Here’s what I think. I think the term “collective control” should be eliminated from the PCT vocabulary. It’s just confusing. I’ve been reading a draft of a 2010 paper by Kent entitled “Collective Control and Environmental Stabilization”. In that paper Kent defines “collective control” as follows:
However, when the actors involved in the joint control of an environmental variable use different reference points in attempting to control the variable, their actions will come into conflict, because the outcome of this “collective control process, as it has been called (McClelland 2006), will stabilize the controlled variable at a “virtual reference level” (Powers 2005: 267).
So, “collective control” is a result of CONFLICT. Kent goes on to say “From the perspective of PCT, every kind of social process is a process of collective control” [emphasis mine]. But he then gives examples of collective control where no conflict is involved at all:
…a choir hum[ing] a note together at a single frequency" and "a movie video, as when a film production company combines visual images, sounds, actors’ performances, voice-over narration, and computer effects to construct a reproducible artifact…
The stabilized results produced in each of these cases – simultaneously sung notes of the same pitch or a video – are not virtual reference states resulting from conflict; they are real reference states resulting from control
Since the meaning of “collective control” is frustratingly unclear, I suggest dispensing with it and just using the term “social control” to refer to the behavior produced by groups of control systems. This is the term used to describe such behavior in my book The Study of Living Control Systems.
In that book I distinguish three different types of social control observed in collections of control systems: 1) cooperative control, which can be intended (as in industrial production) or unintended (such as the flocking patterns produced by birds), 2) conflictive control (which isn’t really control at all, as per my talk at the 2023 IAPCT conference), and 3) manipulative control.
In my treatment of social control I show how these different types of social behavior emerge from the controlling done by the individuals in a group. These different instances of social control don’t all emerge from the same process; but they all emerge from the controlling done by the individuals in the collective. There is no “giant virtual controller” making these social phenomena happen. At least I don’t see any reason to think so and neither did Bill or Tom Bourbon.