[Avery Andrews 930828.1508]
Although organizations are indubitably made up of lots of individuals
controlling for things, it still might (or might not) be appropriate
to think of them as unified control systems. We know, for example, that
mammalian nervous systems involve big populations of neurons interacting
in extremely obscure ways, but this doesn't stop us from thinking that
`lumped variable' models can be useful (as in the arm demos, where a
single magnitude is supposed to represent the angle of some joint, while
in fact there is no particular neuron whose firing frequency represents
that joint angle). We think they are nonetheless useful, but they might
also be extremely misleading. Similarly for organizations and the
people in them, I would think.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au