Images of organisation by Morgan, Gareth
Order out of chaos by Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers
Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm,
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin,
Living Systems by James Grier Miller
Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Advances in Semiotics) by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Barbara J. Haveland
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers have
used evocative images in trying to explain just what a corporation is. Have
they succeeded? Gareth Morgan presents a thoughtful, well-documented look at
images that arise from our theories and metaphors about reality. He discusses
how they shape the way we view the corporation as an entity and how we act. His
analysis involves a mix of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology,
biology and organizational examples. He moves from industrial-age notions of
the organization as a machine, to biological analogies about the organization
as an organism. Other metaphors - the organization as a brain, as social
reality, as the source of cultural difference and as an arena for power
struggles - shape what occurs within corporations. While this book is not an
easy read, it illuminates the dynamics of organizational life.
Morgan decribes common assumptions about organizations - he helps to reveal the hidden assumptions behind the managers perceptions. What do we mean when we say that 'organizations are like animals'? It is pretty easy to start to think from a metaphor, and end up in literal believing in it (e.g. that 'organizations live and die', 'organizations have evolutions'). Such reifications are carefully described by Morgan - several most recurrent metaphors of organizations and popular organization theories basing on them are clearly described, and their pros and cons are pointed out. Having read 'Images of Organizations', it is much more difficult to adopt illusionate metaphors, and to get persuaded by a biased visioner.
Prigogine argues persuasively that he has reconciled classical dynamics with the human conviction that the future cannot be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions and differential equations alone. He draws the reader through his own intellectual odyssey from classical thermodynamics, through linear nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and finally to his holy grail of nonlinear nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
If you are a scientist who has followed these disciplines from afar, and who has wished for a succinct summary that does not shrink from rigor, then acquire this book. You will chuckle at the constant barbs directed across the English Channel, and you will learn wonderful things about thermodynamics and thermokinetics. So few scientific books reveal the authors' insights. Instead, they teem with facts and formulas. Prigogine and Stengers have bedded physics with philosophy as if they were matchmakers for an illicit tryst. You will find yourself whispering, "Aha!" And you will, as I have, wear out your pen with underlining. Prigogine and Stengers are speaking to scientists in fields outside their own. They believe they have seen the light, and they want you to see it too. Give them the chance to convince you.
Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela, two Chilean scientists, lucidly establish HOW we
know WHAT we know, as they engage the reader in a series of perceptual
experiments designed to present the case for each entity's absolute right to
its own "reality."
According
to Maturana and Varela, an individual's "reality" is constructed from
his or her (or its) perceptions, and these perceptions are interactive with the
environment. The authors use the graphic analogy of a raindrop which falls on
the mountainside and, as it courses downward, both affects and is affected by
the slope down which it rolls. That raindrop's experience is its
incontrovertible truth, though rain falling on an opposite slope finds quite a
different path.
Thus,
our "reality" is interactive. Moreover, our reality is mutually
constructed. Our commonly agreed-upon view of reality is in fact a shared set
of assumptions/perceptions. You and I see what we see because we have agreed
that this is what is "out there." Together, we bring forth the world
we experience as objective reality.
The
implications of this idea are profound. We cannot afford to scorn another's
views, for they are just as valid as our own, and without them our greater
"reality" is incomplete.
This compelling book will challenge your assumptions about science and philosophy. But if you stay open to these ideas, you will not see the world, nor your fellow beings, in the same limited way again. And you will more deeply appreciate your own part in bringing forth the dream.
Bohm treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole.
His implicate order concept: that any independent element in our universe
contains within it the sum of all elements, i.e the sum of all existence
itself. He describes an enfolding-unfolding universe with consciousness playing
a central role. He was a great thinker ahead of his time. This classic work
captures a good cross section of his ideas.
I
would recommend anyone who finds the majesty of today's world and its endeavors
to bridge the gap between science and spirituality
This book effectively bridges the gap, and becomes in may ways the blue print
by which the highest level of consciousness and perspective achievable in the
context of Western Society today will be henceforth embraced and appreciated.
Bohm was one of the most important thinkers in Western culture, not just our
time or the last century. And this incredible challenge of a work of his may
not take you half as long to fully digest as it is taking me, but it will open
your eyes in ways that you would not expect about possibility, mind, matter,
energy, thought, order and existence in the universe.
It feels odd reviewing such a historic work as The Origin of
Species, yet some warnings must be espoused regarding this volume as Darwin's
work is often cited as the central document (along with the bible) in an
argument over creation versus evolution. It is bad enough that people who so
often are the most vociferous in this debate (on both sides) are relatively
unread, but worse is that The Evolution of Species as a scientific manifesto is
really of very little value today. Although Darwin was a brilliant naturalist,
it would be as improper to call a scientist who studies evolution a Darwinist
as it would be to call all computers Apple II's. Darwin has no working model of
genetics, and while he proposed many excellent hypothesis about various forms
of selection--he even wrote a book on behavior and facial expressions in
animals!--we would be hard pressed to find Darwin as a citation in any of the
modern literature.
I feel that people who wish to learn about evolution should seek out modern
authors (I strongly recommend John Maynard-Smith's 'Theory of Evolution' as it
is robust in its degree of current biological theory and will leave the reader
not only understanding the biological theory of evolution, but also a lot of
general biology.) On the other hand, if you are a person who is interested in
history and in people, do read Origin or perhaps The Voyage of the Beagle.
Darwin sets a fantastic example of the dedicated naturalist, unbiased and
thorough. His theories, which came later, were elegant--to such an extent that
many of the detractors (even modern day) do not understand them. Darwin's
biogeographical arguments for instance (I am thinking here about 'Darwin's
Finches) stand unmolested by the diatribe of those who would make poor of a man
just because they disagree with him. Neither do his opposers note Darwin's
unwillingness to bring forth his theory. Truth be told, I care little whether
or not people believe in evolutionary theory, only so much as they might at
least understand how his ideas, humbly presented, changed the entire landscape
of science. But most importantly I think people miss that Darwin was a good
scientist--and there are a lot of bad ones. Science has recently taken the turn
toward being all experiment and theory driven, with many of the funds in
biology going more to 'gene splitters' or whatever you might want to call them
than toward what little remains of descriptive science. Indeed it seems there
is little room left for naturalists anymore--even to an extent that naturalists
are sometimes not considered scientists. There are no more scientific works
that are purely descriptive, or they are very rare, or worse done mostly for
placement on coffee tables and not for the furthering of our understanding of
the natural world. Darwin then is almost a sort of fatalist to his own kind;
ushering in the modern age of a unified biology, he inadvertantly relegating
the Conrad Lorenz's, the Jane Goodall's and (fill in the blank of your favorite
naturalist) to antiquity or at least near-poverty. Given all of this it seems
very unfortunate the connotations and burden that Darwin's name has take on.
Instead, it would be very kind if the name Darwin were flung about with the
sort of respect I think it is due.
This
book should be printed in softcover and distributed at supermarkets. Jantsch has managed to finally put a very
large amount of information (just the reading list is worth the price of the
book) in one place. Thermodynamics, cybernetics, mathematics, computing,
physics...they've all been saying the same thing for years now and for some
reason we irrationally ignore the message: the TRUTH is not to be found in a
formal system based on anything resembling the Aristotelian logic we of the
Western world love so dearly...And the deeper we wallow in our mythical
constructions the more likely we won't be around for very long.
Professor Jantsch's vision on subjects ranging from biology and chemistry to cosmology and earth science is breathtaking. Long before anyone outside of circumscribed and as-yet unconnected circles had ever mentioned the words "Chaos" or "Dynamical Systems" theory, Jantsch was lucidly and adroitly anticipating some of the most advanced implications of this unborn paradigm. As a friend and colleague of the great Ilya Prigogine, this is perhaps not so surprising in retrospect. However, his encapsulation of self-organization and self-similarity is still, in my opinion, one of the more mature and comprehensive treatments on the subjects to date! His incorporation of the theories of evolution (seen as both a "micro" and a "macro-" level process) brought it all together in a way which joins and integrates disciplines like neurons link brain and body. All the more reason why I am appalled that this book is so completely out of circulation that my last out-of-print search turned up one volume (after several months), at a cost of over $200US! It is unconscionable that this pivotal work is inaccessible to students, scientists, and instructors, at a time when Jantsch's ideas are so relevant to this increasingly interconnected, evolving global civilization. The closest thing we have is Teillhard de Chardin...and Jantsch does it without the teleological, eschatological baggage which Chardin could not, in the end, escape. It is true that many of the specific ideas in this book are out-of-date. However, he hits far more often than he misses, and we are all the poorer for inaccessibility of his work.
This book has some of the
characteristics of an encyclopedia. It presents and analyzes many diverse facts
about cells, organs, organisms, groups, organizations, societies, and
supranational systems, but it integrates all this knowledge into a single
conceptual system. The book is a presentation of the state of current knowledge
in all of the sciences relevant to these seven levels of living systems. It
also provides a theoretical integration and a methodological approach to
quantitative basic research, and how applied research and development can arise
from this. The set of concepts presented by the author is powerful and draws
attention to all facets of a given problem in a social system.
Although
reading such a long book in its entirety seems at first measure a daunting task
(and one that few people's academic credentials hold up to....), readers daring
enough to try are pretty well rewarded across the whole of this book. This book
is an introduction to systems theory (i.e. that the result of a conglomeration
of small scale processes can be seen to accumulate into larger, predictable
processes at macro levels, similar to how a person who makes individual knots
can end up with a rug...) that straddles the mark from physics to political
economy (which is running far indeed).
Don't let the size of this book stop you from exploring it. The author has designed the book so it (slowly) reveals itself, working from basic concepts of how dynamic systems work through levels of biological and social complexity. It is a brilliant work, a must for anyone involved in any sort of analytical work.
Jesper Hoffmeyer is
on to something significant. Whereas semiotics
is often a dull analysis of formal symbols, Hoffmeyer's biosemiotics is a
lively natural history of signs that interprets evolution as a continuous
advance in semiotic freedom. All living things, according to Hoffmeyer, are
constantly reacting to their environment by interpreting the signs in their own
unwelt,, or interior representation of the surrounding world. Freedom and
chaotic self-organization thus become the hallmarks of all life. Based on sound
research and written in a delightfully accessible style, Signs of Meaning in
the Universe should be interpreted as an advance in both philosophy and
science. Jesper Hoffmeyer shows us the direction of one of the next fundamental
changes of paradigms in the history of science. In his intention to explain
life processes in the light of semiotics he has gone beyond established
biological mainstreams. He recognized, that models of explanation, wanting to
explain the organisational structures of all living phenomena by the use of a
physicalistic language, are not able to reach their goal of complete
description of life processes.
The paradigmatic change in the perspective of life processes is: Jesper Hoffmeyer contends that it is the sign and not the molecule that is the basic unit of life. His intention to interpret life processes in the light of semiotics is an exciting trip through nearly unexplored fields of research. Only biosemiotics has recognized the direction, and one of its most modern exponents has focused his intentions and results of research in this book. Beside his excellent model, which opens a new paradigmatic perspective of research consciousness in explaining life processes in future, Hoffmeyer opens a number of new perspectives on traditional problems of research of life-research: the evolution of life(I), the concept of code-duality, which may equalize the split between neo-darwinistic theory of evolution and "neo- lamarkism" (evolutionary DNS-growth by chance versus constructive DNS-growth) (II), the evolution of mind (III), and evolution of language (IV) and a lot of creative explanation details, I will not mention here in detail.