Sociopolitical Ecology: Human Systems and Ecological Fields PDF
Preview Sociopolitical Ecology: Human Systems and Ecological Fields
SOCIOPOLITICAL ECOLOGY Human Systems and Ecological Fields Contemporary Systems Thinking Series Editor: Robert 1. Hood University of Hull Hull, United Kingdom DESIGNING SOCIAL SYSTEMS IN A CHANGING WORLD Bela H. Banathy LIBERATING SYSTEMS THEORY Robert L. Flood OPERATIONAL RESEARCH AND SYSTEMS The Systemic Nature of Operational Research Paul Keys POWER, IDEOLOGY, AND CONTROL John C. Oliga SELF-PRODUCING SYSTEMS Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis John Mingers SOCIOPOLITICAL ECOLOGY Human Systems and Ecological Fields Frederick L. Bates SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY FOR THE MANAGEMENT SCIENCES Michael C. Jackson A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. SOCIOPOLITICAL ECOLOGY Human Systems and Ecological Fields Frederick L. Bates The University of Georgia Athens, Georgia Springer Science +B usiness Media, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bates, Frederick L. Sociopolitical ecology : human systems and ecological fields / Frederick L. Bates. p. cm. — (Contemporary systems thinking) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4899-0253-5 1. Social structure. 2. Social systems. 3. System theory. 4. Social ecology. 5. Human ecology. I. Title. II. Series. HM24.B3637 1997 306~dc21 97-29385 CIP ISBN 978-1-4899-0253-5 ISBN 978-1-4899-0251-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-0251-1 © 1997 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 10 987654321 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher To HAROLD L. GEISERT whose insightful teaching and personal friendship inspired me to start on the long road to the writing of this book Foreword In the late nineteenth century, researchers encountered limitations to reduc tionism and physicS. A counterposition in biology took on a coherent form by the mid-1920s. Scientists such as Walter B. Cannon (credited with homeo stasis), Paul Weiss, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy (credited with open systems theory) came to the fore. Von Bertalanffy, for example, demonstrated that concepts of physics and closed systems were helpless in appreciating dy namics of organisms. Existence of an organism cannot be understood in terms of behavior of fundamental parts in an isolated system moving toward disorder (as suggested by reductionism and the Second Law of Thermody namics). A whole organism is characterized by increasing or at least main taining order; its behavior is more than the sum of its parts. Biology therefore required new concepts. New concepts in biology focused on functional and relational criteria rather than reductionist analysis of fundamental parts. Organisms exist in re lation to an environment, and their functions and structure are maintained by a continuous flow of energy and information between organism and en vironment. An organism is a complex system comprising many interrelated parts resulting in a whole with integrity. Key concepts here include self-orga nization by way of progressive differentiation, equifinality as the indepen dence of final state from initial conditions, and teleology as the dependence of behavior of the organism on some future purpose "known in advance." Open systems theory and other biological conceptions like homeostasis portray concepts of physics as helpless in appreciating dynamics of social systems as well as organisms. Rather, open systems theory observes social systems as complex systems made up of parts most usefully studied as a whole. Social systems are open to an environment. For organizations, action is taken to hold its critical variables in the steady-state. The primary aim is to ensure survival by transforming inputs and by adapting to changes when they occur. This influential view of systems in the world has been challenged by Maturana and Varela in their theory of autopoiesis. Again, they argued, biol ogy required new concepts. For example, autopoiesis is a theory of self-refer- vii viii Foreword ential systems. This introduces a new notion of the capacity of living organ isms to reproduce themselves and to maintain themselves as autonomous things. Autopoiesis is well presented by John Mingers in his volume, Self Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoesis, in this series Contemporary Systems Thinking. However, there remains a possibility, argues Frederick Bates in this vol ume, that Maturana and Varela's work may continue to lead people to con ceive social systems as living systems or organisms of sorts. This "danger" is surely one that we have learned to avoid in recent years. I feel Bates's con cern here resonating with R.D. Laing's worry that "we have had accounts of men [sic] as animals, men as machines, men as biochemical complexes with certain ways of their own, but there remains the greatest difficulty of achiev ing a human understanding of man in human terms." (The Politics of Expe rience and the Birds of Paradise). In this intriguing book, Bates tackles this great difficulty with his own theory of self-referential systems in human terms. For Bates, these systems exist only as realities created by an observer through the use of "sets of cog nitive rules." From this develops a constructivist theory of self-referential thinking yielding a view that society as a social entity consists of a set of such interrelated systems. These systems move toward closure, but closure sits in stark contrast to closed systems thinking referred to earlier in this foreword. Dangling these ideas before you, Bates offers an invitation to explore this and other notions with him in an intellectually stimulating engagement with his sociopolitical ecology. I recommend that you take up that engagement. ROBERT 1. FLOOD Preface This book is an extension and, to a degree, a reformulation of the ideas pre sented in The Structure of Social Systems and in the various journal articles that led up to and followed its publication. It arose out of my desire to clarify and promote the development of sociological structuralism as opposed to s0- ciological individualism. It also grew out of a recognition that my previous work had not provided a satisfactory view of macrostructure and that it had failed to deal effectively with social change or morphogenisis. In addition, it had not dealt explicitly with the epistemological foundation upon which structural analysis rests. The Structure of Social Systems, as well as the various articles I have writ ten on social structure, assumed an empiricist view of "systems theory" as their theoretical grounding and, as a consequence, accepted rather uncriti cally the proposition that societies are, by definition, as well as by their ob servable nature, systems. Gradually, as my experience as an observer in research settings around the world broadened, I grew increasingly uncom fortable with this proposition, especially in light of my growing interest in social and economic development and the various well-known criticisms of functionalism and its failure to deal effectively with conflict and social change. It has always seemed apparent to me that the logic of systems theory is, in fact, antithetical to the idea of conflict and that attempts to accommo date systems theory to conflict theory have weakened rather than strength ened the internal consistency of the various propositions upon which systems theory rests. Even so, it has also been my conviction that, lacking a satisfactory alternative as a theoretical foundation, we were compelled to live with these inconsistencies while we were searching for a satisfactory res olution of the problems they represent. In order to write this book, which was originally to be directed toward clarifying the meaning of the concept social structure and discussing the role of structural analysis in the sociological enterprise, I needed a new way of looking at social systems. I chose "self-referential systems theory" as this new approach. I first learned of this approach from my friend and colleague, Carlo Pelanda, with whom I was working on an international disaster study ix x Preface at the Institute of International Sociology in Gorizia, Italy. Like me, one of Carlo's central interests is in sociological theory as it relates to the structure and functioning of social systems. In conversations over a period of several years the subject of self-referential systems theory came up repeatedly, and Carlo attempted to explain to me what it was all about. I must confess that for quite some time I was unable to grasp the meaning and significance of what he was saying and was at first resistant to the idea that such systems are thought of as being closed and autonomous. My mistake was to think of them as closed in the sense that Buckley or Rappaport and others think of closed systems. My other difficulty was in understanding the significance of the notion that self-referential social systems exist only as realities created by an observer through the use of "sets of cognitive rules." I remember sitting one night with Carlo on the bakony of my hotel in Trieste overlooking the harbor in which several ships were maneuvering toward the dock and asking him, "Is the crew of that ship out there a self referential system?" Carlo, I am sure, was puzzled by my question, but nevertheless, in his usual good humor, answered, "Perhaps." I later realized he meant by this, "It depends on how you look at it." I was not then aware of the fact that I, an empiricist, was asking for an empiricist's answer from a rather radical relativistic contructivist. My question was directed toward the issue of structural boundedness, which I interpreted to be the same thing as closure, and I did not understand what is meant by closure in self-referential systems from a constructivist point of view. It seemed apparent to me that whoever was in command of the ship we were observing, and whoever was at the wheel and at the engine controls, were all taking information from their environment into account and responding to it by changes in course. This meant to me that the ship's crew was an "open system." Later, I realized that this is irrelevant in a constructivist's version of self-referential systems theory. What is relevant is that perhaps, as Carlo said, it could be demon strated that there is an "independent system of cognitive rules" that governs the behavior of the ship's crew and that these rules have evolved as a set of rules separately from other sets ofr ules covering other activities in society. I really did not grasp what Carlo was talking about until I heard him give a paper at a meeting of Italian and American disaster researchers at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center. Although the paper was about disasters, it was couched in terms of constructivism and self-referen tial systems theory. It suddenly came to me what this theory is all about. I could think of nothing else for the next two days and nights. I could not sleep as I reviewed in my mind everything I had written or thought in the past on the subject of social structure, and by the time I left the meeting, I had in mind the outline and many of the details of this book. Upon returning to Athens, I began to write and had completed a draft in about eight months. Meanwhile I was searching the library for articles and books on self-referen-
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