Boundaries (as an analytical category)

• For Meadows: the problem of boundaries  – there is no single limit to draw, the researcher must always be cognizant that they are artificially created for the purposes of practicality and the conceptual limitations of research 
• Must also be careful not to make boundaries toolarge
• Necessity of flexible boundary given situation 
• For Poole: Analytically, Poole suggests that boundaries provide a “spatio-temporal reference” necessary for critical engagement with the text, which provides a license to draw imagined, but nonetheless critically useful lines around the system. 
  

Boundaries (an an aspect of the system):

• Boundaries as constructed:
  
• Putnam and Stohl “explicated the notion of boundary in ways that turn it from an arbitrary line around the system into something that members perceive and that is structured dynamically
  over time” (cited in Poole 60).
• Luhmann’s adds an understanding of boundaries where systems “self organize through communicative processes” and “maintaining [this] boundary is a continual process accomplished through communication” (cited in Poole 67).
• For Luhmann, the main contribution is an understanding of boundaries (and systems) produced primarily through communication. 

Though a relationship between communication & boundary seems productive, particularly in projects considering abstract social systems, it does prevent some barriers. Poole cites critiques of Luhmann’s singular focus on communication in systems production at the expense of other material and cultural processes. For Habermas, the distinction between systems and the life world presents a barrier to understanding communication as creating and maintaining an aspect of the system itself. In a sense, to suggest the barrier of a system as singularly constructed by discourse from within the system is to submit it to a process of interpretation that Habermas argues situates it within the life world, rather than the system itself.

Building on Luhmann's notion of boundaries constituted through communication, it seems to me that boundaries might also be contested and redefined through communicative, or even rhetorical, processes. In this sense, deliberation can (or at least can attempt to) reorganize and reconstruct system boundaries. For example, the perennial debate over where to draw the proper lines between governmental systems and economic systems. Through these debates, publics and citizens can attempt to challenge and reformulate system boundaries. This observation, if true, might also bring up issues of agency.   

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