Medialization, Systems and Organisations. A Re-Arrangement of Theory and a Reply to Michael Meyen's 'The Medialization of German Professional Football' in M&K 3/2014

The concept of medialization mostly comes along with the idea of a modern society as a functionally differentiated society. Sport, too, is considered as such a functional system. Empirical data seem to confirm that actors like football clubs and associations have adapted to the logic of the mass media in recent years. Scholars often describe these developments using metaphors such as 'superposition', 'merger' or 'concealment' of system logics. In this paper I propose to refrain from using these metaphors, for they contradict the architecture of systems theory. Instead, I introduce an alternative model which refers to the process of multi-referential organizations dealing with different logics through communicative processing. In fact, this process appears more like tottasting and diaresis than merger. Adapted from the source document.