John Earl contributed some speculations on why Australian Aboriginals did not develop a hierarchical system of social integration. My analysis of their social system is that it represented an "environmental republic" as they saw themselves being part of the land. To me, this belief system explains what Earl describes as "distributed control" or self-governance.
Without either hierarchies or markets they could organise ceremonies involving over a 1000 people from over a 100 of miles a way who spoke half a dozen languages not mutually understood by each other and co-ordinate complex activities for over week without any rehearsal. Modern society could not organise such social integration without at least a common language and weeks of rehearsals. (Refer to Chapter 3, 'Structure of Aboriginal Enterprise' in my Australian Parliamentary Paper 135/1978 Impact of mining royalties on Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory)
Hierarchies require a common language as they depend upon orders and commands. Literacy is required for hierarchies to operate at a distance or through many levels. Numeracy is required for markets. So hierarchies emerged with written languages over 5000 years ago and markets emerged with numeracy. Aboriginal culture used the same information and control systems used by social animals based on instincts and semiotics (signs and symbols). A typology of four systems of social integration, which follow these information channels is presented by Streeck & Schmitter (1985: 11) who identified how each had "a separate logic of collective action and social order" being: family & clans, associations, hierarchies and markets.
Modern society has four information and control channels for social integration: the five human senses, semiotics, voice/words and price/cost. The 'band-width' of each channel, being its capacity to transmit bytes, declines as it becomes more specialised. The requisite variety required to manage modern complexity requires the use of the richest band-widths such as used by Australian Aboriginals. My estimate of the how different societies utilise the four different types of information and control channels to integrate their society is set out in Table 1, page 52 of my Parliamentary Report cited above. This was updated and republished in Turnbull (1994: 328).
The article of Heylighen F. & Campbell D.T. (1995) discussed specialisation in labor. However, as the complexity of society increases, it will be necessary to adopt social information and control channels, which permit the decomposition of decision making labor. As shown by Simons (1962) and Mathews (1996) the most efficient way to decompose complexity is through almost self-governing components described as organisational holons and holarchies (Kloester 1967). Holonic organisational architecture, or what Dee Hock (1999) describes as "Chaords", allows the richest information and control channels to be used to manage complexity. It is not VISA International created by Dee Hock, that provides the most compelling example of the competitive advantages of holonic architecture but the Stakeholder controlled cooperatives located around the town of Mondragón in Spain (Turnbull 1995).
A way to investigate complex human information and control systems is through what I describes as Transaction Byte Analysis (TBA) outlined in Table 4 of Turnbull (2000: 20) outlined in Table 4. This provides a different perspective to the utility of such contrary human traits of altruism/selfishness, co-operation/competitiveness, etc, discussed by Heylighen F. & Campbell D.T. (1995). Just as nature utilises the most efficient way to build physical structures by combing tension components with compression components to create "tensegrity" (Ingber 1998), so can "social tensegrity" provide the most efficient way to create self-governing social units, holons and holarchies.
References:
Heylighen F. & Campbell D.T. (1995): "Selection of Organization at the Social Level: obstacles and facilitators of metasystem transitions", World Futures: the Journal of General Evolution 45, p. 181-212.
Hock, D. 1999, The birth of the Chaordic Age, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.
Ingber, D.E. 1998, 'The architecture of life', Scientific American, 30-39, January.
Koestler, C.O. 1967, The ghost in the machine, Hutchinson, London.
Mathews, J. 1996a, 'Holonic organisational architectures', Human Systems Management, 15, 27-54.
Simon, H.A. 1962, 'The architecture of complexity,' Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, December, 467-82.
Turnbull, S. 1994, 'Stakeholder Democracy: Redesigning the Governance of Firms and Bureaucracies', Journal of Socio-Economics, JAI Press, 23:3, Fall, pp. 321-360, Connecticut.
Turnbull, S. 1995, 'Innovations in corporate governance: The Mondragón experience', Corporate Governance: An International Review, 3:3, July, 167-80.
Turnbull, S. 2000, 'Gouvernement d'entreprise:Théories, Enjeux et paradigmes' (Corporate Governance: Theories, challenges and paradigms), Gouvernance: Revenue internationale, 1:1, pp. 11-43, Montréal.
