“The emerging
consensus in system theory”
Copyright 2016 Graham Berrisford. One of about
300 papers at http://avancier.website. Last updated 14/02/2018 15:28
This paper is a commentary on the book with title above, by Kenneth C. Bausch, published in 2001.
Bausch suggests systems thinkers have a mission to herald a new era of social organisation, of advancing participative democracy.
For compatibility with other papers, we shall use the term Social System Thinking in contrast to General System Theory (GST).
Contents
Broader
conclusions and remarks
“Nature is creative. Matter/energy
spontaneously generates forms of order and organisation.”
“Living things maintain themselves as
ever-evolving processes of self-reproduction.” Bausch
The meaning of the last proposition is
unclear and questionable on three grounds.
·
An
individual living thing does not “evolve”; it follows a trajectory from birth
through maturation and adulthood to decay and death
·
A
species is not continually evolving;
it evolves in a discrete event-driven fashion, on each birth and death event.
·
All
individuals die and 99% of species have also failed to maintain themselves;
they are extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction
“Societies organise themselves.” Bausch
Systems thinkers often draw analogies between
societies and other things, especially living things.
Ashby pointed out how important it is not to
confuse different kinds of change.
·
The self-sustaining
processes of an individual organism maintain
its form (through restorative state changes).
·
The
organising or self-organising processes of a society can change its form (through generational changes.)
In social situations of rapidly accelerating
change, the self-organising processes of a participatory democracy provide the
best survival strategy.” Bausch
This is a political assertion, beyond the
scope of GST.
It may be challenged, and surely would be
challenged by Russian or Chinese government leaders.
“We talk about systems in numerous contexts: the solar system, the endocrine system, the system of complex numbers, computer systems, bureaucratic systems, school systems, personality systems, and so on. Bausch
True, but using the term “system” in numerous contexts doesn’t mean the concept is the same.
The overriding concept of “system” is “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole” (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, p. 1199). Bausch
It is not enough for items to be interacting like the bricks in a wall, or interdependent like the words in sentence.
Bausch also promotes process-oriented view in which least some of the system parts must be regularly interacting actors.
“The question arises whether human activity systems are “systems” in the same sense as a computer system or a digestive system.” Bausch
GST answers the question by saying an activity system is an entity in which actors perform regular behaviors.
This can be demonstrated by testing actual behaviors against described behaviors.
A social system (of roles) can be a system of this kind, at the same time as being a social entity (of actors).
“In what ways are these systems alike? In what ways do they differ?” Bausch
Bausch outline three social system models summarised by Buckley (1967): mechanical, organic and process.
He favours the process model
“In this model, “structure” is not “something distinct from the ongoing interactive process but rather a temporary accommodative representation of it at any one time (Buckley, p.18).” Bausch
Bausch alludes to Churchman, Ackoff and Checkland as the triumvirate who created the “soft systems” methodology.
He draws much from Parsons, Meadows, Habernas and Luhmann.
Read Systems Thinkers for observations on the above.
On Meadows and “The limits to growth”, read From Science to Scientism.
Bausch mentions also Beer, Jackson, Haken, Prigoine, Eigen, Maturana and Varela, Csanyi and Kampis, and Goetzel.
Like Ackoff, Beer and Meadows before him Bausch takes a negative view of institutions.
And paints a dark picture of the way the world is going (for the lack of social system thinking),
Disaappearing shared convictions?
“Habernas concludes his volume on the lifeworld and system by echoing Weber’s musing about the loss of meaning and freedom in the modern world.
“Weber saw the noncoercive, unifying power of collectively shared convictions disappearing along with religion and metaphysics” (Habernas, 1989, p. 301). Bausch
Where is the evidence of shared convictions disappearing?
The coercive power of shared religious convictions remains highly evident in terrorist movements around the world.
And despite the number of gun deaths, a shared conviction of a “right to bear arms” remains powerful in the USA.
In 2014 there were 6 gun deaths in the Japan, compared with 33,599 in the US.
On January 1st 2017, in the US, 210 people were shot in 264 separate incidents of gun violence.
“These shared convictions have waned as we have relied on a subjective reason of self-assertion and neglected objective reason with its reliance on truth.
In this process, freedom has succumbed to the domination of technocracy. Bausch
These seem to be metaphysical assertions for which there is no the evidence.
Do technocracies neglect objective reason or ignore truth?
A
shell of bondage?
“Society is becoming a shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit someday, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt.” (Weber quoted in Habernas, 1989, p.302) Bausch
Where is the evidence?
As Hans Rosling shows, there have been dramatic global increases in health and education, reductions in poverty over the last 50 years..
These improvements are least partly due to the bureaucracies and technocracies that social systems thinkers have denigrated.
Many statistics have moved dramatically and surprisingly in the right direction since the 1970s.
There have been global increases in health and education, and reductions in poverty.
Google anything you can find from
Hans Rosling, especially “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4
Minutes - The Joy of Stats”.
A
political movement?
Bausch suggests social systems thinkers have a mission to herald a new era of social organisation, of advancing participative democracy.
Having painted a curiously depressing picture of the world today, Bausch is optimistic about the impact social systems thinking will have.
He says Laszlo, Banathy, Warfield, and others propose models and designs for moving into a new era of social organisation.
“If systems theory is applied to social processes in the manner exemplified in this book, it offers practical and ethical methods for advancing participatory democracy.” Bausch
A new era of social organisation? Advancing participative democracy? Is that the goal of social system thinking?
Is social system thinking really a political movement?
Is the mission of social system thinking to change society, the way government works, the way commercial organisations work?
If that is the vision, do social systems thinkers offer a coherent view of how this vision will work and how to get there?
And the general population composed of actors who are intelligent, willing and able to play roles they expect?
What about those actors who reject the idea of participating in democracy?
Some social systems thinkers seem to start from an anti-central government, anti-technology, or anti-capitalist standpoint.
Some imply the world would be better place if political power and decision making were more widely distributed
As Richard Feynman said “it may be true, may not be true; where is the demonstration one way or the other?”
A
process-based view?
Bausch concludes by promoting a process-based view.
“Systems theory in its coherent view of the social world, offers a process-based understanding that avoids the logical and semantic difficulties that are created by structure-based conceptions of those realities.” Bausch
Bausch favours a dynamic or process-oriented view of the universe, life and systems.
Indded, the “primacy of behaviour” is a fundamental principle (even the principal innovation) of GST.
However, Bausch fails to distinguish three kinds of process.
The processes that
sustain a system
A biological organism is sustained by the processes of life: sensation, respiration, digestion etc.
GST primarily addresses systems with such regular, repeatable processes.
The process that is
the lifetime of a system
A biological organism is transient, it follows a process from birth to death.
Every system described according to GST has a finite life time.
It is a transient island of stability in the ever-unfolding processes of the universe.
The processes that
replace one system generation by the next
Biological processes replace one generation of transient organisms by the next (slightly different) generation.
Note that the natural selection process of
evolution applies outside of biology, to commercial enterprises for example.
Any system designed according to GST principles may be changed from one generation to the next.
Complexities arise when the three processes above are entangled in the description of a system.
The processes of life in an individual
organism are very different from the cross-generational process of evolution.
See the second conclusion below.
Bausch’s book is a
thoroughly researched review of social systems thinking.
He is erudite and reviews a long history of thinkers and theories, views and propositions.
This history is rich in theory development, but thinly supported by experimental verification or falsification.
And the use of the term “system” is questionable.
Is systems thinking supposed to be metaphysical?
Much of the work reviewed by Bausch (though using scientific-sounding words like “entropy”) seems more metaphysical than scientific.
In social system thinking discussion, it is often unclear
what the system is, or where it is described, or what the word “system” adds to “thinking”.
|
General system theory |
Not general system theory |
|
Scientific |
Scientistic |
|
General to all domains of knowledge |
Specific to situations in which humans interact |
|
About roles, rules and regular behaviors |
About individual actors (purposeful people) |
|
About systems at the base level of interest |
About meta systems that define and change roles and rules |
|
Describing testable systems |
Solving any problem in any consensual way |
|
Apolitical |
Promoting a “participative democracy” |
This paper has touched on some of these differences, which are further explored in related papers at avancier.website.
The paper “Systems thinking approaches” addresses the hard/soft distinction.
The paper “From Science to Scientism” addresses the need for prediction and testing of assertions
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