It is apparent that there is interest in mapping principles from the new
sciences (complex adaptive systems, self organization, emergence) to
social organizations. However, most of the metaphors proposed (by
Wheatley and others) and many of the systems studied, come from the
physical sciences.
We humans arise from simple physical/chemical processes which recursively
self organize into adaptive complex systems. But these simple processes
are unconscious, automatic, darwinian; they are basic but mindless
building blocks. By focusing on these physical processes and trying to
map them into the behaviour of social organizations, we work at too small
a scale; we end up looking at the building blocks, not at the richly
complex emergent properties that these building blocks yield.
I propose that the biological domain has to be brought into the
conversation. Human organizations arise when self organization yields
biological entities whose emergent properties and behaviours (mind and
language) interact in a linguistic cognitive domain. This domain is
constitutively social.
Biology is not destiny, but we are autopoeitic beings whose future
possibilities arise from our biological embodiement. Thus our behaviour
in social organizations, which occurs in the linguistic domain, is
grounded in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic histories that we are.
As Taylor succintly put it:
"We are embodied agents, living in dialogical conditions, inhabiting time
in a specifically human way, that is, making sense of our lives as a story
that connects the past from where we have come to our future projects.
That means that if we are properly to treat a human being, we have to
respect this embodied, dialogical, temporal nature" Charles Taylor _The
Ethics of Authenticity_, 1991.
By starting from the biological/linguistic domain, the question is no
longer how well do the principles of the New Science map onto social
organizational behaviour, but rather what are the social/organizational
implications of the fact that we are biological, self-organized
(autopoeitic) systems with emergent properties such as cognition &
language.
To study organizational learning and creativity for example, I suggest one
should look to biological systems; to adaptation, mutation, structural
coupling. These phenomena do not merely provide metaphors but are the
constitutive processes of biological learning, languaging and creativity.
-- Roberto Reichard emergent@sirius.comeverything said is said by someone - The Tree of Knowledge