The Paradox of Intentional Emergent Coherence: Organization
and Decision in a Complex World
Robert M. Cutler
Abstract:
This article elaborates a framework for
evaluating the growth and decline of organizations and other systems,
determining what leads some of them to respond adequately to demands
imposed upon them by their environment, and others not. The framework
synthesizes two apparently mutually exclusive taxonomies. The first
taxonomy concerns how organizations survive. It emphasizes the creation of
organizational structures to accomplish functional tasks and comprises two
principal categories: internal functions and external functions. The
second taxonomy adopts an “epigenetic” approach, concentrating
not on established functions necessary for survival but rather on new
behaviors that must be learned for growth and adaptation to occur. The
functional framework is first-order cybernetic; the epigenetic,
second-order cybernetic. Their integrated synthesis, which is denoted the
“paradox of intentional emergent coherence,” lays stress on
autopoiesis. This synthesis draws on wide literature in world politics and
society, from state-centric decision-making studies to empirical work on
international organizations. It generalizes the framework behind the
author's published empirical work in decision-making analysis and
organizational development. So doing, it concludes on a series of broader
and more abstract-conceptual postulates that problematize the relevant
theoretical questions. These in turn imply a coding scheme for assessing
organizational development and performance that develops more deeply the
mentioned empirical work and may be applied to any second-order cybernetic
system.
The full article, running 6000
words with five Tables and two Figures, is available in PDF (498Kb). The
Contents and first two
paragraphs follow below.
Suggested citation for this
webpage:
Robert
M. Cutler, “The Paradox of Intentional Emergent Coherence:
Organization and Decision in a Complex World[; Abstract],”
Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences (in press); available at <http://www.robertcutler.org/ar07jwas.htm>, accessed 16 December 2024.
- “Complexity Science” or “the Complex
Sciences”?
- Functionalism and
Organizational Development
- Table 1. Internal and External
Functions of an Organization.
- Table 2. Elements for an
Epigenetic Analysis of General Organizational
Evolution.
- Epigenesis and
Organizational Autopoiesis
- Table 3. Concordance between
Functional Requisites and Epigenetic Moments in Organizational
Development, and also by Extension to Phase of State Foreign Policy
Making.
- Table 4. How Deutschian “Capacities”
Operationalize Performance Variables from the Functional and Epigenetic
Taxonomies, Transforming the First-Order Cybrnetic into the Second-Order
Cybernetic.
- Table 5. Correspondence between Categories
for Assessing Institutional Development of International Organizations and
Foreign-Policy Decision Making on the One Hand, and, on the Other Hand,
Fundamental Issues in the Complex Sciences Enumerated at the Outset of
This Article.
- The Paradox of
International Emergent Coherence
- Figure 1. A Functionalist
General-Systems Inventory of Influences on State
Behavior.
- Figure 2. The Paradox of Intentional Emergent
Coherence: A Cyclical Developmental Framework for Organizations and Social
Systems, Unifying the Functional and Epigenetic Approaches.
- Conclusion
Robert M. Cutler[1]
The work presented here draws upon previous empirical
research into the birth and development of a particular type of
international organization, the international parliamentary institution
(IPI), of which the European Parliament is the best known.[2]It generalizes the concepts framing that research to
organizations at large, including political nation-states, by grounding it
explicitly in the theory of complex systems as well as in the classics of
the political science literature, especially works strongly associated
with questions of international relations and change in the foreign policy
behavior of states. By extending the original framework so that it is
applicable to social systems in general, the present article includes
nation-states in general and their foreign policy behavior in particular,
within the scope of study. Its fundamental grounding in the theory of
complex systems is what allows this extension.
Political scientists concerned with foreign policy
analysis have spent a great deal of effort trying to define learning
within their domain of expertise and also distinguishing this from types
of change that may not be qualified as “learning.” For
example, the categories of “change” and especially
“adaptation” have received a great deal of attention in this
context.[3] State foreign policy
decision-making follows very much the same organizational and
informational patterns that the epigenesis of international parliamentary
institutions does also. In cybernetic terms, the tasks facing IPIs seeking
to survive and grow on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the tasks
facing states in international politics, are in fact similar; only the
resources available to accomplish them differ. The general framework
presented here provides a way to take that difference in resources into
account, and so it is applicable to states as well as to IPIs, and by
extension any political or social organization or system. This means, of
course, that it is also a framework of analysis for the growth,
development, and decisions of individual human beings.
Notes
[1]. Member of the
Washington Evolutionary Systems Society. A draft of this article was
presented to the Washington Academy Conference CapSci2006. The
author’s first oral presentation of these ideas was to two
interdisciplinary conferences sponsored by the New England Complex Systems
Institute in Boston in October 1998 and March 1999.
[2]. Robert M.
Cutler, “The Emergence of International Parliamentary Institutions: New
Networks of Influence in World Society,” pp. 201–229 in
Who Is Afraid of the State?: Canada in a World of Multiple Centres of
Power, ed. by Gordon S. Smith and Daniel Wolfish (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2001). International parliamentary institutions (IPIs)
have widely varying origins and legal status but enough in common to
permit a general developmental framework to encompass and permit
comparison.
[3]. See, e.g.: Lloyd
Etheredge, Can Governments Learn? American Foreign Policy and Central
American Revolutions (New York: Pergamon, 1985); John A. Vasquez,
“Foreign Policy, Learning, and War,” pp. 366–383 in
New Directions in the Study of Foreign Policy, ed. by Charles
Hermann, Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and James N. Rosenau (Boston: Allen and
Unwin, 1987); and, notably, Learning in American and Soviet Foreign
Policy, ed. by George Breslauer and Philip Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1991), as well as Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May,
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New
York: Simon and Schuster, Free Press, 1986). However, the discipline has
only begun to recover from the methodological-individualist reduction of
state foreign policy learning to learning by individual members of the
decision making elite, by Jack Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy:
Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” International
Organization 48, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 279–312;
see, e.g., Jeffrey W. Knopf, “The Importance of International
Learning,” Review of International Studies
29, no. 2 (April 2003): 187–209.
Dr. Robert M. Cutler [ website — email ] was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia since the late 1970s. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.
Text: Copyright © Robert M. Cutler
First Web-published: 24 December 2006
Content last modified: 24 December 2006
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