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By reviewing the ongoing debate on “community” within the social sciences, highlights major inconsistencies in the standard definitions, as well as in their operationalization in empirical social research. The relevance of this debate to the study of social dynamics has been reduced by a strong foundational bias and a lack of a proper view of individual agency. Notions of space and time, as well as social memory and culture, have been taken too much for granted. By constructivistically questioning these notions, suggests an alternative approach which explores a likely integration of autopoietic systems theory, agent‐based models and network analysis. Considers its implications for research methodology.

While sociology has usually aimed at producing general accounts of the postmodern social condition, it has not been influenced by the postmodern epistemological challenge but kept its accounts within the modern episteme. Suggests that autopoietic systems theory (AST) can supply a theoretical framework in which this can be done. Based on the concept of communication, this approach can sustain a theory of postmodernity that does not require ontological foundations and in which the fundamental self‐referentiality of scientific truths is affirmed rather than hidden. As such it is able to accommodate the postmodern epistemological challenge. Based on the concept of structural coupling, such a theory would be able to retain the fundamental connection between changes between structure and “culture”, while leaving the specifics of this connection open to empirical analysis.