The mystery of the coordination of human behavior: from common sense to social emergence
Part II of the series on organizations, organizational cultures, and change management
Table Of Contents
1. The soft is harder than the hard
↳ a. The starting point
↳ b. The mystery of the social
2. Common sense notions of the social
↳ a. The social as non-problematic evidence
↳ b. From nonsense to metaphors of obfuscation: the crumbling of common sense evidence
↳ c. Does it matter? No and yes.
3. Sociological classics: Hobbes, Durkheim, and Marx
↳ a. Thomas Hobbes and the Leviathan
↳ b. Emile Durkheim
↳ c. Karl Marx
↳ d. Conclusion
4. Approaches to social emergence
↳ a. The theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS)
↳ b. Luhmann’s sociological systems theory
↳ c. Conclusion
1. The soft is harder than the hard
a. The starting point
The starting point of this series is that various background assumptions about organizations, organizational cultures and change management determine the selection of recommendations and strategies to foster successful business process management (BPM) initiatives within an organisation.
Added to this are the widespread illusions regarding intervention, management and control that exist in relation to organizations, their cultures and members. And these illusions in turn have an impact on the likelihood of the success or failure of a BPM project.
Or to put it another way, the so-called soft factors related to the social are often harder than the so-called hard, i.e. technological aspects because:
- The former is associated with uncontrollable social complexity, where attempts at simplification do more harm than good.
- The latter refers to complicatedness that — at least in principle — can be simplified and controlled.
For more details, see the recent WAITS series on complexity and my own Medium publication on approaches to social complexity.
b. The mystery of the social
In today’s post, we take a step back, because our respective conceptions of the social affect how we conceptualize interactions, families, organizations and society as a whole and how we intend to manage them, such as through attempts at control, intervention, and automation.
- To this end, we will first have a look at common sense notions of the social.
- Then, we explore briefly sociological classics such as Hobbes, Durkheim and Marx.
- And, finally, we delve into contemporary approaches to social emergence, i.e. the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory.
2. Common sense notions of the social
a. The social as non-problematic evidence
From a common sense perspective, it is straightforward:
- When we witness a baby clinging to its mother or see a group of people, we almost instinctively resort to the tradition that we are simply social animals.
- In addition, we tend to put humans into social containers, i.e. families, groups and organizations, referring to nested part-whole relationships.
That is, these social containers, along with the individuals, are seen as parts of the social mega-container (or simply: the whole) known as society.
- In some cases, collective phenomena are used to describe these social units more accurately. We then refer to group or collective consciousness, group or collective memory, etc.
b. From nonsense to metaphors of obfuscation: the crumbling of common sense evidence
- First, humans are not able to understand what is going on in their bodies and brains in real time because the physiological complexity is completely overwhelming:
- The body of an adult 70 kg reference man is made up of ca. 30 trillion human cells and approximately 38 trillion bacteria living in the gastrointestinal tract, etc.
- It is estimated that the human brain consists on average of ca. 100 billion neurons and as many as 1,000 trillion synapses. - Second, scientific studies vary as to how many thoughts a person has per day, but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand thoughts per hour.
Now imagine that 10 people are having a business meeting to make a decision about the digital transformation of their company: Does anyone seriously believe that the trillions of body cells, bacteria, and synapses of all 10 people involved will participate in this decision without the entire low-level complexity being hidden?
And even if only hundreds of thoughts from all 10 people had to be expressed simultaneously every minute, all communication would immediately end in complete cacophony.
- Third, families, organizations, etc. are constituted by dynamic relationships, which we might call interactions, communications, discourse, whatever. But that’s nothing material. Therefore, the container perspective doesn’t make any sense in this context.
- But it gets even worse because, fourth, there are no collective phenomena like collective consciousness or memory. This is because people can’t directly connect their thought processes in everyday contexts.
So, the bottom line is:
Common sense has no comprehensible notion of the social because in a literal sense, all the views presented above are nonsensical. Yet none of us falls into a meaning hole because they still function as metaphors in everyday discourse.
In this context, we could also speak of metaphors of obfuscation, which allow for quick communication in everyday life but hide the lack of awareness of the conceptualization of the social (interactions, families, organizations, etc.).
c. Does it matter? No and yes.
The question then is: does this metaphorical avoidance of conceptualization problems by concealing them matter?
- At first glance, no, because communication still works.
- At second glance, however, it does when interactional, familial, organizational and societal problems are to be tackled, for which naïve solutions to problems such as
- the cult of simplicity
- populism
- moral appeals
- helpless humanism
- personification (especially blaming specific persons / groups)
etc. are often cited.
Of course, these simplifications tend to fail sooner rather than later due to the quite complex and sometimes harsh social realities! - It gets even worse when such naïve solutions are coupled with various illusions of social control, management, intervention, etc., which are only subcomplex recipes for disasters waiting to happen (for more details, see part III of this series).
3. Sociological classics: Hobbes, Durkheim, and Marx
In contrast to the metaphorical (non-)problem-solving of common sense, through which the social appears unproblematic because there is no awareness of the problem, the question How is the social possible at all? can be seen as a founding question of sociology.
a. Thomas Hobbes and the Leviathan
This question was probably first asked by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) even before the beginning of modern sociology as follows: How is social order possible?
His answer was the Leviathan as an early but despotic variant of the social contract theory, in which the members of society surrender rights to an overpowering state that is supposed to protect them from a violent state of nature and, above all, civil wars.
b. Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, who wanted to base social order on a set of shared social norms in view of the volatility of modern industrial society in the 19th century.
c. Karl Marx
If one really wants to understand the 19th century, there is (still) no way around reading Karl Marx (1818–1883). In the Marxist tradition, the socially divisive structure of class then became central with regard to production relations.
d. Conclusion
Although reading those classics with a view to the question of what unites and divides the social can still be interesting, nowadays a more radical approach is taken, which leads to the next paragraph, namely: approaches to social emergence.
4. Approaches to social emergence
Approaches such as the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory take the classical literature’s question of social order a little deeper by asking how the social is possible at all.
a. The theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS)
The answer of the theory of complex adaptive systems to the above question is then:
Complex systems are collections of entities that are rich in interactions between them. Emergent properties are the outcome of these interactions. We can define emergence as the appearance of patterns, properties and behaviours within a system that are not evident in individual components. Some examples (discussed later) include the emergence of small world structures, modules, and hierarchies (patterns); the spread of rumours (processes); cost spirals, and panic (behaviour). David G. Green 2023, Emergence in complex networks of simple agents, in: Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, 2023, no. 18, pp. 419–462.
One of the problems here is that a container perspective with nested parts and wholes still prevails, which is not convincing.
b. Luhmann’s sociological systems theory
In sociological systems theory (in the tradition of Niklas Luhmann and his successors such as Dirk Baecker, Peter Fuchs, Armin Nassehi, Stefan Kühl, etc.), the container / whole-part perspective is replaced by
- the structural coupling of consciousness and social systems via media, especially language,
as well as
- the concept of communication addresses, i.e.: a name of a consciousness is simply an address in communication processes, without the need to consider an individual as a compact figure.
This theory also poses the question of how behavioral coordination is possible between human entities whose thought processes cannot be short-circuited.
The answer is:
Under these circumstances, communication (as a truly social system) emerges as an apersonal mechanism of human behavioral coordination whose autodynamics ultimately elude (individual) control.
c. Conclusion
Luhmann’s meticulously elaborated theory makes it possible to avoid not only the conceptual problems mentioned above, but also the related illusions of control, intervention, etc. regarding the social in general and organizations in particular.
However, the latter are the topics of part III of this series.
As always, thanks for your attention and, hopefully, see you in the next post Organizational Illusions. Part III of the series on organizations, organizational cultures, and change management!
Author for WAITS Software- und Prozessberatungsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne, Germany: Peter Bormann — November 2023.
