(Hirschman and Lindblom in Emery, 1969)
Use of analogies:
(Bauer, 1969, pp. 39-40)
Technological change may also bring about changes in broader social practices. To make the administration of railroads practical, it was necessary to establish standard time zones and to provide rapid communication by telegraphy.
Psychological types of students:
Two principles of human workmanship:
(D. Hawkins in von Foerster, 1968, pp. 163-179)
Compare the principle of eolithism with the lateral thinking of De Bono (1967).
"The variation or standard deviation of such an index (physiological measure of state of health) for an individual is smaller than the variation of the index for the population in general and, in fact, the means for the individual may not coincide with the mean for the population. Thus an index value which falls within the normal range for the population may not be normal for an individual, and conversely."
(R . S . Ledley in Hilton, 1966, p . 96)
Compare with business firm, etc., analysis.
"Individual norms are more important than population norms because biochemical and physiological indices change with individual's age and with such change the individual's susceptibility to disease alters."
(ibid., p. 98)
A system of social accounts:
"It can be expected that as more sophisticated integrated simulation and decision models are developed there will be an accompanying amalgamation of organizational units.
"As integrated systems are developed it is necessary to describe interrelationships that exist among variables and departments which previously have only been treated subjectively. As these relationships are incorporated into the system each addition increases the complexity of the model not linearly but exponentially."
(R.C. Vergin in House, W. C., 1971, pp. 178-189)
Nonlinear Economics
Leading economists in the 1940s and 1950s were determined to turn economics into a precise science. Their main aim was to use science, perceived within a strictly linear framework, to bring order, predictability and control into the study and practice of economics. The principle of diminishing returns was the cornerstone of their rationale. They implicitly believed that economic events create their own negative feedback, which stabilises the economy at or near equilibrium. In short, the economic system is assumed to be linear.
Several economists, notably Brian Arthur from Stanford University, advocated a shift to a nonlinear framework during the 1980s and 1990s. Arthur argued that increasing returns described actual economic events more accurately than diminishing returns. In that nonlinear view of economics, positive feedback is seen as the mechanism that could magnify minor fluctuations into major upheavals.
These initial concerns spread to a wider circle of social science disciplines. Byrne maintained that societies behave as nonlinear complex systems. He envisioned a strong link between realism and complexity, and went on to suggest that this combination was fatal to positivism, which assumes total mastery over nature is possible, and to postmodernism, which rejects grand narratives and advocates in essence social inaction.
The above shift in viewpoint is also evident in international politics and business organisation. Similarly, research by Rihani in the study and practice development led him to conclude that nations behave, and therefore develop, as Complex Adaptive Systems.
Moreover, it is interesting to note that social scientists now regularly speak of interactions, emergent properties and evolutionary change, expressions that are common in the language of complex systems theory, even when they are not aware of the theoretical roots of these terms. In short, the shift to nonlinearity is underway. The need now is to consider the shift in more explicit terms and to analyse the practical implications of of adopting a nonlinear paradigm that treats socio-economic processes as complex entities.
Source: http://www.globalcomplexity.org/Early%20Advocates.htm
Nonlinear Realities
DiCarlo: How might decision-making change in business?
Zukav: Decision making today is primarily an intellectual function. We use logics and understandings that originate in the mind. These logics and understandings are linear and exclusionary. That is, you cannot think of one thing without excluding others. You cannot understand something one way and understand it in other ways simultaneously. We are now developing a higher order of logic and understanding that originates in the heart. The heart is inclusive. It accepts. The intellect judges. The higher order of logic and understanding that originates in the heart comprehends non-linear realities and simultaneous realms of truth.
All of this effects decision-making in all aspects of life, including business. It means that intuitive processes will replace intellectual processes as the main decision-making faculty in business, as in all other human activities.
DiCarlo: What will happen to the intellect?
Zukav: The intellect will not be discarded. A business executive may have a hunch about which area of activity to move into. Once she decides that, she can use her intellect. For example, she may have a hunch to produce a certain product, and then use market analyses to confirm that there is a receptivity for the product, and then use statistical quality control to produce it well. But the mind will no longer be the boss, the "leader" in the old sense. Decision-making will be intuitive. The logic and understanding utilized will be the higher order of logic and understanding of the heart.
Collective decisions will be made by consensus. This is inconceivable to the business community now. We cannot imagine an efficient organization that's run by concensus. That is because there is so much dissension and pain-which are the same things-in business today. So the ability to make decisions by concensus will require that an organization's environment be transformed into one of safety for all involved.
Source: http://www.healthy.net/asp/templates/interview.asp?PageType=Interview&ID=299
Pan-Urban land Use System (PLUS):
"... author visited a number of the cities which had the largest experience in developing urban information systems. In none of them did he find a computerized urban information system in being.
"A total urban information system can be analyzed into 5 sub-systems:
"If all operational input data is computerized upon its generation ... the resulting aggregation of data will ... be an incidental and inexpensive by-product of the total operating system ..."
(ibid., p. 12)
Horwood identifies 6 sub-systems of an UIS:
"Everywhere now we begin to see men and nations beginning the deliberate design of development with a growing confidence in the choice and creation of their own future."
(Platt, 1966, p. 203)
Just what is the purpose of research? To satisfy curiosity? To produce a profitable product? To generate publications? To acquire prestige? To defeat a rival? To earn an advanced degree? To contribute to the needs of mankind? All of the above?
"A culture is very much like the experimental space we use in the analysis of behavior. Both are sets of contingencies of reinforcement. A child is born into a culture as an organism is placed in an experimental space. Designing a culture is like designing an experiment; we arrange contingencies and note effects. In an experiment we are interested in what happens; in designing a culture with whether it will work. This is the difference between science and technology."
(B.F. Skinner in Psychology Today, August, 1971, p. 72)
"The social genotypes are things like blueprints, plans, ideas, symbols, sacred histories, and all the things which organize production both of artifacts and of social organization. Genotypes are things which have the power of organizing role structures, for evolution, on the whole, is evolution of roles. They are the acts, relations, and structures in society which are social organizers. Then the phenotypes consist of the organizations which they produce: families, universities, firms, churches, states; also commodities and artifacts, automobiles, libraries, microphones, clocks, and so on."
(K. Boulding in Rothblatt, 1968, p. 210)
"I distinguish 3 main categories of social genotypes, which I call the threat system, the exchange system, and the integrative system."
(ibid., p. 211)
"... the threat system produces phenotypes in the shape of kings, armies, empires, and some kinds of temples and churches ...
"The exchange system dominates such phenotypes as firms, banks, corporations, insurance companies, and all those organizations which exist primarily in a market environment -- which exist by the transformations involved in exchange and production ...
"There are also phenotypes which are dominated by the integrative system: such things as the family and the church, and even more strikingly, institutions like the Elks, the bridge club, or the little league, which have almost no function except developing integrative relationships.''
(ibid., pp. 213-215)
By and large, regional science and geography simply study existing spatial structures. Whose responsibility is it to develop more desirable spatial structures?
"But what justification can there be for the apparent assumption that we do not know enough to construct models but believe we do know enough to directly design new social systems by passing laws and starting new social programs?"
(Forrester, 1971, p. 126)
"We are on the threshold of a great new era in human engineering ... Science is no longer a frontier. The process of scientific discovery is orderly and organized.
"I suggest that the next frontier for human endeavour will be to pioneer a better understanding of the nature of our social systems ...
"... Data gathering has its place and is important, but it can be far more effective if it is guided by a system model that helps identify the sensitive areas of the system and points to the information that needs to be gathered."
(ibid., p. 127)
The technique of computer-aided design (via 'Sketchpad', an interactive CRT device) may be extended to urban, landscape and regional design. Already one can simulate an aircraft landing as experienced by the pilot, and the visual panorama seen by a person driving through a city. Such simulations could be transmitted to home terminals, and viewer reactions ascertained by means of a 2-way interactive CATV system. In such a way can proposed settlement patterns be tested and improvements incorporated. (See virtual reality.)
"... descriptive approach does not really demonstrate the first thing about how technology acts or interacts with society ... There is no understanding of the crucial chain process that creates the exponential, so there is no discussion of where the exponential behavior will stop, or the possible relation to population exponentials; or why some technological advances are adopted and grow while others are ignored; or how we can know beforehand which variables will turn out to be increasing or decreasing exponentials and which will be linear curves, oscillating curves, step-functions, exhaustion-of-resources curves, and so on ... these are the crucial questions to ask and to try to understand so that some degree of prediction will be possible.''
(Platt, 1966, p. 48)
"What the new information environment actually does is to set the consideration of 'issues' and approaches to problems in a quite different context. It is one in which we cannot tackle one issue, one question, or one problem at a time as isolated items. All must be viewed as critically interdependent and interactive elements in a new systemic context -- in which the perturbation of one component in one subsystem can grossly affect other components in ways that are quite different from the predictable behaviors of any isolated part of the system. A more generally accepted and more adequate comprehension and understanding of this radically altered context is a prior requisite for decisive action."
(J. McHale in The Conference Board, 1972, p. 232)
"Innis had hit upon the means of using history as the physicist uses the cloud chamber. By bouncing the unknown form against known forms, he discovered the nature of the new or little known form."
(M. McLuhan in Foreword to Innis, 1951, p. x)
In our spatially-oriented culture we have lost control of time (i.e., change), and so are moving toward catastrophic breakdown -- unless we regain our control of time. We, fortunately, seem to be on the verge of doing this through information technology.
"It is possible to distinguish two forms of approach to a problem. One, which may be called the theoretical approach, is to formulate the problem in relation to what is already known, to make additions or extensions on the basis of accepted principles, and then to proceed to test these hypotheses experimentally. Another, which may be called the mosaic approach, takes each problem for itself with little reference to the field in which it lies, and seeks to discover relations and principles that hold within the circumscribed area ..."
"When in the field of science a great deal of progress has been made and most of the pertinent variables are known, a new problem may most readily be handled by trying to fit it into the existing framework. When, however, the framework is uncertain and the number of variables is large the mosaic approach is much the easier."
(G. von Bekesy, Experiments in Hearing, p. 4, quoted in McLuhan, 1962, p. 42)
"The mosaic approach is not only 'much the easier' in the study of the simultaneous which is the auditory field; it is the only relevant approach."
(Ibid., p. 42)
Given increased control over the physical environment, and the consequent ability to manipulate this environment, regional description of physical phenomena may assume more of the characteristics of a design science.
'"The reductive technique of conventional science, interpreting the complex in terms of the simple, the higher in terms of the lower, the whole in terms of the part, is useless for revealing movement in the opposite direction. It has no method for working forward toward the future, following the path of integration and development and emergence; so it fails to understand those organic processes in which the end or goal plays a part in determining the earlier sequence of events, even though the end, as imagined or projected, is itself subject in the very act of realization to further changes in its own structure. In the case of organic or human development the reductive technique conceals the one characteristic that, above all others, signifies development as opposed to random change; namely, the continued forward movement toward a goal, or, at a lower stage, toward the completion of an organic sequence, like the life cycle of a species ...
"If ordered knowledge is to be at the service of man's further transformation, the sciences themselves will have to overcome the naive bias against teleology they have inherited from the seventeenth century."
(Mumford, 1956, p. 172)
"Science and technology are dialectical in nature, characteristics well expressed in the dialectical pattern of the unity of opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality and quality into quantity, and the negation of the negation. Dialectics preclude inevitability but presage radical change and transformation ...
"The dialectical process provides a conceptual framework for dealing with change and transformation, with growth and decay. It makes possible the comprehension that even as a thing is, it is changing in an unceasing process ...
"The ecosystem is a complex interweaving of numerous intricate cycles ...
"But science has arbitrarily broken the natural cycle to formulate causal laws to satisfy its quest for order ... all causal laws are found by dissecting the world process into such incomplete cycles ... Thus dialectics is sacrificed to order and causality is wrung from cycles. But a causal chain is circular, like an endless belt with no beginning and no ending but only changing phases in a process. A variable is itself a function of other variables in which the past determines the future as the future determines the past. Abstracting an event from a process to make it discrete and subject to empirical study obscures the totality and the richness of the process ...
"The dialectical process, with its incessant folding and unfolding, creating and destroying, negating and affirming, continues to act upon science and technology as social processes mediating between man and nature. In additlon to the processes described in preceding ... seven other distinct processes can be identified that are transforming science and technology, are operating to nullify their effects, and will, in the long run, lead to their decline. These transforming processes are:
"Efficiency is a measure for evaluating means but omits all reference to ends. But in human terms we must always consider the full question, 'Efficient for what?"
(ibid., p. 290)
"Dr. Brown, for example, foresees the complete collapse of mental hospitals when 'brain-wave analysis of every individual will be made routinely. When an analysis reveals an incipient neurosis or psychosis, an individualized program for feedback can be supplied. The potential patient can then visit his neighborhood computer treatment center where he inserts the taped treatment program into the computerized feedback system and continues treatment until all signs of the potentially abnormal conditions have disappeared.
"... brain-wave research at least provides a means of categorizing the sort of cerebral rhythms that seem to characterize different types of people ... World leaders ... often have dffficulty communicating with one another ... The reasons for these communicative barriers ... is the fact that many of these leaders have different types of brain rhythm ...
"Dr. Brown is developing ... a device that translates brain and body signals into acceptable musical harmonics ... the instrument can also translate signals into visual art forms."
(Rorvik, 1971, pp. 189-193)
This research is linked to biofeedback training and Manfred Clynes's science of sentics. It is yet another example of information technology replacing a physical plant (the mental hospital), and since the data may be stored as it is being accumulated, it is another data source for spatial research. (Jonas, 1972)
"... make computing power available to anyone capable of using it to advantage ... The major part of the capital costs of making computer power available should be borne by public funds.
"... very little powerful thought has been given to the mathematics of interrelationships of organizations considered as whole systems ... Systems modelling provides the possibility for studying the efficiency of organizations considered as wholes."
(S. Bodington in Goldsmith, 1970, pp. 213-214)
"Study of the circuits which analyze the figures placed in a cat's field of vision demonstrates that these recognitions of geometry are owing to the structure itself of the circuits that filter and recompose the retinal image. Actually, these analyzers impose a restrictive grid upon the image, from which they extract certain simple elements. Some nerve cells, for example, respond only to the figure of a straight line sloping down from right to left; others to a line inclined in the opposite direction. Thus it is not so much that a clear geometrical 'idea' is conveyed by the image of the object; rather, the sense analyzer perceives and recomposes the object out of its simplest geometrical elements.''
(Monod, 1971, pp. 151-152)
Thus, one might speculate, in 'perceiving' the future, what is required is a process which filters the image through the desirable or not so desirable human structures, such that one can interpret the nature of the (total) pattern; i.e., do we 'see' a desirable future, and if not, where does the pattern exhibit flaws?
"No doubt it will be possible to palliate certain genetic flaws, but only in the afflicted individual, not in his posterity. Not only does modern molecular genetics give us no means whatsoever for acting upon the ancestral heritage in order to improve it with new features ... but it reveals the vanity of any such hope ..."
(ibid., pp. 163-164)
"...just as an initial 'choice' in the biological evolution of a species can be binding upon its entire future, so the choice of scientific practice, an unconscious choice in the beginning, has launched the evolution of culture on a one-way path, onto a path which nineteenth century scientism saw leading infallibly upward to an empyrean noon hour for mankind, whereas what we see opening before us today is an abyss of darkness."
(ibid., p. 170)
"The presumption that scientific discovery and theory are cumulative has long been a cherished component of the behavioral belief system. Nonetheless, the diversity of analytic levels, the variety of conceptual arrays, and the instability of attitudes and behaviors all lend some credence to an occasional doubt regarding the unity of scientific knowledge. Anticipating the emergence of some general theories that will tie together all of the bits and pieces and transform all of the non-linearities is likely to be in vain. While it would be nonsense to assert that all research is unrelated, it would also be well to recognize that all social knowledge is temporally, culturally, ideologically, and technically constrained. All of these factors serve to impose serious limits upon our ability to cumulate knowledge."
(B.A. Rockman quoted in E.A. Platig in Knight, et al., 1971, pp. 90-91)
"The apparent complexity of an organism at conception could be taken ... as a linear combination of the number of genes in a chromosome set and the number of genes that control other genes. These definitions bring out a close logical relationship between hardware, software, and organisms, and suggest that a theory of algorithms will have close ties with cybernetics and genetics.''
(I.J. Good in Knight, et al., 1971, pp. 229-230)
And yet a finite set of genes, with a finite set of instructions and cognitive structures, has produced apparently an infinitely innovative and adaptive organism. Whether or not knowledge is cumulative may be irrelevant, if we can design a self-organizing and self-adapting society which is ever-sensitive to human values.
"... we can delineate some of the kinds of things that will increasingly be done with computers by social scientists and that will transform those disciplines. We can predict the increasing use of simulation models to represent multivariate systems too complex to allow of analytic solutions. We can predict the development of large data systems with automated retrieval and on-line analysis. The data files will come from many sources, much of them as by-products of normal management record-keeping. At the same time, we predict, social indicators will be developed to measure such matters as discontent, health, and educational progress, to supplement such familiar economic indicators as GNP and unemployment rates."
(Pool, McIntosh and Griffel in Westin, 1971, p. 245)
"... criticisms of rational (decision-making) model:
"Several critics of the rational model suggest a second approach to decision-making -- incrementalism.
"Two major weaknesses ... First ... reflects the interests of the most powerful groupings in society ... second .. ignores overdue innovations."
(ibid., pp. 99-101)
See another take on incrementalism.
"The model (of decision-making) we recommend is called mixed scanning.
"An example of mixed scanning: weather satellites hold two cameras. One takes broad-angle pictures covering large segments of the sky ... The other lens photographs much smaller segments but in much greater detail ... dual scanning device ... scans for signs of trouble. The second camera explores these danger points in detail ...
(Compare with the 'management by exception' technique)
"When criticism shows that a policy is ineffective, stop incrementing and turn to more encompassing scanning."
(ibid., pp. 103-111)
The broader implications of weather and resources satellites for social surveillance are generally recognized. What is apparently lacking is a fully operational set of techniques of analysis and interpretation, and a clearly defined role in the cybernated space-economy. Public acceptance will probably be conditional upon a convincing educational program and broad public participation in the operations, evaluations, and decisions regarding such electronic surveillance.
It should be noted that the space-adjusting character of information technology, in bringing people 'closer together', may induce simulated feelings of crowding, and so trigger those mental aberrations noted by J.B. Calhoun in his experiments with rats.
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