The Next Thirty Years: Concepts and Anticipations [1] [A partial reproduction of a paper published in Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Volume 1031, 20:199-237, 1967]
by Frederick Edmund Emery
1967
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Prediction and Planning
We are here concerned with identifying the needs which the social sciences should be prepared to meet in the next 30 years.
There is a common feeling that men's needs for understanding and controlling themselves and their societies may, in the next 30 years, be different from their current needs. It is difficult to deny the validity of these feelings. Practically all of our social institutions, the regulative as well as the productive ones, have been evolving in this century at a rate which promises substantial change in the next 30 years. Certainly a significant degree of change is to be expected in the ways men can relate themselves to others.
This is a challenge to the social sciences. Their capabilities are in understandings, scientists, methods and, not least, institutionalized arrangements for teaching, research and relating the social sciences to the society. None of these capabilities can be quickly grown, run down, redirected or coalesced. Together with the intense competition with other sciences, professions, etc., for rare resources, the social sciences have their own theoretical blinkers, vested professional interests and institutional rigidities. Apart from the fads and fashions with which we are still afflicted, our recent history suggests that we cannot expect an important new insight seriously to affect the growth or direction of the social sciences in under five years. (For major projects like those of The Authoritarian Personality [Adorno et al., 1950] or Bruner's [1964] Studies in Cognitive Growth, five years is necessary from inception, through research and publication, to widespread impact on the research, teaching and applications of others.) Institutional growth and professional training almost certainly require us to think in terms of more than five years to get from inception to self-sustaining growth. However, this scale of from five to 10 years is not enough to effectively guide current decisions on investment.
Within the time scale of from five to 10 years, one could hope to plan for the development of important concrete capabilities, but the existence of capabilities (adequate theories, methods, personnel and organization) exerts a significant effect on what is expected of social science. The planners must consider, therefore, not just such questions as "Will these resources create this capability?" but also "How will the emergence of these capabilities transform the environment for which they are planned?" This consideration is neither fanciful nor trivial. We have ample historical evidence of how theoretical and institutional advances in the social sciences have, willynilly, attenuated or amplified the demand for other contemporaneous capabilities. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that each wave of planning must seek to create the conditions required for successfully planning the next wave, i.e., for a period of concrete investment one needs to have some image of the character of the next period and sufficient notions about the third period to sense what might be the goals of the second period. In the social sciences this would seem to involve a foresight of 20 to 30 years, but in no way to require a detailed forecast of this period. Decisions must be made with regard to current resources but there is no suggestion in this model of preempting later decisions--rather the opposite, to decide in such a way that later decision-makers are at least as well placed, as far as one can foresee, to make the choices they will wish to make.
It should be clear by now that, with planning, the social sciences can play an active role in the next decades, not simply a passive one--they can seek to modify directively their social environment in order to help men better pursue the ends they desire and not be left to adapt passively to whatever blindly emerges. Insofar as the social sciences are concerned simply to adapt to the next 30 years, then planning for the future would be based on extrapolations of the sort that "by the 1990's x proportion of the population of size X will be in schools; given the past rate of increase in educational psychologists per 10,000 students, we must plan for a supply of ...." This sort of approach would leave unconsidered whether it might not, for instance, be better to develop a theory of pedagogy or a reorganization of industrial culture that would radically change the multiple effects of the educational psychologist or the preeminence of schools as places of learning. Paradoxically, the problems of making predictions would be easier if the social sciences stuck to a passive role. By actively seeking to enhance man's ability to control himself and his institutions, the social sciences are more likely to contribute to genuine unpredictable novelty. Men would have greater control, but the manner in which they would exercise it would be less obvious than if they continued as at present.
We have suggested that the approach to the next 30 years is very much influenced by whether one assumes for the social sciences an active role or a passive one. We have already argued that the concept of planning for a real world entails an active role; it is not reducible to predictions or forecasting (Drucker, 1957:52). Jerome Bruner (1964) in his presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues made the essential point that the active role is not that of dictating:
...however able we are as psychologists, it is not our function to decide upon educational goals.... The psychologist is the scouting party of the political process where education is concerned. He can and must provide the full range of alternatives to challenge the society to choice." (pp.22-23)
Given the stress being laid on the distinction between active and passive roles and the possibilities there are for misinterpretation, it is probably desirable to spell out the conceptual distinction.
The distinction we have been trying to make has been rigorously made by Sommerhoff (1950) in terms of "adaptation" and "directive correlation." Adaptation refers to the responses available for dealing with emergent environmental circumstances. The concept of directive correlation encompasses adaptation in that it allows for that system of causal relations in which the environment is actively influenced to determine the kinds of responses that will subsequently be adaptive.
The relation between these two concepts of adaptation and directive correlation can be stated precisely in diagrammatic form (Figure 1).
Both of these diagrams depict causal processes linking initial states at to with environmental conditions and (system) responses occurring together at a later time, t1, and linking these to an end state or goal condition.
Both of these diagrams allow for variation in the range of initial conditions (of both the system and the environment); in the range of environmental conditions at t1 for which there are corresponding responses; in the degree of matching of these, as reflected in the probability or precision of achieving the goal and, lastly, in the time scale represented by to, t1 and t2.
Figure 1. Comparison of adaptation and directive correlation.
They differ in one critical respect. The diagram defining adaptation is restricted to initial conditions of an environmental nature, i.e., it represents a stimulus-response relation. This, we hasten to add, is not a simple cause-effect relation. As Angyal (1941) phrases it, "...the stimulus prompts the response. The response is mainly determined by the intrinsic tendencies of the organism...[it] is essentially an autonomous function" (p.36) The stimulus for its part is, with respect to the organism, embedded in and predictive of heteronomous processes. An object or event in the environment has stimulus qualities only insofar as it is part of such a coupling of separate systems. This, however, represents only one form of directive correlation. The other is the form of coupling that occurs, for instance, when a man lights a fire. In this case, his wit and action set off an environmental process that enables him by appropriate responses to pursue goals of warmth, cooking, of visual contact, of security, of distillation, etc. Making fires is not only an adaptive response to the sun going down but can be a starting condition (a coenetic variable, from the Greek coenos--beginning) for a range of other purposive activities.
To be applied to the next 30 years of the social sciences, this simple model of directive correlation would have to be elaborated because (a) the key environmental processes are people who are capable of directly correlating their activities with the social sciences, (b) in any real situation the social sciences will be involved in more than one other process and (c) the time scale involves a hierarchy of directive correlations within which the goals of the earlier ones are the starting conditions of the following. The second and third elaborations do not affect the basic properties of the simple model, namely, that where a system can perceive and learn, it is able to determine its future to a degree that is not possible for a system which relies on adapting.
However, the first elaboration clarifies Bruner's (1964) assertion (and our belief) that the active role of the social sciences in the coming decades is not reconcilable with the social sciences seeking to determine the future of man. Unlike the other sciences, the social sciences cannot be indifferent to their subject matter. They cannot, in fact, expect to survive, let alone grow, unless they pursue goals that are shared by their chosen objects of study. No matter how cunning or devious the social scientist became, it is almost certain that his subject matter would eventually outmanoeuvre him, as no physical particle could. This is not a new observation:
"Suppose the physiognomist ever did have a man in his grasp, it would merely require a courageous resolution on the man's part to make himself again incomprehensible for centuries." (Lichtenberg, 1788, quoted by Hegel, 1949:345)
The survival and growth of social science presupposes a role in which it enhances the range and degree of directive correlations that men can form between themselves and their environment. Specifically, this might mean increasing the range of relevant conditions that men can take into account, increasing the range and efficiency of the responses they are able to make or extending men's awareness of the goals they might successfully pursue. In each of these ways the social sciences can contribute to men's ability to choose and to make the next 30 years.
This contribution is only meaningful if, in fact, men have some ability and some desire to shape the future. We assume this to be the case, allowing only that (a) men can only proceed from the objective conditions of the present, (b) they tend to pursue only those goals that seem achievable (and hence may often be blind to possibilities that have newly emerged) and (c) the means they choose may frequently have unanticipated consequences for other goals.
In this section we have sought to argue that
• There is a need for developments in the social sciences that go beyond their present concerns.
• This development needs planning.
• The planning needs to be in a context of expected social developments for several decades ahead.
• The planning should be more than projection or forecasting.
• Planning should actively seek to extend the choices men can make, not to dictate them.
Some Futures
We argued in the first section of this paper that the future will be largely shaped by the choices men make, or fail to make, and that it will not be molded simply by technical forces; that processes existing in the present can reveal some of the basic choices that will confront men over the next 30 years; and, finally, that social science should consider not only the provision of tools (trained personnel, institutions, theories and methods) but also the more active role of helping men to extend their visions.
On this basis we shall seek to identify current developments which are changing the conditions within which men can make their future, and we shall look at these both in terms of the challenges they pose and the opportunities they create for further human development. This should reveal the areas within which growth in social scientific knowledge and capabilities can most help men to help themselves.
We will move from consideration of the broader social systems to narrower ones. Following our own judgment, we will start from consideration of the total social field of entities such as the UK and the USA, i.e., modern Western nations. We are assuming that within the inclusive system based on the world population these constitute the leading part and will do so for several more decades. Our method of approach will be basically that proposed by Ashby (although he may not recognize it). Next, we will assume that the leading part in such systems is the technological system--the complex of interrelated socio-technical organizations concerned with the social (not household) production of material goods and services. We think that this method of proceeding is preferable to abstracting common phenotypical characteristic aspects such as political beliefs or values. The next step follows the same procedure of identifying information technology as the leading part of the technological system. Because this last step puts us at two removes from the total system, we then go back to see what effect this elaboration of the technological system has on the total system.
Lastly, we will touch upon the major boundary conditions of our primary unit. These appear to be
• the relation of the modern Western nations to the more inclusive international system;
• the biological inputs to the systems;
• the natural resources upon which they rely.
Throughout, our concern will be with matters on which the development of the social sciences might have a bearing.
Emerging Characteristics of the General Social Field
If there are predictions to be made they are most likely to be valid if they are derived from analysis of the broader systems. This is, of course, only a theoretical point; we may have little or no information on which to assess the larger systems. This is, in fact, the reason for our choosing the Western nations as a starting point although it is evident that they are part of a larger system. Nevertheless, we do not wish to be like the drunk in L.K. Frank's story who knew he had lost his watch up the dark alley but searched under the street lamp because there he had lots of light. There is a body of evidence accumulating about the growth characteristics of the Western type of society. This evidence is not of the sort that readily permits of graphical or mathematical extrapolation but it has seemed to us that it does permit of the Ashby type of analysis. We will devote most of our space to this analysis because it provides the framework within which more detailed predictions of part processes can be made. A simplified version of this analysis has been published, (Emery and Trist, 1965, Vol.III) but we are placing so much weight upon the conclusion that the argument should be spelt out more fully.
In trying to characterize large complex social systems, we are reminded that some behaviors of both organisms and organizations are a function of gross overall characteristics of the system of which they are parts and which constitutes their environment. We can advance our knowledge of these behaviors if we can identify some of the ideal types that characterize the overall environment, as seen from the viewpoint of the generalized part/system relation.
This is not a new strategy for the social sciences. Thus, in psychology, the Lewinians were able to demonstrate the lawful behavior of "human beings in cognitively unstructured situations" (Barker et al., 1946). It is our belief that a great deal of so-called learning theory is of the same kind, e.g., behavior in "an overly simplified structured situation;" in a "complexly structured or problem situation;" in an "overly complex or puzzle situation." Similarly, Chein (1954) has pointed to the gain that may be had for psychology from the study of environments that, in overall terms, are relatively stimulating or stimulus lacking; relatively rich or poor in goals or noxiants, cues or goal paths; easy to move in or sticky, etc.
In the field of economic organization, a similar scientific strategy has yielded the characterization of markets as classical competitive; imperfectly competitive; oligopolic; monopolistic. These, again, are attempts to define ideal types of overall environments and, again, have been relatively successful in showing the lawfulness of some of the behavior of economic enterprises.
In the field of military organization, the great post-war disputes over optimum size of operating units, optimum weapon capabilities for size of unit, optimum organization of support facilities have all centered on the problem of the changes in the global characteristics of the battlefield environment because of the advent of tactical nuclear weapons.
The solution we seek is, therefore, along these lines. We have made very little progress, but this, we feel, reflects more upon our incompetence than on the correctness of the strategy. As a beginning we concentrated on that dimension of the environment which we would call its causal texture (Emery and Trist, Vol.III). By causal texture we mean, following Pepper (1934, 1942) the extent and manner in which the variables relevant to the constituent organizations (organisms) are, independently of any particular part, causally related or interwoven with each other.
For simplicity of exposition we will consider the relevant variables only as goal objects or noxiants for the component parts and assume that there is some sense in which these can be spoken of as more or less distant from the organization and hence requiring more or less organizational effort to attain or avoid. Already, it will be noted, something has to be known about the organization in order to delimit the environment in this way. For our purposes, we have found it necessary to specify only four ideal types of organizational environments: [2]
1. The simplest is that in which goals and noxiants are relatively unchanging in themselves and randomly distributed within the environment. That is, a placid, randomized environment. This ideal corresponds closely enough to Simon's (1956) "surface over which it (an organism) can locomote. Most of the surface is perfectly bare, but at isolated, widely scattered points, there are little heaps of food." (p.130) It also corresponds with Ashby's (1960) limiting case of "no connection between the environmental parts" (Section 15/4); to Toda's (1962) "Taros Crater" (p.169); and Schutzenberger's (1954) random field (p.100). The economists' classical market probably comes close to this ideal environment. Thus, although this represents an extreme type of environment, there has been wide recognition of the need to postulate it as a theoretical limit. The relevance goes deeper than simply providing a theoretical benchmark. This low level of organization may frequently occur as the relevant environment for some secondary aspect of an organization and is also quite likely to occur in humanly designed environments for the reason that such simplified environments offer maximum probability of predicting and controlling human behavior, e.g., Adler's (1958) "Sociology of Concentration Camps" and the experimental environments of the animal learning theorists.
The survival of an organization in a placid, randomized environment is a fairly simple function of the availability of these environmental relevancies, the approach-avoidance tactics available to the organism and how far it can move without "starving to death," i.e., reserves. (Simon, 1956:131) So long as the environment retains this random character, it does not make much difference if there is more than one need and it is not necessary to postulate any complex organizational capacity for identifying marginal utilities or substitution criteria. "We can go further, and assert that a primitive choice mechanism is adequate to take advantage of important economies, if they exist, which are derivable from the interdependence of the activities involved in satisfying the different needs." (p. 134)
A critical property that emerges from this has been stated very precisely by Schutzenberger (1954), namely that under this condition of random distribution there is no distinction between tactics and strategy--the "optimal strategy is just the simple tactic of attempting to do one's best on a purely local basis." (p.101) The best tactic can, in the circumstances, be learnt only on a trial and error basis and only for a particular class of local environmental variances. (Ashby, 1960:197) However, in these kinds of environments, information capacity can make an enormous difference to survival chances. Thus, Simon (1956), taking vision as the prototype tactic, finds that "a one-third increase in vision will have an even greater effect (than a like increase in reserves) reducing the range of starvation from one in 104 to one in 1040. (p.133)
2. More complicated, but still essentially a placid environment, is that which can be adequately characterized in terms of clustering, i.e., the kind of static environment in which the goals and noxiants are not randomly distributed but hang together in certain lawful ways. This is really the case with which Tolman and Brunswik (1935) were basically concerned and corresponds closely to Ashby's serial system. The structuring that exists within the environment enables some parts of it to act as signs (local representatives) of other parts or as means-objects (manipulanda, paths) with respect to approaching or avoiding. However, as Ashby (1960) has shown, survival is almost impossible if an organization attempts to deal tactically with each environmental variance as it occurs or is signalled (signalling having the effect of multiplying greatly the density of confrontation. (p. 199) Much the same point is made by Simon (1956) and by Tomkins (1962). Along with Ashby, they postulate that survival in environments of this kind requires a second order of feedback involving some sort of threshold mechanism so that reaction is evoked less readily and only to the more general aspects of the environment--to the clustering which will reveal itself only through a manifold of particular occurrences.
We feel that this is the critical feature of this kind of environment, namely that choice of organizational strategies emerges as distinctively more adaptive than choice of tactics. (It is this which is the "ultrastability" of which Ashby writes.) It no longer follows that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." The survival of a system in this kind of environment is conditional upon its knowledge of its environment. To pursue the goal that it can see, the goal with which it is immediately confronted, may lead the system into parts of the field which are fraught with difficulties. Similarly, avoiding a present difficulty may lead a system away from parts of the environment that are potentially rewarding.
In this sort of environment it becomes possible to seek a best strategy where optimality is limited only by restrictions upon knowledge. In the extreme case, enough is known of the structure of the environment so that "the map's projection has been changed to that of the really optimal matrix, the distinction between strategy and tactic (again) disappears (Schutzenberger, 1954:100)." This differs from the randomized environment in that here strategy tends to absorb tactics. Given the omnipotence of a Laplace, then the tactics would be derivable from the strategy. A knowledge of optimal strategies will not, of course, emerge full-blown. These environments will be best learned if an organization proceeds in a piecemeal but sequential fashion by tackling more and more inclusive goals while always keeping the totality of novel features within an optimal limit of meaningfulness.
The objective of an organization in this sort of environment also has certain characteristics. In the first case it could have none, apart from tactical improvement and hoarding against a rainy day. In this case the relevant objective is that of "optimal location." Given that the environment is non-randomly arranged, some positions can be discerned as potentially richer than others and the survival probability will be critically dependent upon getting to those positions. So much of management of organizations is concerned with planning that it is worth considering some of the approximations that are appropriate in this type of environment:
• The recognition of clustering itself so that, at the level of strategic planning, one is concerned with relatively few clusters, which can be approximately characterized as units, instead of with a multitude of individual objects. This lowers the cost of information gathering and processing.
• The development of a hierarchy of strategies as in the rules for trouble-shooting in complex equipment.
• The assignment of step functions to the values of goals and noxiants instead of trying to act on a continuous range of values.
• The backward determination of the strategic path. This is by far the least demanding procedure once the strategic objective is selected. This, however, does require subsequent adjustments of the strategic objective to fit the available paths.
These methods of developing strategies may not bear much similarity to formal models of rational decision-making but they come close to describing the decision-making we have been privileged to observe.
3. The next ideal level of causal texturing is one that we have called the disturbed, reactive environment. It approximates the economists' oligopolic market. In this we simply postulate a Type II environment in which there is more than one system of the same kind or, to put it another way, where there is more than one system and the environment that is relevant to the survival of one is relevant to the survival of the other. Formally, one could postulate a Type I random environment with more than one system present, but we do not think that co-presence makes any difference to the concepts one needs to explain what differences would actually occur in the particular environment (which might be why social psychology has at present such difficulties in linking up with so-called "learning theory"). Co-presence makes a real difference in a Type II environment because the survival of the individual systems requires some strategy as well as tactics.
In the Type II environment, each system does not simply have to take account of the other when they meet at random, but it has to consider that what it knows about the environment can be known by another. That part of the environment to which it wishes to move is probably, for the same reason, the part to which the other wants to move. Knowing this, they will wish to improve their own chances by hindering the other, and they will know that the other will not only wish to do likewise, but will know that they know this. In a word, the presence of others will imbricate some of the causal strands in the environment. The causal texture of the environment will, through the reactions of others, be partly determined by the intentions of the acting organization. However, the environment at large still provides a relatively stable ground for the arenas of organizational conflict. Because of this, conflicting organizations "regarded as a unit will form a whole which is ultrastable" (Ashby, 1960:209).
How can competing organizations constitute a stable unit in a Type III environment? Given the relatively static nature of the environment within which the competition occurs, it is possible (as it was for the individual organization in a Type II environment) for strategies to evolve that limit the disruptive effects of competitive strategies or competitive tactics. One would expect these strategies to be broader and take longer to emerge than those needed in a Type II environment. They would not, however, differ in principle.
It will be noted that by starting from consideration of the causal texture of the environment and the way information flows from this, we avoid the dilemma of the economists' models of imperfect competition, duopoly, etc. As Ferguson and Pfoutts (1962) point out, the models yield predictions of inherent instability despite the observable fact that stability is commonly achieved. Ferguson and Pfoutts do, however, show that stability can be deduced if one postulates information flow and learning. By taking into account environmental properties, we find, as Simon found with the simplest environment, that we have less need to inject into our organizational models (or models of man) a host of ad hoc special mechanisms, and we are less likely to arrive at false conclusions.
One could maintain that this sort of disturbed-reactive environment makes no difference to the distinction between strategy and tactics that we made for Type II environments. We are inclined to think that it does. If strategy is essentially a matter of selecting the "strategic objective"--where one wishes to be at a future time--and tactics a matter of selecting an immediate action from one's available repertoire, then there appears in these environments to be an intermediate level. One has not simply to make sequential choices of actions (tactical decisions) such that each handles the immediate situation and yet they hang together by each bringing one closer to the strategic objective; instead one has to choose actions that will draw off the other organizations in order that one may proceed. The new element is that of choosing not only your own best tactic, but also of choosing which of someone else's tactics you wish to take place. Movement towards a strategic objective in these environments therefore seems to necessitate choice at an intermediate level--choice of an operation [3] of campaign in which are involved a planned series of tactical initiatives and calculated reactions by others and counter-action.
There seems little doubt that even the formulation of strategic objectives is influenced by this kind of environment. It is much less appropriate to define the objective in terms of location in some relatively static and persisting environment. It is much more necessary to define the objective in terms of developing the capacity or power needed to be able to move more or less at will, e.g., to define business objectives in terms of profitability, not profit. This latter kind of formulation has one advantage in this kind of environment, in that there can be a day-to-day feedback of information relevant to this objective. In the former case, the day-to-day feedback about approach to a given location (e.g., percentage of market) may be extremely misleading. It may conceal the fact that the competitor has made it easy by conserving his strength for a later stage (e.g., preparing to introduce an improved product).
The factors in this kind of environment that make it desirable to formulate strategic objectives in power terms also give particular relevance to strategies of absorption and parasitism. It is one thing in a Type I environment if other systems can be characterized as goals or noxiants--they are either absorbed for the temporary sustenance they afford, or else avoided because noxious. It is another thing in a Type III environment when the other has to be absorbed or be absorbed into because it is potentially noxious-- because it is a source of important but uncontrolled variance.
4. The most complexly textured environments that we have had cause to postulate are what we have called turbulent fields. These are environments in which there are dynamic processes arising from the field itself which create significant variances for the component systems. Like Type III and unlike Types I and II, they (Type IV) are dynamic environments. Unlike Type III, we are postulating dynamic properties that arise not simply from the interaction of the systems but also from the field itself.
There are undoubtedly important instances in which these dynamic field properties arise quite independently of the systems in the field (as with some of the earth and water movements in mining). However, in the conceptual series we are here elaborating, most significance attaches to the case where the dynamic field processes emerge as an unplanned consequence of the actions of the component systems; that is, those environments that represent a transformation of Type III environments. Fairly simple examples of this may be seen in fishing and lumbering where competitive strategies, based on an assumption that the environment is static, may, by over-fishing and over-cutting, set off disastrous dynamic processes in the fish and plant populations. We have recently become more aware of these processes through the intervention of the ecologists in problems of environmental pollution. It is not difficult to see that even more complex dynamic processes may be triggered off in human populations.
There are four trends that we feel have particularly contributed to the emergence of these Type IV environments. Before stating these, however, let us briefly state that these fields are so complex, so richly joined, that it is difficult to see how individual organizations can, by their own efforts, successfully adapt to them. Strategic planning and collusion can no more ensure stability in these turbulent fields than can tactics in the Type II and III environments. If there are solutions, they lie elsewhere.
The four trends that we feel have together contributed most to the emergence of dynamic field forces are:
1. The growth to meet Type III conditions of organizations and linked sets of organizations that are so large that their actions are persistent enough and strong enough to induce autochthonous processes (Rothermel, 1982) in the environment (we are here postulating an effect similar to that of a company of soldiers marching in step over a bridge.)
2. The deepening interdependence between the economic and the other facets of the society. The growing size and relative importance of the individual units not only creates the interdependence within their economic environment; it also produces interdependence between what consumers want and what they think can be produced, between the citizen as consumer, as producer and as a social and political entity. This greater interdependence, when matched with the independent increase in the power of other citizen roles, means that economic organizations are increasingly enmeshed in legislation and public regulation of what they do or might think of doing. The consequences that flow from the actions of organizations lead off in ways that are unpredictable. In particular, the emergence of active field forces (forces other than those stemming from the individual organization or the similar organizations competing with it) means that the effects will not tend to fall off "with the square of the distance from the sources" but may at any point be amplified beyond all expectation. As a simple case in point, the Dutch addition of an anti-spattering chemical to margarine created a major crisis in the national margarine market. Similarly, lines of action that are strongly pursued may find themselves unexpectedly attenuated by emergent field forces that, for instance, cast a social stigma on certain kind of advertising. For the organization, these changes mean primarily a gross increase in their area of relevant uncertainty.
3. The increasing reliance upon scientific research and development to achieve the capacity to meet competitive challenge (which capacity, we suggested, tends to become the strategic objective in Type III environments). This has the effect not only of increasing the rate of change, but of deepening the interdependence between organizations and their environment. Choices that once appeared to arise from the market place are now seen as being taken by the organization on behalf of the customer--they are seen as manipulators of desire. It is not hard to imagine an organization finishing up in the dock of public opinion because it chose a line of technical development that appeared to suit its own needs but eventually left the economy in the lurch. The same trend appears in fields of public policy-making where competition over the allocation of resources is increasingly conducted by means of scientific research and analysis.
4. The radical increase in the speed, scope and capacity of intraspecies communication. Telegraph, telephone, radio, radar, television, gramophone, typewriter, linotype, camera, duplicator, Xerox, calculator, Hollerith, computer--these names register a century of change that continues in an explosive fashion. Parallel with these has been a very great increase in speed and ease of travel so that recorded communications flow in greater bulk at greater speed, and even the recording of communications becomes short circuited as it becomes easier for managers, scientists, politicians, etc. to fly to be together than to correspond. We may recall that Trotter (1919) in searching for the conditions underlying social reactivity in living populations, postulated only two critical conditions: some special sensitivity to their own kind and some intra-species communication system. The change that has taken place in the second condition is a greater mutation than if man had grown a second head. The consequences are a great increase in the information burden and a radical reduction in response time in the system--a reduction which is unaffected by distance. Reaction takes place almost before action is formed. Servo systems with these properties can readily get entangled in erratic "hunting" behaviors.
We will probably find that these trends are only a part of the picture and perhaps not even the significant part. However, they are in themselves real enough and may explain why we feel that consideration of the turbulent fields is a matter of central importance and not just a theoretical exercise.
What is less clear is how our society can adapt to these conditions. Ashby (1960) very wisely counsels that there may not be a solution to this problem:
As the system is made larger (and is richly joined), so does the time of adaptation tend to increase beyond all bounds of what is practical; in other words, the ultrastable system probably fails. But this failure does not discredit the ultrastable system, as a model of the brain for such an environment is one that is also likely to defeat the living brain. (p. 207)
However, as a biologist, Ashby offers us the consolation that "examples of environments that are both rich, large and richly connected are not common, for our terrestrial environment is widely characterized by being highly subdivided." (p. 205) It is our firm belief that this sort of environment is, in fact, characteristic of the human condition. What is true is that just as the central matching process of consciousness has evolved to help protect the human organisms from information overload, so has man evolved his symbolic cultures to provide a man-made environment of tolerable complexity. What is significant of our present era is the emergence of a degree of social organizational complexity and a rate of coalescence of previously segregated populations that defy our current efforts at symbolic reductionism.
Adaptation to Turbulent Environments
If our analysis is correct, then the next 30 years (at least) will evolve around men's attempts to create social forms and ways of life that are adaptive to turbulent environments or which downgrade them to the less complex types of environments. As we argued earlier, survival questions are basic ones and insofar as our societies can take on Type IV properties, survival of our current institutional forms is challenged and men will inevitably turn to these questions. We can and will try to spell out some of the ways in which survival can be sought. We cannot predict which paths men will actually take or the actual means they will evolve in order to travel along the paths they choose. What we do know is that the social sciences could influence this process insofar as they give men greater insight into what they want and provide an extended range of means whereby they can pursue desired ends.
Our statement of the problem (and the above quote from Ashby) gives one a clue as to the way men might try to solve it. If the environment is over-complex then downgrade complexity by segmentation, fractionation or dissociation. These are the three general ways in which this can be done. It should be borne in mind that these are just the three possibilities open to passive adaptation. They are essentially defense mechanisms. After we have discussed them, we will raise the question of whether it is open to men more actively to transform their environment by changing the conditions leading to complexity.
First, one may restrict the range of conditions to which one may respond (i.e., the range of coenetic variables). The classic mode of restriction has been that of repression or, in a society, the limitation of access or like forms of suppression or oppression. This does not seem to be the current mode. Any and every possible source of human and social needs and behavior are publicly explored. The dominant mode at present seems to involve some form of trivialization--if anything might lead to anything, then one is free to choose what one responds to. The dynamics have been clearly spelt out in Thorndike's puzzle box experiment.
When a situation becomes too complex for organized meaningful learning, an organism regresses to vicarious trial and error behavior--it responds first to this and then to that in a way which is unrelated to the structure of the environment but may be highly correlated with its own prejudices. Where this becomes a prevalent mode of adaptation, one may still get highly intelligent behavior in the sense that an intelligence test measures the range and efficiency of responses to a strictly defined and limited set of coenetic variables. Creativity will tend to be absent because this is essentially the sensing that a situation involves a different set of coenetic variables to those that are usually assumed. The most significant manifestation is superficiality.
When responses are no longer critically and selectively related to hypotheses about the coenetic variables, they no longer manifest such hypotheses and no longer challenge alternative hypotheses. It is the prevalence of this, as he sees, it that leads Marcuse (1956) to characterize "advanced industrial society" as one dimensional society and its typical citizen as one dimensional man. Like us, he starts from the point that "the range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual." The latter is not restricted by suppression or repression but "the distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation." (p.7, our emphases) In case he should be misread to imply that he is referring to the more trivial consequences of the mass media presenting an over complexity of choice, Marcuse emphasizes that
The pre-conditioning does not start with the mass production of radio and television and with the centralization of their control. The people enter this stage as pre-conditioned receptacles of long standing; the decisive difference is in the flattening out of the contrast (or conflict) between the given and the possible, between the satisfied and the unsatisfied needs. (p.8, our emphases)
This is what we mean when speaking of increased superficiality--of increased indifference to what needs or demands are taken as the starting point for one's behavioral responses. This is not only an individual response to overcomplexity. An organization can diversify its "product lines" so that it can become relatively indifferent to the fate of any particular one. In a society it encourages "fractionation." Members are thrust aside or move aside, not because they constitute a viable social sub-system with goals in conflict with the larger system, but because, as individuals, they are nonconforming. They refuse to be indifferent to the roots of their individual behavior and are outcast as alcoholics, perverts, beatniks or eggheads. Insofar as these people are an identified source of social variance, their exclusion seems to reduce the total amount of relevant variance in the environment.
Marcuse goes beyond us in one very significant respect. We argued only that, given a turbulent Type IV environment, this was one of three ways of adapting to it. He argues that this mode of adaptation has become so deeply rooted, at least in the USA, that that society can be characterized as a "one dimensional society" and, further, that means that "'liberation of inherent possibilities' no longer adequately expresses the historical alternatives" (p.255) or, in his final sentence, the quote from Benjamin: "It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us." (p.257)
Marcuse might be right about the present but we will stay with our earlier theoretical position and maintain that, while at this level one can spell out the alternative future paths, it is necessary to go on to consideration of the leading part if one wishes to see what paths are likely to be taken. His judgment is, of course, very relevant even if it only specifies one of the present conditions from which men in the advanced industrial societies choose their futures. On this particular point, we have the reinforcing evidence advanced by Angyal (1965). Experience in clinical practice up to his death in 1960 led him to observe that while
...the dimension of vicarious living (hysteria) can be safely described as the "neurosis of our time".... Recently, however, the compliant (conforming) pattern emphasized by Fromm, Riesman and others began to give way to the secondary type, the hysteria with negativistic defenses. The "rebellious hysteric" is already quite prominent both in therapists' offices and on the social scene. It is possible that he will become the dominant sociological type, the spokesman of the times. (p.154, our inserts)
He sees the phenomena as being, at the social level of the beatnik, "a protest against the levelling tendency of social conformation which threatens the extinction of spontaneous individuality." (p.154)
From our point of view, this changing pattern of common neuroses suggests that the neurotics may, like artists, be reacting to emerging trends before their more stable fellows. Their basic sense of personal worthlessness may make them more dependent upon the fabric of cultural symbols and hence more sensitive to flaws and rents that are beginning to emerge. What is today's preoccupation with T-grouping and teamwork was the neurosis of yesterday. What is today's neurotic striving for individuality may well be tomorrow's goal (or confusion). If this is so then, despite the impression that Marcuse and Angyal have of the dominance of superficiality, the forces toward other choices may already be operative in the advanced industrial societies.
The second way of simplifying an over-complex environment is that of fragmentation or, more literally, disintegration. As a social system differentiates to better cope with complexity, it also increases the possibility of parts pursuing their ends without respect to the total system. This may not be as big a threat to the survival of the part as it first seems. Given a multiplicity of specialized parts, there may be many different assemblies of parts that can serve the system goals (crudely, troops can load ships if the dockers strike, or an airlift can be laid on). Thus, temporary non-functioning of a part need not lead to its permanent destruction or replacement. For the part itself, the path of segregation involves the risk of major errors but these may seem no worse than risking the devil of overcomplexity.
To our knowledge, no observer has previously contended that this defensive response is the model response. There is, at the same time, uneasiness amongst the social observers that the recent rapid advance in industrial societies has been leaving behind largish fragments of their own societies (notably the poor), intensifying the pressures to disintegrate into smaller, more culturally homogeneous entities (whether Negro, Welsh, Breton, the urban poor or the rural communities) and widening the gulf between the cultures of advanced and under-developed countries. As a response to overcomplexity this is adaptive, provided and insofar as there emerge other system relations which, while less binding, enable the enhanced self-control of the part to be guided by a knowledge of the state, capacities and goals of the total system. Such system relations are emerging in national planning, etc. and, although they may be a step behind the tendencies to fragmentation, there is no convincing evidence that this is other than temporary. While we certainly see no evidence for the emergence of super-states as larger versions of nation states, we do not think the evidence for fragmentation is sufficient to prove this is a goal in itself, or will become one in the next few decades.
The third defensive possibility is dissociation--a degrading in what Angyal (1965) terms the "transverse dimension of system organization" and what we prefer to term the properties of coordination and regulation. Essentially, dissociation would entail that the possible outcomes of the behaviors of others are less frequently taken into account as a starting condition for one's own behavior, or that there is positive restriction on which outcomes would be considered. This is particularly likely when, as with a scratch team of football players, there is no common perception of the situations that emerge or, with a batch of new prisoners, a definite disinclination to associate. There is no real contradiction between this mode of adaptation to over-complexity and that of superficiality. If anything, it acts to restrict the area within which even superficial conformity will be sought and hence, in that way, heighten the tendencies of segmentation.
This mutual enhancement of the defensive adaptations is not surprising. All three of these are ways of personal or organizational disengagement. They may be taken in parallel or sequentially. It is quite possible that there are cultural differences. Certainly, the British society seems to have been remarkably more tolerant--less given to segmentative tactics--than, for instance, the USA or Australia. On the other hand, the British seem more likely to dissociate on the grounds of "I don't want to know," while the Americans and Australians defend their superficiality with "so what?" or "I couldn't care less." Neumann (1954) sees dissociation as being at least as important a technique in modern society as superficiality. He points to the loss in power and intensity of the cultural canons (e.g., "God" and "conscience") which once defined a common world for joint action. The trends in criminal statistics certainly suggest that there are forces in the society that warrant taking this path.
Reviewing our notes on these three mechanisms, we can conclude that:
• They are mutually facilitating defenses, not mutually exclusive.
• They all tend to fragment the spatial and temporal connectedness of the larger social systems and focus further adaptive efforts on the localized here-and-now.
• They all tend to sap the energies that are available to, and can be mobilized by, the larger systems and otherwise reduce their adaptiveness.
Despite the strong cases that have been argued for superficiality (fractionation) and dissociation as major characteristics of the present, and despite the current concern with racial segmentation, poverty and the under- developed nations, we do not think these necessarily define man's future. They are so important that any society should collect statistics on these processes as avidly as they collect meteorological data. However, none of the modern industrial nations is so obviously undermined by these processes that it lacks the power to adapt in other ways.