ON THE DESIGN OF STABLE AND RELIABLE INSTITUTIONS

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We enunciate, as a general system-theoretic principle, that any functional activity of a system typically involves only a few of the underlying structural degrees of freedom of the system. This principle has a number of important consequences, some of which are explored in this note. In particular, it is suggested that the unreliability we observe in functional organizations, and their breakdown with time, lies primarily in the fact that structural degrees of freedom, not involved directly in a particular functional activity of a system, are free for other interactions. Since the structural degrees of freedom of a system are “linked” to each other through the equations of motion of the system, such nonfunctional interactions tend to progressively interfere with the original functional activity of the system. A variety of consequences of this behavior, for biological and human-designed organizations, are explored, and a variety of mechanisms for avoiding this intrinsic dialectic in social structures are indicated.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: