Mechanisms, organisms and social systems

TLDR

Social systems are typically understood through simplified mechanistic or organismic models that provide conceptual images. The paper aims to explain the shortcomings of these traditional mechanistic and organismic approaches to social systems. The authors develop a third model that transcends machine and organism analogies to directly understand social systems. The inadequacy of mechanistic and organismic models is evident in accelerating change, uncertainty, and rising social crises, indicating a fundamental flaw in current thinking.

Abstract

Abstract To think about anything requires an image or concept of it, a model. To think about a thing as complex as a social system most people use a model of something similar, simpler and more familiar. Traditionally, two types of models have been used in efforts to acquire information, knowledge and understanding of social systems: mechanistic and organismic. But, in a world of accelerating change, increasing uncertainty and growing complexity, it is becoming apparent that these are inadequate as guides to decision and action. The growing number of social crises and dilemmas that we face should be clear evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we think about social systems. In this paper we describe and try to explain the deficiencies of the two traditional ways of thinking about social systems. We then develop a third type of model, one we believe does not suffer from these inadequacies, a social system model which seeks to penetrate beyond the nature of machine and organisms to understand social systems in their own right.