4: Viable Systems

The idea that any social collective that has an interest in working together as a whole and develops more or less common (or at least shared) purposes can be modeled as a system. The systems paradigm was driven by biology, where biological organisms were found to be too complex to be modeled through the mechanistic paradigm. The systems paradigm takes the notion of the system as a generalized object, and it has properties that should be applied metaphorically.

The nature of the system as a generalized object is due to Weinberg (1975), and it has the following features:

This understanding of the nature of a system is particularly important when we are attempting to intervene in a situation, since real situations will not always comply with our models of analogy. This is because a metaphor may carry inappropriate conceptual baggage for a situation that suggests that the detail of the metaphor that we are using may not be totally applicable to the situation. When this happens it is said to be overextended. Having said this, a social collective may have certain properties like coherence, after which it may be claimed that it should work as a system, but when it does not it is argued that the reason is because it has some fundamental ills (or pathologies) that stop it from doing so.