Systems Community of Inquiry

Good. Glad you found the Henderson dissertation. Gunnar Hedlund and I gave a series of presentations in the early eighties on the strange idea at the center of it, and that we talked about. It actually cam from Ozbekhan’s reading of Angyal, and then taking it into his 1940s studies with Collingwood at Cambridge (That was the notion of systems limits and what happens when a system reaches its limits (Russ never liked the question….).) Then, based on the contents from my taking, and loving, a 1972 EE Holographic Representation course from the dean of engineering at Penn, Gunnar and I used the holographic dilemma as the metaphor for our thinking about social systems. We talked about the holographic corporation as an idea which some others picked up on, and wrote about, but they missed the point and it didn’t go far enough. None-the-less, it did illustrate an important precondition for what happens when a system approaches its limits (where you see the parts assuming the whole). Maybe you and I should talk about it again? I don’t think anyone else has interest in such phenomena, and Gunnar doesn’t mind.

On the Emery and Trist book, keep in mind that they (Trist?) proposed an interesting way out from our dead-ended social circumstances; one that allowed humans to independently deal with the three maladaptive behaviors in contemporary society, of which they spoke and you list below: Trist argued: ”That we need to build a different kind of structure for how we relate to each other and our environment, where a first step would be moving from society based on ownership to one that relied on ”leasing” of the material matters so we could devote more time and energy to the immaterial matters.” That was perhaps the greatest kernel of wisdom in the book, as Trist saw it. I’m with him on that mission. This why I don’t think people can ”steal” from me. In other words ”property is theft,” as one of my heroes wrote sometime ago.