The concept of autopoiesis was coined by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to describe self-organizing and self-reproducing processes in the cells of biological organisms. Literally denoting self (auto) production (poesis), it denotes the way a biological cell consists of components that are produced by a structure they themselves help to maintain. In sociology, its most famous application has been given by Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann's work from the early 1980s onward is characterized by an “autopoietic turn,” which meant a definitive break away from an action-oriented theory to a communication-oriented one. Autopoietic systems, for Luhmann, produce both their structures and their basic components out of the network of those same components.