[Martin Taylor 2008.08.23.23.38]
(Gavin Ritz 24.08.2008.12.10)
Martin
The argument is not trivial when it comes to something in an organised sense
(institution, Catholic Church (this power structure has lived for 2000
years), government, military, economic organisation) and the INDIVIDUAL.
This is the crux problem of our scientific reality (reductionism). The three
body problem or aggregate complexity.
I can't speak for anyone but myself in answering you. What I say may or may not be accepted or acceptable to others who are familiar with PCT. With that caveat, I, like a fool, rush in...
Reductionism is certainly something we must be careful about. It certainly is something Bill P is careful to avoid, since one of the most important starting points in PCT is the realization that structural organization changes the way simple elements behave.
If you would like to think you have a measure of power re opening or closing
a tap then we are worlds apart in understanding the notion of power as an
organisational plenitude.
We have, as is usual with words, several different kinds of everyday meanings associated with "power". On top of those, we have different meanings when they are used in specialized technical language. If we are to communicate about what actually happens when people (or organizations) act or interact, we must try to avoid insisting on there being only one way to use the term; but there's nothing wrong with explaining how we are using the term in a particular context.
So, I want to know what you mean by "organizational plenitude". The American Heritage dictionary gives "plenitude" as: 1. An ample amount or quantity; an abundance: /a region blessed with a plenitude of natural resources/. 2. The condition of being full, ample, or complete.
So an "organizational plenitude" presumably means something an organization is full of, perhaps a capability. Is that close? Even if I am close to your meaning, I don't find it very helpful, because an organization could be full of lots of things, and have many properties. It almost certainly is a different concept of "power" from the power needed to move a rock, turn a tap, or get someone's help to move furniture.
To say that all this is a subset of PCT is a very strange argument, when PCT
deals with an individual's psychological/physiological situation.
An individual's psychological/physiological situation is almost always in interaction with other individuals. You can't get away from that in applied PCT, though you can when you are investigating the properties of individual separated control systems.
So in
other words by deduction you are saying our institutions are only a sum
total of the PCT concepts.
No more than I would say that chemistry is only a sum total of physical concepts. It is, of course, but to say so is not very helpful.
In both cases, the specific structures and environmental influences are important. The physical concepts, in principle, can be used to predict chemical properties (and in practice, too, for cases simple enough to yield to our present computers). Likewise, PCT, in principle, could be used to predict the behaviour of different organizational structures; but in this case, the prediction could be only probabilistic, since the same organizational structure is likely to behave differently when the slots are occupied by different individuals. An organization with a micro-managing boss is likely to perform less well than one in which the boss provides competent people with objectives (or so says PCT).
I have already looked at PCT and its ability to work within organisations
and there is nothing there to convince me it has some contribution to make
at this stage of its development.
Well, it is something I have thought about, too, and I do think PCT has distinct contributions to make. Some members of CSGnet have, I believed, even used PCT for practical purposes in improving the performance of some organizations (I hope they will chime in to this discussion).
I think that it's actually the other way around PCT is probably a subset of
POWER;
Even if you can't define POWER, I do wish you would provide some kind of description, illustration, sets of examples, or something -- anything -- that would allow me to guess how your idea of POWER differs from the everyday usage, which is more or less the force one can exert against whatever might inhibit one from getting one's way. With the tap example, the required force is normally very small, and very little power is exerted, as compared with the power needed to move a large rock. (Actually, in physical language, neither requires a defined power, but in everyday language they do). The boss of a big organization can exert a lot more force than can the worker on an assembly line.
I have written a paper on something I call the fundamental formula
and to me PCT fits that and not much more.
Maybe the discussion would be advanced if you were to attach that paper to a message to CSGnet, so that we all could understand better where you are coming from.
I admit I don't fully understand
the concept of the plenitude/power but I see the signature everywhere in all
disciplines and the fundamental formula is part of this power concept. In
PCT it's the error. But PCT doesn't add much more than that.
I wouldn't say that "error" has anything to do with the concept of power in PCT. The error is simply a measure of the difference between the current value of a controlled perception and its reference value. Where power comes in is in the ability of the controller to do something about reducing the error. That depends on the existence of means and on the know-how to use them. There really isn't an "official" concept of power in PCT. Remember that this thread started from the other side, the everyday notion of power, and how an understanding of PCT suggests how one may think of power. Fred Nickols (2008.08.22.0636 MDT), followed by Bill P. made a suggestion that seemed (and seems) right to me: In Bill's words (2008.08.23.0740 MDT) ""power" means nothing more nor less than the ability to control: to act on one's world in such a way as to experience it the way you want to experience it."
And as Fred said: "I grew up with a pretty commonplace notion of power; namely, the ability to control others. In the course of being trained as an OD specialist in the Navy, I came upon and adopted a very different definition of power: the range of options at one's disposal. The more options you have the more power you have. ... Another way of increasing your own power is to increase the power of others (i.e., increase their range of options, even if that boils down to simply helping them see alternatives). In PCT terms, you help them do a better job of obtaining/maintaining reference conditions for variables they wish to control. They tend to return that favor."
What Fred said comes quite close to expressing the power of organizations, or rather, of the people in authority roles in organizations.
I have grappled with this concept for more than 15 years and have a complete
library on power; I have even developed a strategic model for economic
organisations (published paper) around the concept of power. Which works I
make multi-million dollar decisions using this model.
If those decisions are effective, then you are good at your job. It doesn't mean the underlying theory is necessarily right any more than the fact that Ptolemaic astronomy made very accurate predictions of the movements of the planets meant that it was right, nor than the fact that Newton's theory of gravity made even better predictions meant that it was right...and even though general relativity makes even better predictions, I think most physicists don't take it as the "final right answer", given its incompatibility with the equally impressive Standard Model of quantum mechanics.
So far as I can see, most of the comments you have made here about "power" are entirely compatible with PCT. [I take it you were referring to my response [Martin Taylor 2008.08.23.10.20] in your "porridge" satirical commentary. I thought I was being quite to the point in each instance. You apparently didn't. ]
Look, if you have grappled with this concept for more than 15 years, either you must have come to some conclusions that can be expressed simply enough for people who haven't been thinking about it for so long to understand. Either that, or the concept itself is in fact just a hazy intuitive notion and is not a suitable basis for a real science of organizations, as I believe PCT to be.
I have also developed psychometric tools (in commercial use) to measure
motivation which in PCT terms could be construed as an error at the Systems
Concept Level, but not out of PCT has this model been defined but from the
concept of power.
If different bases lead to the same model, it is likely that the bases are not terribly incompatible. As for "motivation", I don't think I would restrict it to any one level, or to any one perceptual control system.
What really interests me (and maybe it should you), I have been unable to
integrate PCT (even tiny parts of it) into any usable model for
organisation. There's something fundamentally problematic with it at this
level. Which is all I care about.
All right. I'm not sure whether what should interest me is your inability to integrate PCT, or just the process of integrating PCT. Either way, there's a good place to start, because PCT in organization is something I have thought about for some time, without writing much about it. I do think PCT is a useful starting place for modelling organizations.
I don't have much on hand to offer you, but you might like to look at some items on my Web site <http://www.mmtaylor.net/PCT/index.html>, in particular the "Social control" Powerpoint I gave to the 2005 CSG meeting (some of the slides have the tag line "No one person is the controller. The company is."), the item "On Helping", and <http://www.mmtaylor.net/PCT/Mutuality/long-form.html>, which deals with evolving informal organization, not formally structured organization (but then even the most formal organization tends to evolve so that its internal practices become less formal over time).
Maybe one or two of these might be a start toward what interests you. They aren't much, but they are something.
Martin