From Government to the Management of Complexity:
The Cybernetics of Governance
A Paper presented to the Metaphorum on Cybernetics and Governance
University of Sunderland, April 30th – May 1st 2004
©Paul A. STOKES
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland, Dublin
Email: paul.stokes@ucd.ie
Note:
This work is a draft and may not be quoted in publication without the author’s
permission.
Abstract
The old paradigm of government has ceased to work in the contemporary world and
theorists and practitioners alike are floundering around looking for an alternative
model as a resource for steering and direction through the post-modern maze.
Governance has been proposed as the solution but what is governance? Governance
explodes the old political science tripartite lynch pin of parliament-executiveconstitution and instead challenges us to see governance as a function of the
organisation and constitution of society as a survival unit. In this view government as
traditionally conceived is but the tip of a very large iceberg of governance structure,
function and activities which are distributed throughout the social realm. Beer’s VSM
is used to identity and map these structures and processes.
DRAFT
This paper begins by bemoaning the separation of the political and the social as
reflected in the split between political science and sociology. Only by recognising that
the state and its agencies are embedded in society can we retrieve a comprehensive
picture of the dimensions of governance in our societies. This line of analysis
necessitates a re-appreciation of the role of the nation state, particularly in Europe,
which is the topic of part two. Part three examines the development of the Monopoly
State and the historical build-up of hierarchical power structures from the age of
empires to the absolutist state. What is most interesting is the counter current, at first
dimly perceived among the eddies and flows but later forming a distinctly dominant
pattern in itself; the move away from vertical relations as the sole determinants of
macro societal relationships. Part four discusses the implications of this development
in terms of the historically unprecedented valorisation of horizontal over vertical
relationships throughout European societies. In particular, it points to the historical
rise of societal complexity, discussed in part five, and its role in bringing about the
identity society (discussed in part six) in which top-down, vertical approaches to
societal governance (in part seven) are increasingly found wanting.
Part eight examines the proposition that only meta-organizational solutions are
adequate to the complexity of the governance issues now facing western societies.
The paper concludes that Beer’s VSM is the only meta-organizational model that is
both fully specified and also adequate to this task.
1. The Political and the Social
Traditional social theory does not attribute ‘a purpose’ to society. This is one reason
why Parsons’ Social System (Parsons 1951) was eventually rejected by the
sociological community.1 It is also the problem with Walter Buckley’s attempt to
1
Parsons too was attracted by the argument from design. Unlike William Palely, however,
Parsons on contemplating the social order did not just see an argument for the existence of
God. He also saw the workings of a higher, specifically societal, intelligence. This
intelligence addressed itself to solving the problems of the social order by skilfully
manipulating and placing people in locations in the social structure, by motivating them to do
the ‘right’ things and by ‘dealing with’ residual problems that arose. In fact it was Parsons’
besetting flaw that he could imagine the problems of social order being solved only in a such
a heteronomous and intrusive manner. His late discovery of cybernetics was to no avail
because it seems that he just did not get the essential message: there is no overarching
controller. Control in any complex system is of necessity distributed throughout the system.
Social order, insofar as it exists, is immanent, not transcendent. In other words, pace Parsons,
there is no social system.
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revise the idea of ‘society as a complex, adaptive system’ (Buckley 1967; Buckley
1968). The charge of teleology still stands and has not been satisfactorily resolved.
Part of the problem has to do with the eschewal by modern sociological theory of
modern political theory. It consists of the refusal to accept that modern western
societies are essentially political societies where key features of social and economic
regulation are assumed by the state. Social theory still tries to theorise the regulation
of modern society without reference to its political integument.
The split between sociology and political science as separate disciplines rests upon a
presumption that the state merely opens up and secures the arena of action and debate
that is civil society but in all other respects stands over and above it as its guardian.
Later models may have allowed for the political system to produce outputs to and
receive outputs from this same society but these occur through discrete channels and
don’t affect the fundamental relationship of standoff between polity and society.
Recent research and thinking had challenged this model and has brought forward an
alternative conceptualisation of the state as somehow embedded in society with all
that that entails. Of course the ‘social control as repression’ school had already
breached this divide but only in the sense of the state invading and dominating civil
society almost to the point of its total obliteration. As we have seen, this is hardly a
breakthrough and is in any case evidentially flawed. The rejection of this approach,
however, may lead to the temptation to throw the baby of the state out with the bath
water of repression. Rather than exclude the state as irrelevant we still need to bring
the state back into sociological analysis as a crucial feature of society. We need to
develop and sustain a notion of the state as embedded in and emergent from the forms
of organization of civil society and to understand how the pattern of state
development meshes and interacts with the growth, development and institutionalising
of social forms generally in a process of mutual influence and co-evolution (Hall
1981; Hall 1983a; Hall 1983b; Hall 1986).
Increasingly authors have been questioning the separation of state and civil society as
distinct and separate spheres of action. For instance, it has been argued that one of the
consequences of increasing democratic pressure on the state to respond to an everlarger range of demands and interests has been to increase the degree to which the
state penetrates into civil society such that the distinction no longer applies. We now
effectively live in a state-society [Sozialstaat] (Cohen and Arato 1989; Evans,
Rueschmeyer and Skocpol 1985; Foucault 1979; Schmitt 1985; van Krieken 1991).
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The State and Social Telos
The case can be made more strongly still. It is in the explicit recognition that political
regulation lies at the very inauguration of modern society (Wilson 1980) that the
possibility is broached of a contemporary sociology. Only in this way can we speak of
‘purpose’ and society; it is the state that imposes a framework of unitary purpose/s on
society and that attempts to co-ordinate the various elements at its command to this
end. Because a system is a network of nodes that co-ordinates itself in a purposive
way or is co-ordinated in a purposive way, it is only in this context, and this context
only, that we can also speak of ‘society as a system.’2
But what kind of a system can the state/society be? Well, at the very least, it should be
a viable system, that is a system that over time is capable of maintaining its existence
as a distinct identity. Without this a specific society can be deemed to have ceased to
exist or to be merged with or subsumed into a larger entity. Contemporary sociology
always assumes that its is dealing with national societies i.e. Irish, British, French
society without looking to the litmus test of identity maintenance to determine
whether the boundaries still correspond with the nation-state as assumed or whether,
in fact, there is has been a weakening of the boundaries.
According to Beer any viable system maintains its existence by means of a specific
set of mechanisms which correspond to his Viable System Model [VSM]. The
state/society, if it to be viable, may be expected to conform to the delineaments of this
model, all things being equal. Of course, what makes all things not equal has been the
historical distortion of societal morphology by the demands of competitive power
struggle between survival units.3 Nonetheless, by applying the criterion of the VSM as
an instrument of critique we may expect to arrive at a view as to how successful the
governance mechanisms of the social-state are and what are their shortcomings. And
because of the prescriptive nature of the model we may also find ourselves in a
position to recommend specific measures that may go some way towards remedying
the deficits, even under less than perfect conditions.
It was this omission that was, crucially, the source of the weakness of Parsons’ Social
System model.
2
‘Power struggle’ is a major source of distortion for the model, as Beer himself [almost]
allows Beer, Stafford. 1989. "The evolution of a management cybernetics process." Pp. 211270 in The Viable System Model: Interpretations and Applications of Stafford Beer's VSM,
edited by Raúl Espejo and Roger Harnden. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons..
3
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In particular the VSM can assist with the identification and diagnosis of many
problems of contemporary economic and social life that are in essence problems of
regulation and control of the social system as a whole and of co-ordination and
communication amongst its various sub-systems and that are not specifically
economic or social as such (i.e. problems of governance).
2. State-Society: A Viable Couplet
This line of argument draws upon an important contribution to the theory of state
formation made by Norbert Elias. The integument that has given inclusive closure and
identity to social groupings over the millennia has been what Norbert Elias referred to
as the ‘survival unit’. The emergence of nation states in recent centuries is the latest
form of survival unit to emerge on the world historical stage. It has constituted
society, as we know it. In consequence, the study of society cannot be undertaken
outside of this context. We have now arrived at the top-most inclusive level of the
recursive structure of identity we call the state-society. To understand this though
requires an appreciation of the role and dynamics of survival units in human history
(Elias 1987). Pressure of space prevents anything but a brief survey.
At the outset it necessary to clarify the status of the national state, as its status has
been queried in recent years. For instance, many writers have maintained that
globalization has eclipsed the nation state in importance, rendering the latter impotent
and irrelevant to future economic global development (see for instance: Horsman and
Marshall 1994; Mayntz 1993; Ohmae 1995). This position has itself, however, been
questioned.
Almost everyone concedes that both the salience and role of nation states has changed
markedly since the Keynesian era. Nowadays, states seem to be less autonomous, they
have less exclusive control over economic and social processes within their borders,
and they struggle to maintain national distinctiveness and cultural homogeneity
against Americanised ‘global’ culture (Ritzer 1993).
Hirst and Thompson, for instance, concede that ‘While the state’s capacities for
governance have changed and in many respects (especially in national
macroeconomic management) have weakened considerably, it remains a pivotal
institution, especially in terms of creating the conditions for effective international
governance’ (Hirst and Thompson 1996: 170).
They write:
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States in the advanced world no longer have war as a central support
for their claims to sovereignty. They are no longer conceivable as
autonomous actors, free to pursue any external policy in the anarchical
society of states. The society of states is passed from an anarchical
condition to a quasi-civil one. The vast majority of states are bound
together in numerous ways in what amounts to an international
political society, and in the case of the major advanced states of the G7
and OECD, a virtual standing association of states its own rules and
decision procedures. This does not mean that national states are
irrelevant, the does mean that their claim to a monopoly of the means
of legitimate violence within a given territory is no longer so definitive
of their existence. (Hirst and Thompson 1996: 180)
They conclude nonetheless that the nation state is still ‘simply the most developed
form of the idea of the self-governing political community’ (op.cit.: 173).
Michael Porter has come to a similar conclusion from his study of national strategies
of competitive advantage. He points to a paradox that is at work in the globalisation
process:
The globalisation of industries and the internationalisation of
companies leaves us with a paradox. It is tempting to conclude that the
nation has lost its role in the international success of its firms.
Companies, at first glance, seem to have transcended countries. Yet
what I have learned in this study contradicts this conclusion. As earlier
examples have suggested, the leaders in particular industries and
segments of industries tend to be concentrated in a few Nations and
sustain competitive advantage for many decades. When firms from
different Nations form alliances, those firms based in Nations which
support true competitive advantage eventually emerge as the
unambiguous leaders. (Porter 1990: 18-19)
The word ‘glocalization’ has been coined to capture this phenomenon (Naisbitt 1994).
Competitive advantage is created and sustained through a highly
localised process. Differences in national economic structures, values,
cultures, Institutions, and histories contribute profoundly to
competitive success. The role of the home nation seems to be a strong
as or stronger than ever. While globalisation of competition might
appear to make the nation less important, instead it seems to make it
more so. With fewer impediments to trade to shelter on competitive
domestic firms and industries, the home nation takes on growing
significance because it is the source of the skills and technology that
underpin competitive advantage. (Porter 1990: 19)
And whereas glocalisation may invoke both sub-national and supra-national actors
and identities, the principal point to be grasped here is that ‘the bulk of the world’s
population live in closed worlds, trapped by the lottery of their birth. For the average
worker or farmer with a family, one’s nation state is a community of fate’ (Hirst and
Thompson 1996: 180).
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Role of Survival Units in Human Evolution and History
Mennell tells us that although the life of early humans may well have been, in
Hobbes’s famous phrase, ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’; it was never [as Hobbes also
asserted] ‘solitary.’
The primal condition of society is not a war of every human being
against every other. It appears to be rather a condition in which human
groups have no other protection against possible annihilation or
enslavement by another stronger group than their own fists, weapons
and collective fighting capacity. In other words: people always lived
together in groups which Elias calls survival units. Between members
of one survival unit, the level of cooperation in finding food and other
necessities, and in defence against or attacks upon other survival units,
was relatively high.... The level of violence customary between
members of different survival units—each regarding the other as
outsiders—was very high. (Mennell 1992: 217-218)—emphasis in
original4
Over the course of human development as a whole, the overall trend has been toward
larger and larger survival units both in population and in geographical extent.
In the latter half of The Civilising Process, Elias constantly draws attention to the
contrasts between the taming of impulses towards the use of violence within statesocieties and the relatively unbridled persistence of violence in relations between
states. The size of the power-system encompassing rival survival units has grown over
the millennia: from the very first ‘big man’ chiefdoms, through the age of the great
ancient civilizations, up to the French and English kings in the Middle Ages, through
the struggles of the Valois and Hapsburgs, until it encompassed all of Europe by the
30 Years War and was worldwide by the 20th century. In this way, the European
state-formation process itself is a good example of the overall trend towards bigger
survival units incorporating more people and more territory (Mennell 1992).
The Raison d’Être of the Survival Unit
In What Is Sociology? Elias asks ‘What makes complexes like states and tribes so
important that it is almost taken for granted that they are what is meant whenever
reference is made to social ‘wholes’?’ He explains as follows:
States and tribes are to a considerable extent objects of common
identification-objects to which many individual valences are bonded.
Yet why do emotional bonds to state-societies—which nowadays are
In his earlier book What Is Sociology?, Elias referred to these groups as ‘attacking-anddefence-units’ Elias, Norbert. 1978b. What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson..
4
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nation-states—take priority over bonds to other figurations? At other
stages of social development, towns, tribes are even villages have
taken priority in the same way. What are the common features of the
various figurations which at different stages of development have
bound individuals to them by this type of predominating emotional
bond? (Elias 1978b: 138)
For Elias, the explanation is obvious:
Its function is obvious: it knits people together for common purposes—
the common defence of their lives, the survival of the group in the face
of attacks by other groups and, for a variety of reasons, attacks in
common on other groups. Thus the primary function of such an
alliance is either physically to wipe out other people or to protect its
own members from being physically wiped out. Since the potential of
such units for attack is inseparable from the potential for defence, they
may be called ‘attack-and-defence units’ or ‘survival units’. At the
present state of social development they take the form of nation-states.
In the future they may be amalgamations of several former nationstates.5 In the past they were represented by city-states or the
inhabitants of a stronghold. Size and structure vary: the function
remains the same. At every stage of development, wherever people
have been bound and integrated into units for attack and defence, this
bond has been stressed above all others. This survival function,
involving the use of physical force against others, creates
interdependencies of a particular kind. It plays a part in the figurations
people form: perhaps no greater but also no more negligible than
‘occupational’ bonds. (Elias 1978b: 138-139)
Throughout human history there has been an inexorable tendency for victorious
survival units to absorb and integrate the vanquished. The result has been ever larger
and more integrated ‘societies’. Despite regressions—Feudalism, for example, was an
example of a reversal of this process—the process always regained its course leading
to greater functional differentiation, multi-level integration and the formation of larger
attack-and-defence organizations (Elias 1978b: 155).
3. The Road to Political Monopoly
The process that gave rise to the very first political kingdoms in human history was of
a similar pattern to the process that gave rise to European state formation. According
to Elias, at the point of utmost feudal disintegration in the West certain dynamics of
social interweaving came into play that tended to integrate larger and larger units.
Elias tell us that out of the competition of small territories, themselves formed through
5
This problem will remain until all former attack-and-defence units have been effectively
integrated into one—mankind.
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the struggles of even smaller survival units, a few and finally a single unit slowly
emerged victorious.
The victor formed the centre about which a new larger dominion was
integrated; he formed the monopoly centre of estate organization
within the framework of which many of the previously freely
competing regions and groups gradually grew together into a more or
less unified, better and more balanced and higher web of a higher order
of magnitude. (Elias 2000: 436)
Just as, in the post-Neolithic phase described earlier, the process is experienced as
compelling and not one of choice. A number of estates placed in competition
experience the need to expand if they are not to be subjugated by expanding
neighbours, so in the next the group of units one-degree larger, duchies or counties,
found themselves in the same predicament. With the growth of population, the
internal competition for land is intensified and pressures mount for external
expansion.
The dynamics are such that in a society with such competitive
pressures, he who does not gain ‘more’ automatically becomes ‘less’.
In other words, it sets the territorial rulers against one another. At first
the divergences of power are contained, even in this phase, within a
framework that allows a considerable number of feudal territorial
dominions to remain in contention. Then, after many victories and
defeats, some grow stronger through accumulating the means of
power, while others are forced out of the struggle. The victorious few
fight on and the process of elimination is repeated until finally the
decision lies between only two territorial dominions swollen through
the defeat and assimilation of others. All the rest—whether they were
involved in the struggle or remained neutral—have been reduced by
the growth of these two to figures of second or third rank, though they
still retain a certain social importance. The other two, however, are
approaching a monopoly position; they have outstripped the others;
between them lies the issue. (Elias 2000: 98-99)
The process is repeated until finally, in the extreme case, one individual controls all
power chances and all the others are dependent on him. In this way an ever-increasing
number of power chances tends to accumulate in the hands of an ever-diminishing
number of people through a series of elimination contests.
Elias tells us that this process is inexorable in a society with numerous power and
property units of relatively equal size. Under pressure of demographic and resource
circumscription these will come under strong competitive pressures towards the
enlargement of a few units and finally towards monopoly. No matter who the
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monopolist is, ‘that a monopoly will sooner or later be formed has a high degree of
probability, at least in the social structures that existed so far.’
In the words of Elias:
In the language of exact science this observation with perhaps be
called a ‘law’. Strictly speaking, what we have is a relatively precise
formulation of a simple social mechanism which, once set in motion,
proceeds like clockwork. A human figuration in which a relatively
large number of units, by virtue of the power at their disposal, are in
competition, tends to deviate from this state of equilibrium [many
balanced by many; relatively free competition] and to approach the
different state in which fewer and fewer units are able to compete; in
other words it approaches a situation in which one’s social units attains
through accumulation a monopoly of the contended power chances.
(Elias 2000: 99-100)
A mechanism of this kind is at work in formation of hitherto existing states, at least in
the European domain, just as it was earlier involved in formation of smaller units, the
territories, or will be later in formation of the larger ones.
The Monopoly State
Modern society is characterised, above all in the West, by a high degree of
monopolisation of force and taxation by the central authorities. The process of
integration of territories into ever larger units by means of elimination contests and in
the direction of monopoly should not obscure from our vision the distinctive
governance functions that such pacified polities perform, which functions add greatly
to their stability and success as polities (Corning 1983).
The success of the division of labour itself, the securing of routes and markets over
large areas, the standardisation of coinage to a and the whole monetary system, the
protection of peaceful production from physical violence and the abundance of other
measures of coordination and regulation are all highly dependent on the formation of
large centralised monopoly institutions.
The more, in other words, the work processes and the totality of
functions in a society become differentiated, the longer and more
complex the chains of individual actions which must interlock for each
action to fulfil its social purpose, the more clearly one specific
characteristics of the central organ emerges: its role as supreme
coordinator and regulator for the functionally differentiated figuration
at large. For a certain degree of functional differentiation onward, the
complex web of intertwining human activities simply cannot continue
to grow or even to function without coordinating organs at a
correspondingly high level of organization. (Elias 2000: 163-164) –
emphasis in original.
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Power and Dependence
With the achievement of a monopoly there commences a complex process of its
undoing, not in a process of social disintegration, but in a way that further serves the
integration of society. For it is the paradox of the monopoly position that it makes the
monopolist actually dependent on functionaries for the exercise of the monopoly
powers.
Elias describes what is involved:
The more people are made dependent by the monopoly mechanism, the
greater becomes the power of the dependent, not only individually but
also collectively, in relation to the one or more monopolists. This
happens not only because of small number of those approaching the
monopoly position, but because of their own dependence on ever more
dependents in preserving and exploiting the power potential that
monopolised. Whether it is the question of land, soldiers or money in
any form, the more that is accumulated by an individual, the less easily
can it be supervised by this individual, and the more sure he becomes
by this very monopoly dependent on increasing numbers of others, the
more he becomes dependent on his dependents. (Elias 2000: 108)
In short, the more people on whose work or functions the monopoly in any way
depends, ‘the more strongly does this whole field controlled by the monopolist assert
its own weight and its own inner regularities’ (loc.cit.).
Every monopoly tends, therefore, from a certain degree of accumulation onwards, to
escape the control of any single individual and to pass into that of entire social groups,
frequently starting with former government functionaries, the first servants of the
monopolists.
In this way the power first won through the accumulation of chances in
private struggles, tends to slip away from the monopoly rulers into the
hands of the dependants as a whole, or, to begin with, to groups of
dependants, such as the monopoly administration. The privately owned
monopoly in the hands of a single individual or family comes under the
control of broader social strata, and transforms itself as the central
organ of a state into a public monopoly. (Elias 2000: 108-109)
Such shifts in favour of the many do not in fact lead to the disintegration of the
monopoly, ‘but only to a different form of control over it.’ Elias tells us that only in
the course of a growing social interdependence of all functions does it become
possible to wrest monopolies from arbitrary exploitation by a few without causing
them to disintegrate.
The main phases of the monopoly mechanism and its unravelling, a process of social
formation that has been repeated throughout human history, can be described as
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follows. There is first the phase of free competition or elimination contests, with the
outcome that resources and power chances become accumulated in fewer and fewer
and finally in one pair of hands. This concludes the phase of monopoly formation.
Secondly, there is the phase in which control over the centralised and monopolised
resources tends to pass from one individual to ever greater numbers, and finally ‘to
become a function of the interdependent human web as a whole.’ This is the phase in
which a relatively ‘private’ monopoly becomes a ‘public’ one (Elias 2000: 115). In
this way princely dominions merged into the royal ones and royal power into the
bourgeois state (Elias 2000: 159).
Despite the fact that we are describing here a process of formation of nation states and
the growth of their public bureaucracies, in a historical perspective what we are
witnessing is a long-term shift in emphasis from vertical to horizontal relationships.
This process is of considerable importance and relevance to my discussion and it
forms of topic of the next part.
4. The Long Term Shift from Vertical to Horizontal
Relationships
I have argued elsewhere (Stokes 2003) that the interplay between sociomatrix and
identity is the play between vertical and horizontal dimensions of relationship, on the
dimensions of grid and group (Douglas 1978; Douglas 1982; Thompson, Ellis and
Wildavsky 1990).
Cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm has noted that the three African great
apes, with which we share a common ancestry, are notably hierarchical in their social
organization. ‘Reproductively fortunate’, he remarks, ‘are the high-ranking males or
females, while those relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy fare less well.’ He
continues,
The same can be said of most human political societies in the world
today, starting about five thousand years ago. At that time, people were
beginning to live increasingly in chiefdoms, societies with highly
privileged individuals who occupied hereditary positions of political
leadership and social paramountcy. From certain well-developed
chiefdoms came the six early civilizations, with their powerful and
often despotic leaders. But before twelve thousand years ago, humans
basically were egalitarian (Knauft 1991). They lived in what might be
called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no
social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside
the family there were no dominators.
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For more than five millennia now, the human trend has been toward
hierarchy rather than equality. But the past several centuries have
witnessed sporadic but highly successful attempts to reverse this
trend—to reverse it as much as is feasible in large nations that require
considerable political centralization. These efforts occurred in America
and in Europe, and have taken place more recently in certain other
areas, notably India and Latin America, as people emerged from
colonialism. Marxian socialists as well have made a variety of
unsuccessful attempts to create truly classless and coercion-free
political societies at the national level. It would appear, then, that some
kind of fundamental tension exists between forces that make for
equality and democracy, and those that make for hierarchy and
coercive leadership. To a contemporary ‘democrat’, the upshot is not
particularly comforting. (Boehm 2001: 3-4)
One cannot understand the developments of recent centuries if one does not see them
in the context of the overall long-term trends of European civilization. Among these
are decisive shift in the balance of power among strata, classes and groups in society
(Elias 1978b). Elias draws our attention to four aspects of this trend:
1.
The reduction of power differentials between governments and governed.
This manifested itself in the eventual winning of the franchise by all members of
society. What this realignment meant was that ‘no section of society remained simply
a relatively passive object of domination by others’ (Elias 1978b: 66).
In the perspective of the long-term historical development of societies this change
meant that the ‘chances of the bulk of the governed to exercise a measure of control
over governments, relative to the chances of governments to control the governed,
became somewhat greater than they had been’ [loc.cit.].
2.
The reduction of power differentials between different strata and groups.
It is clear that differentials had diminished also between groups and strata in society.
Whereas the bulk of the populace of European societies used to be virtually powerless
this could not be said of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Not only have power
differentials diminished between social classes, but also between men and women and
between parents and children. Authoritarianism of all kinds has been attenuated as a
basis for the exercise of authority [viz. Weber’s shift to ‘legitimate’ authority].
3.
The transformation of all social relationships in the direction of a greater
degree of reciprocal, multi-polar dependence and control.
Perhaps the most fundamental developments in European societies since the end of
the 16th century was the rise of capitalism and the enormous productive control over
natural forces and elements that were gained as a result.
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Along with the attenuation of power differentials, the growth of ever
more complex and longer chains of interdependence between people
brought about a shift in the structure of control in society from strictly
top-down, bi-polar relations of power vs. powerlessness to one where
there is a very significant degree of multipolar and reciprocal control
among social groups. (Elias 1956).
This development is fundamental to an understanding of modern societies, yet
sociology is so conceptually out of alignment with its subject matter that it still does
not possess a formulation of the problem of power in society that does justice to this
insight. Sociology’s present level of conceptualisation of the phenomenon of power
in society could be said to be almost feudal, seeing it still, as it does, in strictly topdown, bi-polar terms.6
4.
The development of social sciences and social ideals as instruments of
orientation when social bonds are relatively opaque and when awareness of their
opacity is increasing.
Elias eloquently describes the basic experience of social life in the modern era, which
provides the soil for the germination and growth of a scientific sociology:
More and more groups and with them more and more individuals, tend
to become dependant on each other for their security and the
satisfaction of their needs in ways which for the greater part, surpass
the comprehension of those involved. It is as if first thousands, then
millions, then more and more millions walked through this world, their
hands and feet chained together by invisible ties. No one is in charge.
No one stands outside. Some want to go this, others that way. They
fall upon each other and vanquishing or defeated still remain chained
to each other. No one can regulate the movements of the whole unless
a great part of them are able to understand, to see as it were, from
outside, the whole patterns they form together. And they are not able
to visualize themselves as part of these larger patterns because being
hemmed in and moved uncomprehendingly hither and thither in ways
none of them intended, they cannot help being preoccupied with the
urgent, narrow and parochial problems which each of them has to face.
They can only look at whatever happens to them from their narrow
location within the system. They are too deeply involved to look at
themselves from without. Thus what is formed of nothing but human
beings acts upon each of them, and is experienced by many as an alien
external force not unlike the forces of nature. (Elias 1956: 232)
6
For an indication that movement on the conceptual front has been taking place in relation to
the phenomenon of power, see some recent work Flyvberg, Bent. 1998. Rationality and
Power: Democracy in Practice. Chicago: Chicago University Press, Haugaard, Mark. 1997.
The Constitution of Power: A Theoretical Analysis of Power, Knowledge and Structure.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, Hindess, Barry. 1996. Discourses of Power: From
Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell..
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The Diminution of Requisite Hierarchy
According to Aulin, the decisive factor behind these developments, making it possible
to relax social hierarchy7 has been the potentiation of regulatory ability conferred by
the growth of productive forces. He writes:
As long as improvement of the tools of production implies more
automation, and a higher level of education means increased
productivity, this factor is identical with economic growth.... Should all
the economic growth disappear in the world, we would be facing, in
view of our cybernetic analysis, the real threat of reverting to the era of
totalitarianism as a necessary element of survival of human population.
… Absolute power and strict social hierarchy backed by conditioning
of the truth serves the survival of human population only at a low level
of development of productive forces. (Aulin 1982: 29)
Western societies have undergone a process whereby crude, disciplinary, top-down
controls have given way to more participative, democratic, distributive control in
which more and more of society gets to have a say. This decline of strict class-society,
Aulin tell us, began in Europe with the collapse of the Roman slave-society. The
feudal social order, which after some chaotic centuries began to take shape in West
Europe, represented the beginning of a relaxation of social hierarchy. This went hand
in hand with a process whereby the enormous unused developmental resources of the
lower social classes were gradually released, and began to speed up social progress
toward greater self-steering and emancipation (Aulin 1982: 138; Aulin 1986). In fact,
if anything it was the development and dissemination throughout European and later
on American societies of new technologies of control as well as new forms of social
organization that permitted self-regulation to take such a strong hold (Beniger 1986;
Beniger 1990; Whitney-Smith 1991).
Aulin explains this process cybernetically by reference to what he calls the Law of
Requisite Hierarchy. Self-steering and hierarchy are opposite if reciprocal notions.
The more hierarchy there is in the structure of a dynamic system the less there can be
self-steering. Greater self-steering generally requires lesser hierarchy.
The reason resides in the fact that the weaker the average regulatory ability and the
larger the average uncertainty of available regulators, the more requisite hierarchy is
needed in the organization of regulation and control for the same result of regulation
(Aulin 1982: 115). In other words, the law states that greater hierarchy in organization
By hierarchy is meant here ‘heteronomous directedness’ or ‘direction by others’ in contrast
to autonomy.
7
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can compensate to a certain extent for a lack of regulatory ability (Aulin-Ahmavaara
1979).
In a strictly hierarchical organization all orders go down and all information goes up
the social ladder. In a developed society, however, there are representative organs
through which even the underdogs can send orders upwards, and organs of education
and information through which information is shared between ‘bosses’ and employees
(Etzioni 1968; Mechanic 1962).
The possibilities of self-steering in human society depend largely but not entirely on
the level that has been reached in the process of production in that society (Aulin
1986). In this sense, productive forces act as regulators in human society (Sen 1999).
However, self-steering is not only a matter of directly productive activity but also
depends decisively on the level of development of political, administrative and
creative activities as well. In fact the degree to which the possibilities of self-steering
created by productive activity are realised or not depends crucially on the deliberate
political, administrative and creative acts of the members of the society (Aulin 1982:
135; Corning 1971; Corning 1983; Corning 1996).
In the history of human civilizations, initially, it is the aristocratic elites who define
their own importance and for whose sake the survival unit exists. Gradually and by
virtue of the growing dependence of elite groups upon them, members of the lower
orders are co-opted in alliances against other elite groups (Elias 2000). Such a
process, the formation of vertical alliances (Powelson 1994) extends the range of
numbers of people who identity with the survival unit of the state and who feel as
though they have a stake in it. All the time, power ratios between the top layers and
intermediate to lower layers are being attenuated in a process that Elias calls
‘functional democratisation’(Elias 2000).
Aulin suggests that with increasing self-steering and increasing variability of social
structures endogenous causality will grow in significance. He writes that
The march of events in a human society will be ever more based on the
deliberate decisions of its members. Counter to the expectations of
most futurologists, increasing progress thus means decreasing
predictability. With advancing self-steering in society the future can be
less and less foretold by the past. Life becomes ever more like an
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intellectual adventure and ever less like a military or an economic one.
(Aulin 1982: 144)8
Or in Dennis Gabor’s words, the challenge may well be to invent the future (Gabor
1964). Beer and others (Beer 1979; Espejo and Harnden 1989) have well made the
point that institutions are currently lacking that specifically embed the future into the
present in such a way that a proactive stance towards bringing out future states of the
societal system becomes possible.9 The possibility of such institutions is intrinsically
caught up with the possibility of a social science (Elias 1978b; Etzioni 1976).
5. Historical Increase in Societal Complexity
According to Stafford Beer the shift from the vertical to the horizontal in relationships
is responsible for the enormous increase in social complexity that characterises our
era (La Porte 1975; Luhmann 1985).10
He maintains that for many centuries, horizontal linkages were not very important for
the vast preponderance of human beings, except of course for the aristocracy for
whom the ability to form coalitions and cement alliances was crucial for survival.
‘The organizational quantum, a village in a feudal society, the subsidiary of a firm, a
the ward of a city, and so on, obeyed the law upwards and administered the law
downwards. What the cousins were doing, which is to say organizational quanta at the
same hierarchic level, was really of no concern’ (Beer 1975: 30).
A feudal Lord [one man] exerted total control over his serfs—simply
because they could not in practice match his variety between them.
That is because the variety available to them in principle was never
allowed to proliferate. On men digging the soil from long to dusk, and
then collapsing into bed, offered no more variety to the boss than one
such man—because they were replicas, one of another. They presented
a low variety situation easily contained by master having
unquestionable authority and plenty of time. [op.cit.: 34]
8
See also Bennis and Slater Bennis, Warren, and Philip E. Slater. 1964. "Democracy is
Inevitable." Harvard Business Review..
9
System Four of Beer’s Viable System Model [VSM].
Livingston defines complexity as follows: ‘A thing is complex when it exceeds the capacity
of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control – regardless of
the resources placed at his disposal’ Livingston, William L. 1985. The New Plague. Bayside,
NJ: FES Publishing..
10
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He claims that ‘perhaps the major organizational issue today could be called
horizontal relevance.’
Society has undergone an expansion which has caused the quanta
carefully separated by the stereotype to collide in almost every
dimension we can nominate. Social units are no longer separate: they
share common boundaries, which the inhabitants freely cross.
Divisions by profession, trade or skill, have come to overlap because
of changes in our conception of the best way to do things. Knowledge
itself has been reorganized, because of changes in our understanding of
the universe, with the result that interdisciplinary studies taken as a
whole are now far more important to society than studies made within
the classical disciplines. Above all, technological change—in
communication, computation, the ability to travel—has affected the
family tree stereotype of organization to the point where the
boundaries it seeks to maintain can be maintained no longer. [loc.cit.]
This has come about through the interaction of a number of factors. Technology has
facilitated the proliferation of individual variety and hence the complexity of society.
Communication technology in particular [from reading and writing to train travel and
beyond] has facilitated the spread of horizontal networks, as a result of which, society
has ‘fairly suddenly become massively interactive.’ This has altered the variety
balance of traditional forms of domination and control.
There has also been a substantial diminution in the degree of what Douglas calls
‘grid’ (Douglas 1978; Douglas 1982). Beer describes the situation of one of loss of
authority and hence simplicity of control.
Just at the moment when technology has unleashed such potent
mathematical forces of interaction in the human society, society has for
other reasons abandoned most of the restraints on variety it already
had. Leaving aside the relatively small numbers of ways of behaving
better cut out as actually illegal, there used to be a great many varietyinhibiting social taboos. There were social disciplines too—
administered by squires, priests, schoolmasters and even fathers; and
there was in the individual himself and acceptance of what used to be
called ‘his station in life’. [op.cit.: 33]
The regulatory process has been threatened in the process forcing it to increase its
own complexity and variety relative to that of the environment. Beer cites the
example the growth in complexity of the tax code.
The general levy is a low variety tax, and therefore easy to administer.
Once we take account of individual circumstances, the variety goes up.
Trying to match this variety, more and more regulations are
introduced—until it is doubtful whether anyone can work out what is
happening. A similar situation exists for the police, and even for less
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obvious social regulators existing within education, health and social
welfare. [op.cit.: 34]
Complexity Crisis
The regulatory mechanism is threatened in another way too. The very purpose of
organization is to handle proliferating variety, firstly by cutting down variety where
that seems to make sense, and secondly by proving efficient and well-lubricated
channels for the flow of control variety. See Figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1: The Variety Imbalance between Environment, Operations and
Management
Figure 2: Instruments of Variety Management
The process of bureaucratisation is stimulated by the proliferation of equivocality in
the environment. A constant stream of exceptions, loop-holes, externalities and
individual cases fuelled the drive for bureaucratic growth (Meyer 1990; Meyer and
Brown 1977). But clearly, bureaucratic structure is in the end inadequate to deal with
massively parallel variety.
As civilian life becomes increasingly complex, which means that every
individual has high variety [compare feudal times], it becomes
increasingly necessary to match the total variety of half the citizens
with a control variety consisting of the other half. Today we have just
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about reach the point where the policing of the state—in terms of
taxation, welfare, education and so forth, as well as criminality—
consumes half the total effort of society. [op.cit.: 111]
As we shall see, proliferating variety is a measure of increasing chaos. Entropy is
increasing in the social system; negentropy is falling (Beer 1970a; Beer 1970b; Geyer
1978; Geyer 1990; Geyer 1991; Geyer 1992; Geyer 1994; Nicolis and Prigogine
1989; Prigogine, Allen and Herman 1977a; Prigogine, Allen and Herman 1977b).
Complexification and Entropification
The continuous process of binding of complexity into increasingly centralised
structures tends to a limit under existing conditions. Joseph Tainter (1988; 1995) has
exhaustively studied the collapse of historical societies and has concluded that
increased complexity and the attendant costs of this is responsible for societal-wide
collapse in almost every case he studied.
Complexification represents the build-up of entropy in a system. More complex
societies are more costly to maintain than simpler ones, requiring greater support
levels per capita (Miller 1978). Initially, as societies increase in complexity, more
networks are created among individuals, more hierarchical controls are created to
regulate these networks, more information is processed, there is more centralisation of
information flow, there is increasing need to support specialists not directly involved
in resource production, and the like. The result is that as a society evolves toward
greater complexity, the support costs levied on each individual will also rise, so that
the population as a whole must allocate increasing proportions of energy budget to
maintaining institutions dedicated to coordination, centralization and control. (Tainter
1988: 90-91).
Continued investment in sociopolitical complexity reaches a point where the benefits
of such investment begin to decline, at first gradually, then with accelerated force.
Thus, not only must populations allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to
maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point, higher amounts of this
investment will yield smaller increments of return. Diminishing returns, therefore, are
a recurrent aspect of centralizing sociopolitical evolution and of investment in
complexity [loc.cit.].
The processing of large quantities of information is an essential aspect of complex
societies, and indeed the need for this processing is probably one of the reasons that
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such societies came into existence. Yet the costs of information-processing, in many
spheres, also show a trend of declining marginal productivity [op.cit.: 99].
As the size of a social group increases the communication load increases even faster.
Information processing increases until capacity is reached. After this point,
information-processing performance deteriorates, so that even greater costs are
allocated to processing that is less efficient and reliable [loc.cit.].
Up to a point many of these costs are bearable due to the economies of synergy that
are involved (Corning 1983; Corning 1995; Corning 1996; Corning 1998; Corning
forthcoming). The process is very much a question of economy and the gains of the
present are not free lunches but are rather more like credits drawn on the future that
someday will fall due to be paid.
The more complex the system becomes it approaches the limits of its existing control
architecture and a period of crisis of governance ensues (Beniger 1986; WhitneySmith 1991).
The constant build up and yet constant deferral of the costs of centralization as the
system builds ever more away from equilibrium conditions yields deleterious
consequences at system level, among which are to be found:
1. There is increased differentiation with many more parts [identities] and subsystems all relatively autonomous from each other and all potentially either
mutually-enabling or mutually-inhibitory. Luhmann describes only the apex of
this line of development whereby functionally differentiated systems are
effectively estranged from each other and hence cannot interact or communicate
with each other without intermediate transducers and systems of mediation.
2. There is increased complexity in the system, action takes longer to effect, and
more and more other points of view have to be taken into account. Sociology
reflects this in the manner of ‘false consciousness’ as an essentially ‘theoretical’
problem (Marx and Engels 1974).
3. The 80:20 rule kicks in after a while with consequent diminishing returns to effort
(Beer 1979; Tainter 1988; Tainter 1995). The whole system eventually becomes
too cumbersome and too expensive to run relative to the benefits derived.
In other words, it is inevitable that entropy builds up in the system in the form of
increased complexity, loss of efficacy of action and decreasing returns to investment.
Luhmann’s state of maximum differentiation really represents just such a state of
maximum entropification (Luhmann 1982).
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What Tainter does not show, however, is that the process of entropification represents
a ‘control crisis’ and can be resolved by the discovery and invention of new control
technologies that are applied in ways that augment the amount of control variety that
is available (Beniger 1986). Chiefly they permit new modes of governance and social
organization to come about (Beniger 1990).
Today we are also experiencing a control revolution in the form of various
experiences of the ‘loss of control’. The overall trend is away from top-down forms of
directive control to increased relative autonomy within society itself. We should not
underestimate the difficulty of ‘letting go’. As Whitney-Smith reminds us, the most
difficult shift to achieve in control is between centralised control and de-centralised
control by individuals (Whitney-Smith 1991: 173).
The Identity Society
In terms of a theory of action, all of these changes manifest themselves as different
facets of a single societal phenomenon: identity and identification.
The self-effacement of the masses came to an end, paradoxically, with the mass
political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the democratic
movement, nationalism and anti-imperialism, the suffragettes, and so forth. These
were movements of mass society and of mass democracy (Ortega y Gasset 1932). The
identity society has now replaced the society of the masses, although many do not yet
realise it (Glasser 1976). Identity has become so central to the experience of our
societies that it has become an indispensable explanatory concept of social action and
social forms in these societies.
So-called hyper self-reflexivity in no more that the identity phase of the selfrecognition of the self (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994). This is the state of society
characterised by post-modernism.
In an identity society, identity and complexity emerge as dancing partners. This is the
root of the experience of post-modernism, the sense of ennui, of ‘nothing happens’.
As the possibilities for getting action become stymied under existing arrangements,
action gets backed up down the side-alleys and side-shows of identity.
The identity society is a society of entropic complexity. It is a society in which
questions of structure get aired but in a mystical, metaphysical way as though
‘structure’ were the ahistorical condition of every society. Not all societies
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‘complicate’ action to the same extent. Some identities are action-related and this
action leads to hyper-identity if it is blocked or interrupted in some way.
There is a mistaken notion about that the question of identity has assumed importance
only in the context of the recent emergence of the so-called politics of identity.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that there has been a prior lack of
concentration on questions of identity in sociological analysis. One reason for this is
surely the lack of a well thought-out approach to the whole area of social dynamics.
Recently, an approach to process thinking has emerged in sociology, especially in
Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that this new approach has produced a new way
of addressing the question of identities.11
The developments of the last century have to be seen in the context of the human
history that preceded them. In a real sense the last century saw for the first time since
the rise of the ‘common person’ (Robertson and Holzner 1980). For almost all of
human history till then the common person was a nobody, a zero, a nothing. History
was about and for the aristocrats and nobles. The peasantry was largely invisible,
except when they occasionally revolted. The rise of the cities began to change all that.
When craftsmen formed guilds in the medieval cities they began to take on, assert and
defend completely new forms of identity that demanded recognition and respect from
others. The rise of the bourgeois class and their forms of association similarly brought
forth new forms of identity and recognition. The growth in the numbers of types of
identities has lead to a great complexification of society. Although correlated with the
growth of the division of labour this process—the multiplication of identities—is not
one and the same. Marx’s distinction between a class in itself [klasse an sich] and a
class for itself [klasse für sich] is apposite. Whereas identities can be wholly attributed
[e.g. ‘nigger’, ‘Mick’] normally the demand for recognition comes from identities that
are self-consciously chosen, affirmed and validated.12
Even though undergoing tremendous functional differentiation the industrial working
class was nonetheless highly under-differentiated in terms of identity claims for the
11
See, in particular, Mennell Mennell, Stephen. 1994. "The Formation of We-Images: A
Process Theory." Pp. 175-197 in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity: The Modern
Discourse of Identity, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers..
Some groups ‘turn around’ attributed identity in an ironic reversal by embracing and
espousing the values associated with those negative identities e.g. the way some black people
and groups have embraced and celebrated the ‘nigger’ identity.
12
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early period of industrial revolution. Like the peasantry before them, they were
invisible and of no consequence as social actors. They were merely instruments of
production, pure labour power. This began to change with the rise of organized
associations of workers, the trades unions. It was these associations that demanded
recognition, respect and their due for workers. However, even with the rise of unions,
industrial workers remained highly under-differentiated in terms of identity. The
identity of ‘boilermaker’ conceals a multitude of possible unique identities of
individuals that it cannot express. Nonetheless, the activism of the industrial working
class did significantly add to the pantheon of competing identity claims in modern
society. They demanded and got a place at the table, as witnessed by the history of
social partnership in Europe since the end of World War II.
Mass society did exist for a period but we are now leaving it. Mass society was the
society in which complexity was not acknowledged and things were run as though
society was still small and intimate. Mass society is an engulfed society [Scheff
1997]. This is not the society of the ‘good old times’ when things were simple and
black and white, before ‘everything got so complicated’. Mass society was a society
of uniformity, of sameness, of grey conformity organized around the simple nostrums
of family, country and religion. Governments ran countries on the basis of simple
notions of population and mass demographics.13 The period of mass society was a
transitional period and as an example of cultural lag in governance was a precursor to
the current control crisis.
Worse, people misunderstood themselves in deceptively simplistic terms and denied
their own complexity. Family life was a Pandora’s box of seething complexity and
repressed identity claims (Cooper 1971; Laing 1976; Laing and Esterson 1970). Of
course, the complete inadequacy of simplicity when confronted with complexity was
bound to come to grief. And so it did with the eruptions of the 1960’s, the decade
when individuals began to ‘come out’ and ‘do their own thing’. The self-reliance and
self-confidence that increasing affluence gave to young people in particular triggered
a process of unprecedented differentiation and individuation based on life experience
(Habermas 1971). Of course, this necessary re-balancing of the social bonds in the
13
There is also the not inconsiderable fact that most government and administrative elites
held very snobby, simplistic and derogatory attitudes towards the common people, such was
the class divide between government and governed.
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direction of individuation was completely hi-jacked by the Thatcherite revolution and
misinterpreted as a swing towards selfishness, egoism and the private sphere and
against community and connectedness. We are still dealing with it under the crisis of
governance and with what Knorr-Cetina (1997) calls the trend towards individualism.
For most of our history human beings have been engulfed in a variety of group
identities. The trend towards individualism is therefore a very recent and so far shortlived phenomenon. Like many reaction phenomena it has been judged to have swung
too far and a counter reaction has set in-at least at the ideological and intellectual
levels (Etzioni 1995; Lasch 1979). Before rushing to judgment it might benefit us if
we took a closer look at the phenomenon and its history.
The individualism of which we speak is not the atomism of classical mechanism or
the individualism of the ‘invisible hand’. These were phantastical constructions
lacking any empirical referents whatsoever. The number of free, unfettered
individuals who could dispose of their wealth and assets solely according to the ratio
of pure calculation always was and is vanishingly small. Although individuation has a
long history (Bloom 1999; Jaynes 1976), the individualism of which I write has come
about through a rejection of the ties that bind—as though from a long deep-seated
historical yearning to be ‘free’. The American experience has been characterized in
precisely this way: the land of the future where people could construct their own
identities free from the fetters of the past.
Escape may be a prerequisite to getting greater control over one’s life but in itself it is
not sufficient. What is necessary is a technology of control—a means of taking
[greater] control and constructing life meaning and identity for one’s self. Reading
and writing are precisely such tools. Once absorbed they give the individual
unparalleled inner freedom to move in whatever direction they wish without being
observed by others.14 Not only can they enrich the world of valued goal objects in a
person and hence set them off in new unheard and undreamt of directions. They also
give them the means of greater control over their lives through he manipulation of
ubiquitous symbols. Literacy and numeracy enormously increase the variety of
14
To what extent people have always had the inner freedom to think their own thoughts is a
moot point Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.. Nonetheless, the stimulation provided by
reading by greatly extending the range of experience and thought would have amplified it a
thousand fold.
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behavioural action and response that is available to people. The self-reflexivity
involved in the processes of reading and writing prompt the formation of identity
questions (Bloom 2000; Hoggart 1958). Riesman, for instance, calls our attention to
the ‘refuge of print’. He writes: ‘… we must not forget that the great reading-hour
storehouse of the era depending on inner-direction is the Bible and that the Bible is
not one book but many, with an inexhaustible variety of messages’ (Riesman 1961:
96).
Such a refuge holds out the possibility of detaching the self from the fixity of already
established identities, of the possibility of leverage from the immersion of engulfment
(Bloom 2000).
Such a refuge may encourage and permit the child to free himself from
his family and primary group; and he may learn to criticize what he
leaves behind, as did the self-emancipating readers of the Polish
peasant press. It opens up to him a whole range of models-the ‘fivefoot wardrobe’ from which he can try on new roles. The Renaissance is
itself testimony to this potency of the written word. Individualistic
strivings find support as well as oversupport in the variety of paths of
life described in print and drama. To be alone with a book is to be
alone in a new way. (Riesman 1961: 96)15
A significant increase in the inflation of identities and identity claims was brought
about by the introduction of numeracy and literacy on a mass scale (Hoggart 1958).
In discovering and becoming more of ‘themselves’ people propagate identities.
Recognition and respect become the by-words of the new society of identities.
Political correctness is a reflection of this newfound necessary respect for difference,
even though it often gets it wrong and triggers the embarrassment it was meant to
avoid. In coming to discern their interests, their likes and dislikes people join with
others in forging new collective identities of many kinds and varieties. These new
identities become a new source of action and of demands for recognition. Individual
action was by no means the only outcome of this process. New forms of identification
unleashed mobilization of collective action on an unprecedented scale as whole
groups of people struggled to wrest control of their destinies from overweening,
bloated and redundant empires (Anderson 1991). In many instances of the latter
collective identification and liberation took precedence over individual liberation,
which means that the severing of community bonds has come later if yet at all to post15
See also Bobrick Bobrick, Benson. 2001. Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English
Bible and the Revolution it Inspired. New York: Simon & Schuster..
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colonial societies than to the societies of empire and domination. Ultimately though,
as we have seen with Ireland in recent decades, the demands for individual release
from communal engulfment cannot be postponed indefinitely and the floodgates are
rent asunder. In post-colonial societies this latter process is incorrectly attributed to
some kind of malign American cultural influence. But this would not be correct. The
mass media of television, radio and the cinema is only doing what the print media of
books, magazines and newspapers did to previous generations: prizing people away
from the grip of collective engulfment by tickling and awakening the imagination of
individual identity and destiny (Brooks 2000; Florida 2002; Mitchell 2002; Zuboff
and Maxmin 2003).
Destiny in lone isolation for all is not the telos of this process. Even rational
individualists realize that their fate lies in ganging together with their fellows. The
challenge is to find forms of association that entail neither the alienation of extreme
individualism nor the engulfment of group identity but rather solidarity (Scheff 1997).
No society in history has experienced solidarity in this sense or allowed it.
Throughout history to date the power imperative (Elias 2000; Schmookler 1995) has
imposed conditions of systematically distorted communication (Habermas 1970) on
all relationships in human societies. We are hopefully at the latter end of the phase of
elimination contests among survival units (Elias 1978a) that has characterized human
history since the agricultural revolution, although we are far from being out of the
woods yet (Barber 1996; Huntington 1998; Maffesoli 1995).16 To this extent the new
communitarianism is hopelessly idealistic and unrealistic. It really has not done the
historical analysis, as a Marxist would say. As yet there is no extant form of societywide community that would act as a genuine salve and antidote to the new
individualism. The ‘material preconditions’ are not yet in place. And yet I believe that
this individualism calls forth or beckons a new form of community that would be its
complement (Agamben 1993). Without this counter-pole to act as an inhibitor we are
likely to continue to witness extreme forms of individualism, apathy and narcissism in
our societies (Lasch 1979).
The self-discovery of individuals cannot be gainsaid and put in reverse. A new
community must build on the self-awareness of the present to forge a reflexive group
consciousness, one that both preserves and yet transcends individualism in a form of
16
The decisive ‘battles’ may yet still be ahead.
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group identity that is broad and strong enough to hold both poles of the continuum.
Such a society necessarily will be an ‘agreed’ or ‘negotiated’ society. Increasingly
people will come to be intolerant of obstacles to community such as power and
income inequalities and negotiations around these issues will be difficult.
There are historical and structural preconditions:

The struggle for power between nations on the world stage must come to an
end, something that will not play itself out for some time to come (Schmookler
1995).

The struggle for existence must also come to an end. This entails the
elimination of poverty and also the humiliation and disrespect that goes with
material and status differences (Kawachi, Kennedy and Wilkinson 1999;
Wilkinson 1996).
Some of these conditions may well be almost unattainable. And there may be real
obstacles in the way of ever achieving a community that is not riven by status
differences (Hammond 1978; Hammond 1983a; Hammond 1983b; Hammond 1990;
Hammond 1996; Hammond 1999a; Hammond 1999b).
A social science has a role to play in assessing the realistic chances of these
conditions being met as well as maieutically assisting the birth of the new society in
whatever manner possible.17
A negotiated society is not necessarily a transparent society in the way Marx thought
communist society would be (Marx and Engels 1974). A social science will have the
17
Outside of the immediate context of this discussion, it should be noted that major threats to
the status and standing of humanity loom on the horizon from at least five sources: [i] a global
scale conflict using weapons of mass destruction, [ii] a catastrophe of the planetary
ecosystem, [iii] robotics and the development of machines with specifically alien i.e. nonhuman intelligence Warwick, Kevin. 1998. In the Mind of the Machine: The Breakthrough in
Artificial Intelligence. London: Arrow., [iv] biotechnology Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Our
Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. London: Profile Books,
Rifkin, Jeremy. 1999. The Biotech Century: How Genetic Commerce Will Change the World.
London: Phoenix. and, last but not least, [v] evolution itself Cadbury, Deborah. 1998. The
Feminization of Nature: Our Future at Risk. London: Penguin Books, Coren, Richard L.
1998. The Evolutionary Trajectory: The Growth of Information in the History and Future of
Earth. New York: Gordon & Breach, —. 2001. "Empirical Evidence for a Law of Information
Growth." Entropy 3:259-272, Livingston, William L. 1985. The New Plague. Bayside, NJ:
FES Publishing.. See also Kurzweil Kurzweil, Ray. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines:
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin Books., Mazlich Mazlish,
Bruce. 1993. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press., and Dyson Dyson, George B. 1997. Darwin Among the
Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Reading, MA: HelixBooks:AddisonWesley..
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task of discovering the systematic constraints that will operate to block action and of
raising them to the level of collective perception so that countervailing controls can be
enacted (Gorz 1976; Gorz 1982; Gorz 1985).
6. From Government to Governance
Writing of societal complexity inevitably brings us to the question of social control or
governance. Unlike Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, many
contemporary authors do not realise that ‘governance’ is not something new but has
been the secret heart of the cohesion of societies since time immemorial. For instance,
Bob Jessop writes,
So-called ‘governance’ mechanisms [as contrasted to markets or
hierarchy] have long been widely used in coordinating complex
organizations and systems. They are especially appropriate for systems
that are resistant to top-down internal management and/or direct
external control and that also co-evolve with other [complex] sets of
social relations with which their various decisions, operations, and
aims are reciprocally interdependent. (Jessop 2001)
It is true that increasing societal complexity challenges the limited understanding of
the processes of governance that were barely adequate in an age of mass society but
that are clearly and manifestly inadequate in an age of identity. As Scharpf notes:
... the advantages of hierarchical coordination are lost in a world that is
characterized by increasingly dense, extended, and rapidly changing
patterns of reciprocal interdependence, and by increasingly frequent,
but ephemeral, interactions across all types of pre-established
boundaries, intra- and interorganizational, intra- and intersectoral,
intra- and international (Scharpf 1993: 37)
Such patterns of reciprocal interdependence across multiple boundaries with their
basic resistance to hierarchical co-ordination are usefully labelled ‘heterarchic’. Not
only do they resist top-down command, they are also ill-suited, contrary to Hayekian
claims, to simple, blind co-evolution [the so-called ‘invisible hand’] with its mutual,
post hoc adaptation.
After an extensive review of problems of modern governance, Kooiman concluded:
The existence of ‘[functional] interdependence’ between formally
and/or relatively autonomous [non-hierarchically ordered] political and
social actors is of the essence.
By interdependence we mean that no single actor has the possibility of
‘doing the job’ [solving a problem or grasping an opportunity]
unilaterally. No actor is so dominant as to be able to enforce a certain
line of behaviour, or to place the costs of social problem-solving on
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others and take the revenues himself. And all actors can be severely
hindered in reaching their own objectives by other actors.
‘Interdependence’ in itself is not enough. The realization of the
opportunities within interdependence is the central assignment of
social-political governance (Kooiman 1993: 251).
It is important to bear in mind that these overall societal trends do not, contrary to
expectation, presage the dissolution of all forms of identity into the sociomatrix. That
would represent the triumph of postmodernism and the dissolution of society tout
court. One would be forgiven for thinking the contrary what with talk of the
‘boundaryless’ organization, the ‘flat’ organization (Hastings 1993) and the
valorisation of network solutions of all kinds (Lipnack and Stamps 1994). The form of
solution is easier to grasp if one has an accurate diagnosis in the first place. I have
been arguing that all forms of bureaucratic organization are increasingly deficient in
requisite variety in the face of the burgeoning complexity of the social world. Not
only have traditional forms of government and business organization been affected
but the very structure of individual identity also (Gergen 1991; Turkle 1984).
Alvin Toffler has declared that ‘Today’s businesses simply lack the requisite variety
to make it in the 21st century’ (Toffler 1990: 190). The same could be said for all
existing forms of government. In fact, the current ‘crisis of governance’ may well be
construed as a second Feudalism, the latest centripetal phase of Elias’s ‘Monopoly
Mechanism’ (Elias 2000) brought about by the ‘loss of control’.
As we have seen some important properties of networks reside in their potential for
requisite variety of response. They tend to be horizontal rather than vertical—meaning
they have either a ‘flatter’ hierarchy or none at all. They are adaptive—able to
reconfigure themselves quickly to meet changed conditions [‘flexible coupling net’].
Leadership in them tends to be based on competence and personality rather than
social or organizational rank. And power turns over frequently and more easily than in
a bureaucracy, changing hands as new situations arise that demand new skills. All of
these characteristics can confer requisite variety of response in an unstable and
uncertain environment.
Leslie J. Berkes reflects the network form of organization when he states,
‘Organizations are redesigned daily by their members to get the job done. That’s the
real structure. It’s the informal organization-the anti-organization.... It is the primary
organization’ [op.cit.].
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Networks therefore can be enormously useful, flexible, and ant-bureaucratic. But in
the recent enthusiasm, elementary distinctions are often ignored (Toffler 1990: 201).
Toffler reminds us that network organization has its limitations along with its virtues.
It is superb for fighting terrorism or a decentralised guerrilla war, not marvellous at all
for the control of strategic nuclear weapons where the last thing we want is for local
commanders to be free and unrestrained. What is required is a broader concept, one
which implies that an organization is capable of encompassing both the formal and
informal, the bureaucratic and the networked sub organizations (Fukuyama 1999;
Toffler 1990: 202).18
Governance Crisis
Governance is now on the academic and political agenda. Its discovery has ‘coincided
with economic changes which have made big business and big government appear
rather ineffective as means of economic and political organization (Jessop 1995: 312).
Jessop defines governance as
The general field of governance studies as concerned with the
resolution of (para-) political problems (in the sense of problems of
collective goal-attainment or the realization of collective purposes) in
and though specific configurations of governmental (hierarchical) and
extra-governmental (non-hierarchical) institutions, organizations and
practices. (Jessop 1995: 317)
Jessop writes: ‘Current fascination with the nature and dynamic of governance is
closely linked to the failure of many taken-for-granted co-ordination mechanisms in
the post-war world’ (Jessop 1995: 311).
The fragmentation of society into interconnected networks of identities has, I wish to
propose, precipitated this crisis of societal ‘steering’ or a governance crisis. What was
once (it was thought) exercised in a direct, simple, linear and coherent way has now
become interrupted, transformed, and deflected across a myriad refractory and
reflexive surfaces of identity. The conditions under which any power can be yielded
have been laid bare. As Latour puts it:
‘Power’ is always the illusion people get when they are obeyed;
thinking in terms of the diffusion model, they imagine that others
18
Something that Castells fails to take into account in his recent monumental work Castells,
Manuel. 1992. The Informational City: information technology, economic restructuring and
the urban-regional process. Oxford: Blackwell, —. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society.
Malden, MA: Blackwells, —. 1997. The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwells..
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behave because of the master’s clout without ever suspecting the many
different reasons others have for obeying and doing something else;
more exactly, people who are ‘obeyed’ discover what their power is
really made of when they start to lose it. They realise, but too late, that
it was ‘made of the wills of all the others’. (Latour 1986: 268)
It is precisely the profusion and proliferation of such heteronomous wills in a myriad
different ways that has led to the stretching of the arms of government to embrace as
much as possible of the emergent but refracted civil society. Among the factors
responsible for the current crisis of government Jessop mentions the ‘eruption of
identity politics and new social movements which threaten established forms of social
and political domination’ (Jessop 1995).
However, not all identities are equal. Not all identities are complete. It has been
accepted since Simmel that individual identity is a function of the ensemble of one’s
social memberships. If the quantum of social organizations is deficient in a society
and hence also the quantum of social capital deriving from the social networks that
subtend these, then there will be a deficiency in the quanta of identities at both levels
of individuals and of social organizations. This is why this phase of the discussion
more nearly fits the European situation than it does the North American. In recent
years Europe, and certainly that region of it covered by the EU, has seen a burgeoning
growth of civil society, in networks and innovative forms of social organization and
of government (Egeberg 2000). In this respect there has been a veritable economic
and cultural renaissance in the regions of Rhône-Alpes, Baden Wurtenberg, Catalonia
and Lombardia. And according to researchers, there has been sustained recent growth
in social capital in countries such as the Netherlands (Curtin 2002) and Ireland (Sabel
1996).19 In the United States, in contrast, according to at least one influential
commentator, there has been a net decline in historically high levels of social capital
(Putnam 1995; Putnam 2000).
Complexity, we have seen, is a function of the numbers and patterns of interconnected
networks between identities. And this also has precipitated a challenge to traditional
governmental institutions.
Governance as a growth industry has its basis in societal
developments, in particular with increasing interdependencies, and this
19
Also Pauline Jackson, University College Dublin, who has just completed a research
project on the growth in the number of organizations in the Irish Republic. Personal
communication.
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at many levels and in many directions. … these broad societal trends
[may be considered] to be an expression of, a reaction to, or even an
engine of long-term societal differentiation and integration processes.
These processes result in lengthening chains of interactions
(Kaufmann, Majone and Ostrom 1986). These chains are increasingly
institutionalised, multi-level, and multi-dimensional and this ongoing
process leads to the proliferation of the number of influential actors in
society while at the same time increasing the number of interactions
among those parties. (Kooiman 2001)
This has resulted in the stretching of the state apparatus out into society to address
these demands. The further the arms of the state stretched the more the central organs
of government were subjected to erosion of power and were overtaken by as a process
of de-monopolisation and diffusion of power [the so-called ‘hollowing out of the
state’ (Elias 2000; Rhodes 1996)]. In consequence this has precipitated what has been
referred to as a failure of hierarchical decision-making and ‘top-down’ planning in
recent decades. Peters and Pierre have written:
Finally, the overall nature of the political project pursued by
contemporary Western states has changed significantly over the past
10–15 years. Previously, the emphasis was on expanding the political
sphere in society; the current main objectives are to increase efficiency
in public service delivery and delivering more customer-attuned
services. (Peters and Pierre 2001)
However, to describe the matter sequentially like this is to misunderstand the actual
dynamics involved. It is precisely on account of attempts to expand the political
sphere in society that we have the changes that the authors write about. The expansion
of the political sphere came up against the limits of complexity and of control. As
with the monopoly mechanism the more the state tried to spread itself across the
societal terrain the more necessary it was to devolve powers not so much to officials
but to organizations of civil society that had been co-opted for governance purposes
by officials. The paradoxical effect was that in the pursuit of government we got
governance, the dilution of direct government and the admittance and recognition of
the role of self-steering in society. It represented the final realisation that government
does not take place by political and administrative fiat but by the consent of the
governed (Latour 1986; Mechanic 1962; van Krieken 1991). I have already argued
that the fundamental problem that we are dealing with here is one of proliferating and
burgeoning complexity on the horizontal plane in western societies. Variety is a
measure of complexity and cybernetics provides the scientific foundation for the
activity of variety management (Beer 1970a; Beer 1970b). John Fobes, former Deputy
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Director-General of UNESCO in remarks to the Club of Rome on the subject of
governance made the explicit connection with cybernetics when he said:
The stresses from social change that require a broader sense of
governance have called into play Ashby’s ‘law of requisite variety’
(which may be interpreted as stating that ‘the regulators or governors
of a system must reflect the variety in that system in order to be of
service to it.’) (Judge 1987)20
The Rise of Post-Parliamentary Modes of Governance
The diffusion of power from the centre in the attempt to cover the variety of an ever
increasingly complex civil society has deeply questioned the adequacy of traditional
forms of parliamentary democracy.
The fragmentation of the electorate and the ‘differentiated polity’ (Rhodes 1996;
Rhodes 1997) has produced a powerful degree of solidarity within the component
social elements. These groupings increase their demands for economic benefits,
especially governmental benefits. Such is the frequency and intensity of interaction
between these two great spheres of action that the opportunity to express political
demands and balance them by periodic national elections becomes less and less
effective as a crucial element in social control (Janowitz 1975).
According to Janowitz, the rise of parapolitical and new social movements (Dalton
and Kuechler 1990; Hegedus 1989; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Zald and McCarthy
1987) represents an implicit recognition of the limitations of periodic national
elections as mechanisms of social and political control (Janowitz 1975: 104). The
crisis in political legitimacy constitutes the key problematic issue in advanced
industrial society (Habermas 1976) and constitutes a ‘governance crisis’ in
contemporary societies.21
20
Anthony Judge credits Fobes with the recent rehabilitation of the concept of governance.
According to Alvin Toffler, Judge himself was one of the ‘earliest and deepest analysts of
network organization’ Toffler, Alvin. 1990. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at
the Edge of the 21st Century. New York: Bantam Books..
21
Governance, as already stated, is not a new issue. The question goes right back to the
‘social control’ school of American sociology Janowitz, Morris. 1975. "Sociological Theory
and Social Control." American Journal of Sociology 81:82-108, —. 1991. On Social
Organization and Social Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. Questions of
societal self-steering and social self-regulation were at the heart of the sociologies of Park and
Burgess for instance Park, Robert E. 1952. Human Communication. Glencoe, Il: The Free
Press, —. 1967. On Social Control and Collective Behavior. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1969. Introduction to the Science of
Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press..
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It is precisely the vigour and range in growth of civil society in Europe that has
rendered parliamentary modes pedestrian and irrelevant as well as stimulating the
search for new relevant models of democracy that reflect a more active, pro-active
and more responsive and more timely modes of governance (Andersen and Burns
1996; Andersen and Eliassen 1996; Curtin 1997; Keane 1988; Medrano and Gutierrez
2001; Piore and Sabel 1984; Putnam 1993; Sabel 1996; Warleigh 2000).22
Advocates of post-parliamentary forms of governance have proposed variations such
as deliberative (Curtin 1997; Mouffe 2000) or associational democracy (Hirst 1994;
Hirst 1997; Hirst and Khilnani 1996). Curtin explains what is entailed:
A deliberative theory of democracy draws from the insights of
deliberative theorists who perceive political will formation processes
as essential for democracy.23 It emphasizes active participation rather
than the intermittently passive procedural participation of voting in
elections as the key for democratizing decision-making processes.24
From this perspective the ability of citizens to effectively participate in
social (or civil) dialogue, in the broad sense of the term, is a definite
attribute of democracy. This model of democracy looks at political
participation by citizens in a broad sense not limited to participation in
strictly political institutions (voting) and not limited to ‘interest
representation’ in the classical sense of the term. Democracy is rather
conceived as a mechanism that transforms the original interests of
individuals. In particular the moral qualities of dialogue or deliberation
account for a conception of democracy that relies on dialogue as a
means of containing selfish interests and the power of factions based
on them. This constraint is achieved by dialogue’s tendency to exclude
those positions that cannot be sustained on an impartial basis.25 The
epistemic value of democracy flows from the process of decision and
discussion in general and not from any decision in particular. (Curtin
2002)
One important though neglected aspect is that these forms of participation in
governance involve social organizations directly and only through them, indirectly as
it were, the citizenry. The development certainly supports the overall burden of my
work that the fundamental societal units are forms of social organization. When
22
I would like to single out the work of Mary parker Follett for her outstanding prescience in
this matter Follett, Mary Parker. 1920. The New State: Group Organization the Solution of
Popular Government. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press..
23
See further, D. Curtin, Postnational Democracy. The EU in Search of a Political
Philosophy (Kluwer, 1997) and references cited.
24
Ibid.
25
See C.Nino, The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy (New Haven, 1996), p.101.
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society mobilises from the bottom up it does so in the refracted forms of social
organization.
Mixed-Mode Governance
The newer theories of democracy increasingly move us away from the idea of an
opposition between state and civil society where the latter is conceived of as a realm
of spontaneous (private) order and natural democratic legitimacy. Issues of
governance are seen rather as applying to both sides of this divide and civil society
needs itself to be ordered and enabled to constitute itself.
As Fobes explained to his audience in the Club of Rome:
The concept of governance emphasizes that order in society is created
and maintained by a spectrum of institutions, only one of which is
known as government. By examining that spectrum at all levels of
society, we can obtain a broader sense pf ‘governability’ as it is
exercised in policy-making, in providing services and the application
of law. (Judge 1987)
A deficiency of pre-existing concepts of governance was that this was something that
governments specifically do. Cybernetics tell us something different: control is a
distributed property of all complex systems.
The first principle of control is that the controller is part of the system
under control. The controller is not something stuck on to a system by
a higher authority which then accords it managerial prerogatives. In
any natural system, whether we speak of animal populations or the
inner workings of some living organism, the control function is spread
through the architecture of the system. It is not an identifiable thing at
all, but its existence in some form is inferred from the system’s
behaviour. The controller moreover grows with the system, and, if we
look back though time, we see that the controller evolved with the
system too. (Beer 1979: 35)
If this is so then we my expect to see that, under the specific historical conditions
described here, governance devolves to various combinations and interactions of state,
market and civil society (Streeck and Schmitter 1985).26 This is exactly what we do
see (Kooiman 2001; Offe 2000).
26
The question may be put as to how Eurocentric this argument is and as to whether it does
not take sufficiently into account developments in the USA, Eastern Europe including the
former Soviet union, Asia, Africa and, specifically, China as well as other parts of the world.
This is far too big a question to attempt to answer here. Suffice it to say the model being
proposed does rest on the presence of significant levels of social capital in a society. For
historical reasons that may have to do with the ‘rise of the West’ Europe may now have a
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This stretching of the state has interpolated into existence a veritable panoply of
policy networks (Rhodes 1996; Rhodes 1997), advocacy coalitions (Sabatier 1988;
Sabatier 1999), and so on. The important of such networks for my argument cannot be
underestimated. According to Jessop:
Policy networks confer flexibility of adaptive response and hence the
potential of generating requisite variety and thus augmented control
abilities:
Strategic analysis can be taken further yet if we allow for selfreflection on the part of individual and collective actors about the
identities and interests which orient their strategies. Individuals and
organizations can be reflexive, can reformulate within limits their own
identities, and can engage in strategic calculation about the ‘objective’
interests that flow from these identities in particular conjunctures. A
further step in strategic-relational analysis (and sometimes in strategic
self-reflection) occurs when one examines (and actors build) the
capacity to switch among different modes of governance. Since any
particular mode of policy-making, coordination, or crisis-resolution
contains its own distinctive dilemmas, contradictions, and weaknesses,
the capacity to switch among them facilitates more effective responses
to internal and/or external turbulence (cf. Offe 1975). This requisite
variety (with its informational, structural, and functional redundancies)
plays an important role in the adaptability of intra- and interorganizational networks. (Jessop 2001)
It is in these policy networks or advocacy coalitions (Sabatier 1988; Sabatier 1999)
that we see the commingling of state, market and civil society. According to Offe
these are the three building blocks that lie at the foundation of modern social and
political institutions. Offe has identified what he describes as ‘six pathologies’ that
eventuate from the overvaluation or neglect of any one of these building blocks. Three
of these pathologies result from the single-mined reliance on just one of the three
building blocks. The other three fallacies result from the premise that any one of the
three can be excluded from the ‘architecture of social order’. They are:

Excessive statism

Too little governing capacity – the withering away of the state

Excessive reliance on market mechanisms

Excessive limitation of market forces

Excessive communitarianism

Neglecting communities and identities (Offe 2000: 83-93).
global comparative advantage in this factor and so be in a position to be an exemplar for a
qualitatively new phase in societal governance.
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On the surface it can appear that what we have here are three contradictory and
conflicting principles. In fact Offe refers to them as the ‘three antinomies of social
and political order’. The three antinomies ‘tend to undercut each other. They also
depend upon each other. As none of them is dispensable, the need for self-limitation
of the proponents of each becomes evident’ (Offe 2000: 93). He agrees that what we
have here is a ‘repertoire of partly contradictory, partly complementary arguments and
observations that can be brought to bear upon the critique and reconstruction of
existing institutional arrangements.’ He believes that that these antinomies and
ideological rivalries must and can be resolved ‘through practices of civility and
deliberation which unfold ‘in between’ the poles of our conceptual triangle of ‘pure’,
if largely obsolete solutions’ (loc.cit.).
The problem of designing and defending state-society relations, however, is not that
of opting simplemindedly for one of the three, but of engaging in, or at the very least,
tolerating a process of the ongoing design, readjustment and fine-tuning of a rich and
adequate mix in which all three building blocks of social order have a mutually
limiting and variable role (op.cit.: 82).
Hence he argues the need for some form of meta-organizational framework to enable
us to understand how optimally they should be related to each other.
Kooiman concurs:
The twin forces of differentiation and proliferation also require some
form of reintegration. Hence, they engender a growing but different
need for collective action, not in the form of public action as an
expression of this collective need alone, but also of public-private
modes of collective action as a response to those societal needs that
create new societal opportunities. (Kooiman 2001)
Dilemmas of Heterarchic Governance
Offe has argued that these three antinomies should be integrated under a new form of
meta-organizational framework, one that does not cancel their animus but directs it to
sociopoietic ends.
Heterarchy has been proposed as an alternative organizing principle to that of
hierarchy (Grabher and Stark 1997; Reihlen 1996; Stark 1989; Stark 1999a; Stark
1999b; Stark and Grabher 1997). Heterarchy represents the idea of interdependence in
contrast to markets which assume independence and hierarchy which is based on
dependence (Stark 2001). However, heterarchy on its own is insufficient as a
framework of societal integration. Jessop (2001) has identified a number of strategic
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dilemmas that may contribute towards failure of heterarchic governance mechanisms.
These are:

Cooperation vs. Competition
This problem is one of maintain trusting open relationships when multiple
opportunities for free-riding and defection abound.

Openness vs. Closure
Heterarchic governance mechanisms, because they operate in complex, uncertain
environments, face problems in remaining open to those environments while
simultaneously securing the network closure required for effective coordination
among a limited number of partners (Coleman 1990).

Adaptation vs. Flexibility
Heterarchic governance mechanisms are held to be highly adaptive. Too successful
adaptation can reduce future flexibility of available response. This poses dilemmas of
governability (capacity for guidance) vs. flexibility (capacity to adapt to changed
circumstances).

Accountability vs. Efficiency
Some public-private partnerships can blur the public-private distinction, thus posing a
dilemma of accountability versus efficiency. Not only are there problems about
attributing responsibility in interdependent networks (especially where these are interorganizational rather than interpersonal) but public-private arrangements run the risk
of privatizing politics and/or promoting the statization of the private sphere (Jessop
1995).
From Corporatism to the ‘Negotiated Society’
Heterarchy is certainly a move in the right direction. However, as a concept it is still
rather vague and nebulous. It has two principal failings. First, it excludes hierarchy as
an organizing principle, and two it can only fail [partly as a consequence of this
exclusion] as a means of hegemonic organization.
The term ‘heterarchic governance’ itself contains a number of problems. Heterarchy
seeks to embrace both governance and open-networks [whereas as ideal types they are
polar opposites] as well as eschew hierarchy. This is not possible! Heterarchy, in
other words, with its ‘one size fits all’ approach, confuses the issue of the degree of
governance that it may be appropriate to bring to bear in any situation. This is clearly
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evident in its treatment of hierarchy.27 As a principle its animus derives from the fact
that it is non hierarchical. However, therein lies the rub. It assumes that anti-hierarchy
is the solution. It cannot explain why hierarchy is now not necessary. Nor can it
specify a limit to how much heterarchy might be desirable and whether or not it might
be necessary to resort to any form of hierarchy in the cycle of governance. One set of
problems that heterarchy does not address, according to Fukuyama, is ‘problems of
coordination through hierarchies under conditions of increasing economic
complexity’ (Fukuyama 1999: 202). Heterarchy is at once too general and too simple
an answer. Fukuyama has counterclaimed by stating that ‘it is highly doubtful that
formal hierarchies are about to go away any time soon now’ (Fukuyama 1999: 202).
In fact, Fukuyama has cited several reasons for the inevitable persistence of hierarchy
(loc.cit.).
Heterarchy, it must be concluded, is a low variety model of governance and of selforganization and is almost certainly inadequate. Its paradoxes and contradictions are
insurmountable. What is needed is a framework in which the dynamics of the various
antinomies outlined in these pages (as well as the antinomies of grid/group and
engulfment /isolation) can be managed and regulated to socially useful ends.
Jessop tells us that although inter-systemic concertation is sometimes recommended
in this context it is also subject to paradoxical limitations:
On the one hand, entire subsystems (such as the economy, law,
politics, education) can never be real acting subjects with capacities for
conscious action. Thus, to avoid blind co-evolution based entirely on
post hoc structural coupling, inter-systemic concertation must be
mediated through subjects who can engage in ex ante self-regulatory
strategic coordination, monitor the effects of that coordination on goal
attainment, and modify their strategies as appropriate. On the other
hand, such bodies can never fully represent the operational logic (let
alone fully comprehend the current conjuncture and future direction) of
whole subsystems. Indeed, they could even promote their own private
interests in maintaining inter-organizational exchanges (or simply their
own survival as organizations) at the expense of effective inter-
27
I have explained elsewhere (Stokes, 2003) how networks as regions of the sociomatrix were
intrinsically self-organizing but that degrees of governance could be introduced, depending on
the control costs and risks. This development would take the networks away from being selforganizing in the sense originally meant in that now they would incorporate elements of
centralised control e.g. the monitoring of members contributions and turn-taking. Formal
governance lay further ahead still which would necessitate the drawing of a boundary of
identity between what was inside the organization and hence properly under its control and
what is to remain outside, in the environment.
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systemic concertation. In short, whereas the complexities of strategic
interdependence among systems do require specific forms of interorganizational concertation, the latter needs regularizing to limit the
risks of self-serving ‘privatization’ and to guide strategic interaction so
that it remains in line with the ‘public interest’. This depends in turn on
an hegemonic consensus or project which provides the various forces
involved with common programmatic objectives despite differing
codes, identities, etc. (Jessop 2001)
Small open economies have already faced some of these problems even in the heyday
of Fordism and made continuing efforts to resolve them. The Scandinavian economies
and Ireland, for example, have tended to combine orthodox corporatism with a socalled ‘negotiated economy’ model of concertation (Hausner, Jessop and Nielsen
1993; Nielsen and Pedersen 1988; Nielsen and Pedersen 1993; Sabel 1996). Of course
to speak of a ‘negotiated economy’ is really to miss the point. ‘Negotiated society’
would be nearer the mark because what was negotiated always involved a wide range
of extra-economic as well as economic elements.
It was not confined to industrial capital, blue-collar workers, and the
central state but extended to rural and urban petty bourgeois sectors,
the local state, and functional domains such as health, education,
welfare, and scientific research. Moreover, under the impact of the
above-noted shifts in the mode of growth, there is now even greater
emphasis on inter-systemic noise reduction and negative coordination
to supplement inter-organizational negotiation and inter-personal
networking. In this sense one could say that the ‘negotiated economy’
operates in certain respects in a meta-governance manner by
embedding corporatism in a wider strategic learning context. It
provides a framework which encourages social partners to respect the
operational codes and procedures of other systems and to engage in
self-regulating conduct within their own operational spheres in the
interests of a wider social project. (Jessop 1995)
Policy networks constitute a governance mechanism if they bring interdependent
elements together under a common sign and so deal with antinomies directly. For
instance, partnership in Ireland brings together social partners and a complex variety
of interdependent elements ranging from incomes and fiscal policies to quality of life
and social services issues. A single agreement can put all of these into alignment with
each other. Outside of the agreement the elements could trigger continuously off one
another so as to produce a vicious circle.
Government may play a role but that role ideally should take more the form of metagovernance than government proper. Thus Jessop tells us, in their account of sectoral
governance in the US economy, Lindberg, Campbell and Hollingsworth note that
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‘The state ... is capable of influencing governance in many complex
ways, most of which are not available to organizations in civil society.
... Other actors cannot behave like the state because they cannot serve
as gatekeepers, allocate resources and information, influence and
structure property rights, or affect governance and governance
transformations in other ways as does the state’ (1991: 31). This
argument can be rephrased in terms of the need for a meta-governance
instance which ‘organizes the self-organization of inter-organizational
relations’, i.e., provides the ground rules for governance, ensures the
compatibility of different governance mechanisms and regimes,
deploys a relative monopoly of organizational intelligence and
information with which to shape cognitive expectations, acts as a
‘court of appeal’ for disputes arising within and over governance,
serves to re-balance power differentials by strengthening weaker
parties or systems in the interests of system integration and/or social
cohesion, etc. This emerging meta-governance role means that
networking, negotiation, noise reduction, and negative coordination
take place ‘in the shadow of hierarchy’ (cf. Hodgson 1988: 220-228;
Scharpf 1994: 40). The need for such a role is especially acute in the
light of the wide dispersion of governance mechanisms and the
corresponding need to build appropriate macro-organizational
capacities to address far-reaching inter-organizational changes without
undermining the basic coherence and integrity of the (national) state.
And this role tends to fall to the state because of its heightened
paradoxical position as an institutional subsystem which is
simultaneously merely part of a wider, more complex society (and thus
unable to control the latter from above) and also a part normatively
charged (notably in the last resort) with securing the institutional
integration and social cohesion of that society. (Jessop 1995)
An organized and structured plurality of governance mechanisms is needed to ensure
requisite variety and flexibility in managing the manifold forms of unstructured
complexity. Such plurality cannot be guaranteed from above but must also embrace
and be directed towards initiative from below.
The hegemonic integration of these antinomies will require a specific metaorganizational framework of control that will transcend them i.e. preserve yet
overcome them. The nature of the framework has been identified as ‘interpolable
control’ and has been strongly counterpoised to vertical top-down ‘comptrol’ [see
Table 8.1.]. It is time to revisit our discussion of ‘control’. This is the topic of the next
part.
Two Types of Control
According to Hood we may usefully distinguish between what he calls two styles of
thought about control as a generic concept (see Table 1). The first way of thinking
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about control goes back to the ancient notion of ‘comptrol’ or contra-rotulus (Hood
1976). This involves the periodic checking and examination of the activities of public
officials by independent agents typically charged under constitutional authority to
investigate, admonish and even to sanction. The term ‘comptrol’ therefore may be
defined as ‘any conception of ‘control’ as self-conscious oversight, on the basis of
authority, by defined individuals or offices endowed with formal rights or duties to
conduct inquiries, to call for changes in behaviour where performance has been
unsatisfactory and perhaps also to punish miscreants’ (Hood 1991: 348) (see Figure
3).
Figure 3: The Variety Balance
This can be contrasted with another quite different understanding of control based in
the operation of ‘immanent, self-balancing processes which may not be conscious or
under any over-arching direction and conscious, purposeful actions for the attainment
of desired goals’ (Hood 1991: 348).
Any system may be said to be under control if the states it routinely produces are a
recognisable sub-set of all its possible states. ‘Balancing processes’ of some kind are
often involved in the achievement of such an outcome. This conception of control is
based on a mechanistic metaphor that posits the operation of forces that may come
into play and throw their weight against the tendency of a system to take up certain
states. However, one can escape its mechanistic carapace by understanding it in terms
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of the balancing of varieties in a complex system. Both concepts of control were
given stimulus by the advent of cybernetics (Hood 1991; Richardson 1991).
The cybernetic understanding of control in this latter broad sense leads to two
important conclusions regarding the regulation of complex systems. The first is that
complex systems cannot be controlled by overt or self-conscious
‘controllers’ alone; such systems are largely self-controlled and cannot
be otherwise. Second. And consequently, those who wish to import
conscious direction to such systems must find ways of interpolating in
an immanent or built-in balance of forces — manipulating that balance
to steer the system toward the desired sub-set of its possible states.
Hence the term ‘interpolable balance’ used here … to denote controls
as understood in this way. (Hood 1991: 348-349)
Interpolable balance is not to be confused with passive, immanent social control. It
represents a manipulative or interventionist way of thinking about control.
Despite this, government is still conducted very much in the fashion of ‘comptrol’ as
the accounts by Howard (1994; 2001) and Booker & North (1994) will testify. This is
probably because comptrol is deeply rooted in the European tradition of constitutional
(limited) government and formal public accountability in financial affairs. It is not
surprising then that many of the responses to the governance crisis have consisted of
well-argued demands for an augmentation of ‘comptrol’: to give additional powers to,
as well as extending the scope of, those exercising formal oversight in order to match
the increase in government activity. Examples would be legislative enquiry, judicial
review, audit scrutiny, tribunal of enquiry, social science evaluation, and so on.28
As far back as the 1970s, however, it was recognised that the ‘formal constitutional
structure of public accountability’ could never be capable of securing effective public
accountability of government in modern societies (Hague, Mackenzie and Barker
1795: 21-22). According to authors such as Dunsire and Hood, the problem with
‘comptrol’ is that it does not possess requisite variety (Dunsire 1991; Hood 1991).
The interpolable balance approach looks to a sub-structure of
immanent or self-acting controls to provide the requisite variety that
formal oversight alone must inevitably lack and which are invisible to
those who see ‘control’ only in terms of official checking-up activities
by those in authority. Cybernetics, social control theory … are bodies
of ideas leading to the expectation both that immanent controls can be
found to exist in any complex system and that there is no way of
controlling such systems from the outside except by ‘working with
28
These latter constitute System Three* in Beer’s VSM.
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Nature’ to manipulate their balance by what Dunsire (1978: 225) terms
the ‘selective inhibition’ of forces in opposition. (loc.cit.)
Control as ‘Comptrol’
Control as ‘Interpolable Balance’
Detection of
By regular or ergodic, self-conscious
‘Problems’ identifiable only ex post facto
problems
checking and evaluation
from actors’ behaviour; ‘issues’ raised
irregularly, opportunistically, through
‘redundant’ channels
Setting of
Defined official norms
Tensions among contradictory principles,
standards
pressures, goals
Achievement of
By ‘authority’ – possibly backed by
By any process of tension serving to
compliance
sanctions
keep behaviour within limits
Control
Defined official overseers manning a
Variable (whomever it may concern at the
operatives
permanent ‘control’ room
time); heavily dependent on system
‘insiders’ (for ‘information-impactedness’
reasons)
Recipe for
Strengthen official authority or
Re-think the wider-system so as to
‘setting up’
sanctions; expand or change
augment self-policing mechanisms
control
comptrollers; redefine or tighten up
already in the structure or to build them in
formal procedures
Table 1: Two Types of Control (Hood 1991)
Beer’s VSM is the only existing formal model of such a system based on an analysis
of the requirements of variety management entailed by any complex system. The key
to the VSM is the central idea of interpolable control: all subsystems of a viable
system, by exhibiting their variety to each other, control each other (Beer 1979: 362).
There are two fundamental types or modes of control. In terms of the cybernetic
tradition, the one is associated with the work of William Powers, whereas the second
is demonstrated principally in the work of Stafford Beer (Richardson 1991). They are:

Executive control

Autopoietic or homeostatic control
Executive control is necessary in order to achieve certain reference standards or
perceptions. Constant scanning for error signals of deviation from the reference
standard are the norm here, including audits and such like.
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Autopoietic control is about maintaining a complex system in homeostatic
equilibrium, producing itself in the act of routinely doing whatever it does that
constitutes its identity. For instance, a football match does not entail much in the way
of executive control but is all about the interaction of the opposing variety potentials
of each of the competing teams. A good match represents a homeostatic equilibrium
produced by well-matched opposing teams each capable of generating similar
potentials of variety in their play.
The two types of control are by no means mutually exclusive. Typically the two types
of control are implemented through the same system. An organization, such as a
government department, maintains itself in autopoietic equilibrium by producing what
it routinely does on a day-to-day basis, whether it is processing social welfare claims
and payments or inspecting schools, or whatever. Autopoietic control is the means
whereby routine day-to-day outputs are achieved. In cybernetic terms we might say
that a certain recognisably stable subset of all possible states of the system is routinely
produced by means of this form of control. However, from time to time executive
orders are passed down from the cabinet via the responsible minister: specific new
things have to be done, efforts evaluated and results achieved. Not only is it necessary
that the Department possesses the capacity of generating the additional variety
required by these executive orders in addition to its routine activities, it carries them
out by means of a different model of control: executive control. Executive control is
typically the form of control employed by individuals as they go about their daily
business. In order for this to happen though it is necessary for the vehicle [be it body,
organization or department] to maintain itself in optimum homeostatic order or under
autopoietic control. Claude Bernard captured the relationship between the two forms
of control when he wrote that ‘la fixité du milieu interieur est la condition de la vie
libre, independante’. The VSM is predominantly biased towards securing the survival
unit in homeostatic equilibrium. Allowance is made for executive control though in
the form of System Three *, which engages in periodic audits of the System One
operational units.
Towards Meta-Organization
What are the prerequisites for a meta-organizational model of society? First of all we
should appreciate that we need to understand complexity as a phenomenon sui generis
and its historical importance for understanding the macro trends of contemporary
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western societies. Secondly, if organizations are oriented to controlling uncertain and
complex environments then a theory of complexity is necessary to enable us to
appreciate the need for forms of organization other that the strictly bureaucratic and
the conditions and contexts in which they might be necessary and appropriate.
Thirdly, variety is a measure of complexity, a defining idea of the science of
cybernetics. Fourthly, Stafford Beer has developed a framework for understanding
how organizations are shaped to deal with problems of complexity, both their own
internal complexity and that of the environments in which they are embedded. We
need to accept the necessity for the design of good governance arrangements that are
compatible with societal complexity and that will facilitate greater autonomy as well
as augment systemic synergy in society (Coleman 1991; Jones 1970; Soltan and Elkin
1996; Wildavsky 1988).
As Beer reminds us, we really have no choice in the matter:
Managerial, operational and environmental varieties diffusing through
an institutional system, tend to equate; they should be designed to do
so with minimum damage to people and to cost (First Principle of
Organization). (Beer 1985).
7. Towards Viable Identities
If a society is a whole constituted by the relations that obtain between its parts we
must ask what form such relations must take to ensure their viability? I have proposed
elsewhere (Stokes 2003) that interaction and communication [horizontal dimension]
are facilitated by the phenomenon we call culture. Authoritative relationships and in
particular teleonomic economy are a function of relationships on the vertical axis. We
have also seen that an embedded orientation to the future and the environment is a key
feature of all successful systems. Last but not least is cohesion that the closure of
identity confers on all this diversity of activity. Stafford Beer has proposed that a
mathematically precise structure along these lines is a morphological attractor for
viability. This is not to suggest that all societies are shaped after this fashion, only that
survival may well depend on it.
Achieving Negentropy
In an earlier section the entropification of social systems was shown to be an outcome
of the binding of complexity under a process of continuous centralisation. It is
necessary now to look at the informatics of this process in order explore the
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possibilities of not just reversing this process but of maintaining an ongoing balance
of negative entropy in systems.
Variety29 and complexity propose challenges of regulation and control. Information
and organization are the means to do this. However because they are biological
variables (Bateson 1973) we need to be aware, in designing any such meta-system,
that too much of a good thing can actually be counter-productive.
Up to a point information and organization represent the build-up of negative entropy
in a system. Beyond a certain point, however, organization begins to work against
itself. From this point onwards, additional information and organization represent the
incremental entropification of the system in question.
Information is composed of two complementary aspects, novelty and confirmation
(Campbell 1982; Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson 1967; Weaver 1963). The
relationship is set out in Figure 4. Pure novelty is utterly unique and cannot be
construed i.e. regarded as information. Pure confirmation just tells us exactly what we
know already. It is a state in which everything is known. Information, in the
pragmatic sense of the term, stands somewhere between these two poles and partakes
of both degrees of novelty and confirmation. A hundred per cent novelty means that
the instability threshold of the current system has been breached and that it has
entered a chaotic or ‘disorganized’ phase. A hundred per cent confirmation
corresponds to maximum entropy in a system. The negentropic value of the
combination is at a maximum when both components contribute equally (Jantsch
1980: 50-53).
Figure 4 represents the change in entropy production that occurs when a new structure
or system emerges from the chaotic state. In this state entropy production actually
implies sociopoiesis, the building of structure from information and confirmation. For
instance, area ‘A’ in Figure 4 involves a great deal of hard sociopoietic work, the
initial building of social organization. After this initial phase of social formation
however, an optimally organized structure will oscillate around a balance between
novelty and confirmation. Area ‘B’ in the same figure indicates that novelty has to be
coped with continuously without metabolising this into too much confirmation,
rationalisation and societal ‘gridlock’. This is the far from equilibrium position
indicative of all optimally organized systems (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977; Prigogine
29
Variety is a measure of complexity of a system i.e. the number of states it may take.
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1976; Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Yates 1987; Zeleny 1980). This is not an outcome
that can happen automatically, by itself as it were. It has be planned or designed as a
feature into the system in question.
Pragmatic
Information
100%
0
Novelty
Confirmation
0
100%
Figure 4:Novelty and Confirmation (after Jantsch 1980)
When every unforeseen contingency and loophole is met with a new authoritative
response it is not difficult to see how rules proliferate and simple action becomes
complex and deferred along long chains of entailment and consequence. It also means
that nothing can happen that does not fit the rules. However, as Meyer maintains, the
continuous build up of social organization is based of the metabolism of novelty and
uncertainty into rule-based, ‘rational’ procedures (Meyer 1985; Meyer 1990; Meyer
and Brown 1977). Increasingly the bias of the system is that everything must be preordained and fit the already established bureaucratic categories. If novelty and
contingency present they must wait until a rule exists for those situations also. The
continuous encoding of contingency into a rule-based modus operandi represents the
entropification of the social order. The terminus of such a process is a veritable ‘iron
cage’, the ‘closed system’ of Weber’s sociology of energeia. The key to
understanding and unravelling this process is the word ‘authoritative’ and the need to
relate every contingency back to the source of authoritative rule giving. It is this that
drives the imperative to centralise everything under a top-down hierarchy of comptrol.
Although to be fair we may allow that the motivation for this is based on a
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particularly abstract sense of equality and fairness, the results are in practical terms
frequently unfair, unjust and disastrous (Howard 1994; Howard 2001). As a process it
leads to the scleroticization of the channels through which action should be achieved
but no longer cannot.
Entropy production
Pragmatic
Information
Dissipative structures
Autopoiesis
B
Equilibrium
structures
A
Instability
threshold
100%
0
Novelty
Confirmation
0
100%
Figure 5: Entropy and Negentropy (after Jantsch, 1980)
The solution lies in deliberately co-opting what nature does in any case: by refusing
the build-up of centralised, integrated structures, and by choosing de-centralisation
and autonomy (Sale 1980). By utilising a variety management map on which the
totality of relationship types can be plotted we can identify and negotiate the optimal
relations that should obtain between centre and periphery. In this schema the centre
does not legislate for details (which are endlessly proliferating) but devolves
responsibility for these functions to control nodes closer to the action. The centre then
remains responsible for overall policy and standards, in other words the general
criteria that the infra-systems should take as their reference standards.
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The VSM as a Perpetual Anti-Entropy Device
It will be noticed that the forms of life that Douglas and her colleagues assert to be a
ubiquitous feature of all organized social life are represented in this structure of
Beer’s. Let us recap the main points of the ‘grid/group’ position. Wildavsky et al.
assert the following points:
1. There are five, and just five, ways of life that are viable.
2. Each of these ways of life is viable only if all the others are present.
3. These essential mutualities can be sorted out into two linked cycles: a primary
cycle in which each of the four engaged ways of life does something vital for the
others that they cannot do for themselves, and a secondary cycle in which the
hermit is able to withdraw from all the intense transactional activity generated by
the hypercycle.
4. Each way of life is dynamically stabilized, that is, the movement of individuals in
and out is a necessary condition for its persistence through time.
5. If we consider just the primary cycle these movements in and out can follow any
of the transitions that are logically possible.
6. It is the cumulative mismatches between promise and performance that, from time
to time, dislodge an individual from his or her way of life (Thompson, Ellis and
Wildavsky 1990: 84).
Although for Douglas the possibility space gives rise to four reasonably pure forms of
life [hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism and fatalism] she does admit that in ‘real
life’ what we find, especially at the level of politics, is varieties of coalitions between
forms of life that are surprisingly compatible. For instance, egalitarian politics is often
found in coalition with a form of authoritarianism. In fact this combination
characterizes much of the politics of the far left in 20th century Europe.
A viable society is one that can embrace three of the possibilities into its design and at
the same exclude the pathological form [fatalism]. In other words a form of
community is possible in which individual autonomy is a computable function of the
unity of purpose of the system, itself a computable function of the degree of perceived
equality throughout the system. The relationship between the first two has been the
subject of much of the cybernetic work of Stafford Beer.
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The VSM is one very compelling way of structuring these relations and of handing
the tensions along the centre/periphery, command and autonomy axes.
The VSM describes the most negentropic possible relationship between parts in a
system, between the centre and the periphery and between authority and autonomy.
On a continuum of possible states from near disintegration to the asphyxiation of
central control, the VSM posits an optimum relationship from the point of view of the
potential longevity of the system and between the parts of the system.
Variety Management and the VSM
I have been arguing that the central task of governance today lies in managing societal
complexity. As variety is a measure of complexity this comes down to the question of
variety management. The parameters of the task have been given to us by Offe, Jessop
and Douglas, Wildavsky et al as various ‘antinomies’ of social life.
I have proposed that the VSM is the only formal structure for variety management
that explicitly addresses and designs these antinomies in as active ingredients. The
key to their successful combination lies in how the respective varieties disposed by
each are counterpoised against the other so as to produce a situation of mutual control,
in some cases, their very antagonism holding the system together (Coser 1956). This
is the genius of the VSM as a formal model of ‘interpolable control’. It is, in
consequence, the preferred and only instrument of interpolable control available. How
does the VSM achieve this?
Systems One must of course dispose requisite variety with respect to both their
internal and external environments in order to remain viable as identities. They are
also high variety generators in themselves and their potential for variety generation is
both a source of work capacity and problem solving capability as well as a source of
complexity and entropy for other Systems One and of course for the metasystems in
which they are recursively embedded.
System Two begins the process of whittling down the potential varieties disposed by
all System One operational elements by specifying preferred ways of doing things and
by placing high interactional and transaction costs on non-conventional manners of
interaction. This is process we call culture and it extends to cover all manners of
social regulation, even the ‘culture’ of social control.
The process of variety reduction goes much further with the activities of System
Three. It is decided at this level what shall be the constituent elements in System One
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that are concomitant with the over-arching system’s identity. With those selected
there is conducted a process of resource bargaining and issues of system economy and
synergy are decided at this level. In society these activities are reflected in the process
of institutionalisation. Tremendous variety reduction is achieved in this process.
However, there are real dangers. Institutionalisation sets up a realm of official society
counterpoised to all those forms of social organization that did not make it in the
selection process. This in turn calls into being an unofficial societal realm of the
excluded and marginalized, those denied institutional recognition. Official society is
also the arena in which the mass media operate, the social realm that is reflected back
as being the only true society. This can represent a dangerously low variety model of
the actual social totality under governance. The realm of unofficial society can be a
source of unresolved social tensions and identity claims which one day may demand
to be met. This is, potentially, a major source of social conflict.
Institutionalisation reduces societal complexity. There is good reason to think that the
rise of societal complexity in recent times therefore has to do with what I have
suggested amounts to a process of de-institutionalisation. There is a massive process
of re-organization taking place around us—a veritable control revolution—that will
require our best efforts at and grasp of governance if we are to resolve it satisfactorily.
System Three is principally involved in securing the homeostatic stability of the
system in the here and now. It does this by pushing down its own internal variety,
sometimes to dangerously low levels. It represents a socially conservative—and
conserving—function. System Four can correct this tendency somewhat by focusing
on sources of novelty in the external environment and in the future. To do this it needs
to have a sense of the limitations of System Three both as regards the adequacy with
which it addresses current environmental challenges as well as the challenges and
opportunities that it perceives in the future. System Four then corrects for the variety
reducing activities of System Three by pumping the system up again, this time with
new variety directed towards the challenges it perceives in the there and then.
Because System Four can feed its variety directly into the overall system and System
Three actively reduces System One levels of variety there is a real potential for
systemic oscillation and conflict here. Such a potential for conflict, however, is
managed by the system. To start with, the varieties disposed by Systems Three and
Four are counterpoised to each other. Each has to address the other’s concerns on an
ongoing basis. Secondly, System Five intervenes directly in the interactions between
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these two components of the metasystem so as to manage the transition from the here
and now to the there and then in a manner that is most consistent with the identity of
the system in question. If change takes place too quickly then the encompassing
system may loose all sense of itself as a coherent identity. If change occurs too slowly
then it may well lose the struggle for survival by being overtaken by events in the
environment to which it did not respond in time. System Five is charged with getting
the balance of change just right for each identity.
Towards Meta-Governance
Loss of steering capacity at the highest levels of government is the inevitable outcome
of the demise of mass society. Autonomous identities, either as individuals or the
myriad forms of social organization that have populated civil society, cannot be
commanded, pigeon-holed or boxed. Politicians and administrators that continue to
act in this way are in danger of being regarded as irrelevant at best or as lacking
legitimacy at worst. Hence we have inherited a governance crisis. The only way to
roll out even half-successful policy measures is to co-opt all the relevant stakeholders
and involve them, as far as practicable, as partners even to the point of taking
responsibility for the policy, its implementation or both. It is no surprise therefore to
learn that this is precisely what has been happening. Under conditions of complexity
regulation devolves to the lowest autonomous level. Authority flows from the bottom
up (Latour 1986; Mechanic 1962; Weick 1979). Self-regulation is, in the end of the
day, the only option. What makes it work for society is that, if we accept that the
extent of the range of identification [and of ‘identity’] is coterminous with the
boundaries of the self, under widening circles of identification, self-regulation
becomes social regulation.
Complexity, it appears, is the anti-glue that disbands and dissolves all forms of
governance that are not based on the twin pillars of autonomy on the one hand and a
recognition of the bonds of interdependence and shared fate on the other. Such a
process of dissolution seems to be proceeding apace in the world around us right now.
These are the twin foundations of any possible future community (Agamben 1993).
Of course, with complexity another outcome is entirely possible: apparent chaos. Of
course in social affairs true chaos is never possible (Bull 1977; Elias 1978b). What
will be experienced as chaos will derive from the foreshortening of the sociomatrix
through premature and invidious attempts at closure in an attempt to isolate the new
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identity and to exclude the ‘others’ (Jackson 2000). Chaos may well be the outcome
of such premature forms of identity taking as each pre-emptively moves to gain
control over more and more of the sociomatrix not already subsumed under their
governance. This is by now a familiar story (Elias 2000; Schmookler 1995). However,
we are not doomed to repeat history. To avoid prolonging this ancient tragedy we
need more than to merely remember it as George Santayana has admonished.30 We
need to be guided by the insights into social morphology and the role of models, such
as the present one, in human governance. We also need to grasp the fundamental
necessity and morphology of parts-whole relations (Scheff 1997). All identities are,
recursively, parts of larger and more inclusive identities right up to the fullest extent
of interconnected humanity. To avoid chaos, then, we must needs discern the pattern
that connects the parts to each other and to the encompassing whole in which they are
embedded. It is important to bear in mind that all identities are provisional and
constitute partial closures of the sociomatrix sufficient unto the facilitation of
effective governance. Furthermore, it will be necessary to manage balances between
‘I’ and ‘We’ identities [the social bond] on the one hand and between autonomy and
interdependence on the other. Complexity may dissolve invalid forms of governance
but this process does not necessarily eventuate in some form of reduction to elemental
societal states. As we have seen, the urge to pathological forms of identity-taking may
well be irrepressible in the absence of an understanding of an alternative route
through. Just as the study of complex-adaptive systems has revealed that it is not
some form of atomism that lies behind the complex morphologies of the world but
rather complex dynamic interactive patterns [as in the discovery of moiré patterns
(Nicolis and Prigogine 1977)] Beer’s work has revealed that identity is not some
irreducible entity but has a necessary and complex morphology of its own. It is to be
expected that as the play of identity is opened out due to the expansion of complexity
that more and more of this complex morphology may be revealed. That has been the
argument of this work and the delineaments of that morphology have been laid out for
the reader to consider and reflect upon. For instance, the current situation of the
European Union is apposite. The muddling through of governance patterns as is
30
As these authors point out, the course of history the first time round has indeed been tragic.
However, its repetition would amount to more than farce [Marx]. It would be more than
careless even [Wilde]. It would amount to wanton and wilful irresponsibility.
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evidenced in the EU right now with variations on the themes of post-parliamentary
and deliberative forms of democracy is evidence of the working of the law of requisite
variety in this domain. However, we have also seen that among human beings
governance is not something that can be achieved in any automatic fashion or by
reflex. The unravelling of this morphology is due no doubt in some degree to the selfreflexive character of identity. Although distinct morphological patterns may propose
themselves and even in the absence of direct human shaping dominate the field
temporarily, in the end of the day it is entirely necessary that human beings reassert
control of the helm and steer the survival vessel of society deliberately and
consciously in a ‘consensual’ direction. However, we cannot do so unaided. We do
need a map both of the journey and of the vessel in which we sail because of the
complexities of steering that are involved. It has been my argument throughout that
such a map is given us in the model of the viable system as constructed by Stafford
Beer.
The task ahead has been given us in Beer’s First Principle of Organization:
Managerial, operational and environmental varieties diffusing through
an institutional system, tend to equate; they should be designed to do
so with minimum damage to people and to cost. (Beer 1985: 30)
The parts-whole morphology of identity that I have adumbrated in these pages
whereby metonymy and metaphor are inextricably related is apposite. In particular, I
have identified the crucial role of metaphor in providing top level cohesion for
governance systems (Judge 1987; Judge 1992; Stokes 2003).
The world system, its seems, is going through an adjustment of variety management
with extensions of variety management occurring at both extremities: the rise of new
social movements, the province sub-state and more inclusive forms of governance and
partnership between the state and civil society on the one hand and a variety of supranational developments on the other: globalisation, G8, the EU, WTO, UNO and so on.
All of these have been in train since the mid 1940s. (See, however, Hirst and
Thompson 1996).
The battle for governance is clearly going to be a societal process of the first
magnitude over the coming decades as we move away from the ‘governance of
people’ to the ‘governance of things’ [complexity]. We are at the very beginning of a
new governance paradigm. The crises of governance we are experiencing are
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consequences of the seismic shift in human societies in the last century towards
complexity and identity and away from the anonymity of the mass society.
There is narrow ground indeed between markets and hierarchies. As societies, our
vision of the possibilities of effective political and social action has been constrained
between the Scylla of anarchic individualism on the one hand and the Charybdis of
authoritarian centralisation of the other.
Neither is a path to freedom or community. We need a new means of conceptualising
the mix between alienation and solidarity, between grid and group in such a way that
all the possibilities and instrumentalities of social life are available to us. The viable
system model represents a cybernetically grounded way of managing the balance
between the organized varieties of social life and the tensions that are endemic. Above
all it would force us to think about the telos of our social life together and about
whether we are happy to live the oscillatory, counter-productive and downright
contradictory nature of our policy environment because we have failed, beyond
ideology, to clarify the nature and importance of our social objectives. That way both
social and political maturity lies. The last word must go to someone who not only has
not shirked these questions but who has done more than most to take us beyond the
now sterile self-nullifying and oscillatory oppositions of ‘right’ versus ‘left’.
In a series of radio broadcasts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC]
Stafford Beer made the claim that, ‘It is actually possible to redesign the institutions
of government according to the principles and practice of cybernetics’ (Beer 1974:
47). He also delivered himself of the following conclusion:
According to the analysis of centralisation and decentralisation with
which we began, it is clear that there should be a major devolution of
power. I think it should be open to a community to organize its social
services [education, health, welfare] exactly as it pleases, and to accept
or to reject the initiatives or local innovators. I think that goes for local
branches of national undertakings: public and private, also. I think that
workers should in general be free to organize their own work, and that
students [up to the age of death] should be free to organize their own
studies.’ [op.cit.: 79].31
31
See also the work of Alexander (Alexander, Christopher. 1964. Notes on the Synthesis of
Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, —. 1979. The Timeless Way of Building.
New York: Oxford University Press, Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray
Silverstein. 1977. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford
University Press.) and Turner (Turner, John F. C. 1976. Housing by People: Towards
Autonomy in Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars.).
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It is scarcely possible for people today to understand that what Beer is talking about is
not utter fantasy but is practically realisable. To grasp the possibilities we have to
relinquish our fantasies of centralised domination and allow ourselves to be taken into
the play of distributed systemic control.
Beer’s vision is based on such principles as agreed degrees of freedom in action,
dignity in autonomy and effective governance: principles that can only be effected in
a negotiated society. As more complexity devolves the balance of power to nongovernmental layers of society the more difficult it will be to resist the inexorable
drift in this direction.
8. Conclusion
In this paper I have attempted to argue that the full perspective a new social science
cannot be grasped under conditions of the separation of the political and the
sociological. Sociological theory must see that governance functions are performed at
all levels of society and political theory must concede that governance is embedded in
all levels of organized society. It is only in the light of such a conjunction that that we
can appreciate the full power of Beer’s system five—the closure layer of identity and
of governance.
Since the end of feudalism in Europe there has been a strong centripetal tends towards
the escalation in societal size through successive rounds of elimination contests.
Those led to the development of highly concentrated structures of power with
monopolies of force and taxation being held by very few individuals at the top of the
structure. Paradoxically this process arrived at a terminus beyond which it could not
go. Due to the increasing complexity of ever-larger polities, monopolist rulers became
increasingly dependent on ever-greater numbers of functionaries for the
administration of their territories. This was the first step in the transition from private
power monopolies to publicly administered monopolies of power in society.
Innovation in the technology of production gave greater control and autonomy to
producers thus loosening the hold of authoritarian modes of social regulation. This
was the beginning of a long-term trend in the valorisation of horizontal relationships
over vertical relationships. The long chains of horizontal dependency that ensued
began to ensnarl society in a web-like structure of complexity. This in turn led to the
augmentation of the self and the sense of self-identity, relative autonomy and selfregulation. With the rise and widespread use of the technologies of self-reflexivity we
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are on the verge of a veritable explosion of identities and identity claims. So much so
that we may consider that we have entered the phase of identity society.
The tasks and challenges of government change dramatically as we move from a mass
society where government is based on demographics to a complex society where it
seems identities in their various recursions have already begun to assume quite
autonomously governance functions of their own. It seems that government is no
longer the seat of societal governance—societal governance has become part of the
self-governance of society itself. Of course there is a real danger of anarchy and
reaction when the essential loosening of structures and bonds is (wrongly) construed
as threatening the existing order. To avoid this possibility it will be necessary to have
a meta-organizational means of understanding the complex dynamics and flux of the
governance phenomenon over the coming decades. The VSM is the only model so far
proposed that itself contains sufficient variety to absorb, integrate, relate and
transcend the conflicted elements into some meta order which looks more like chaos
than order but which is decidedly more orderly and rational than chaos.
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C:\Documents and Settings\Paul\My Documents\Work Files\2004\Metaphorum\From
Government to the Management of Complexity.doc
Words: 25,681
Date: 09/03/2016 20:09
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