International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

The government of human organizations.

From a systemic viewpoint, it is important to understand how organizations do manage to sustain themselves, how they define goals and pursue them. This however also implies a study of how some individuals or groups become dominant and more or less succeed in managing and controlling an organization.

As to the first aspect, the need for critical subsystems – twenty of them, according to J.G. MILLER – corresponds to the various processes needed to secure the survival of the system within its environment. Each subsystem must have definite capabilities, act in a coherent way and coordinate its action with other subsystems. It must thus obtain specific inputs of matter, energy and/or information, be able to use them and to produce some outputs, either products required by the system itself or by its environment (including co-systems), or unwanted subproducts that must be somehow eliminated in a non dangerous way. Politics in this aspect, is a matter of securing these conditions by appropriate, i.e. non selfdefeating, regulations and controls.

The study of the ways some individuals or groups succeed in obtaining and maintaining the "control of the controls" and eventually loose it, as well as the relations they mai ntai n with other groups and the way power is traded and transmimtted through time, should form the core of the systemic-cybernetic study of politics.

Many systemic-cybernetic concepts could be used: theory of communication (including semantic coding, channels capacity, noise, use of redundancy); theory of regulation and control at multiple hierarchical levels; heterarchical organization; concept of order parameters, slaving principle; values and norms; mindscapes; organizational closure; stigmergy; etc…

This is still largely an unexplored field, notwithstanding the efforts of K. DEUTSCH (1961, etc.), D. EASTON (1965a, b), W. BUCKLEY (1968) and some few others.