Also "from the colonies" -- and Stafford Beer's city of retirement
Andrew,
(Not being on a first name basis I hesitate . . .) Super interesting article about cybernetics and managerialism. And a nice identification of the question of power, which is so often overlooked in technology journalism.
May I ask for a little more research though on the question of the relative popularity of cybernetics in Eastern Europe, versus the West?
In my experience with a quite a few software and engineering types educated in Eastern Europe, it has been very common to find most of them educated in cybernetics, at least insofar as we are talking about plant-level systems theory. I didn't know that the Soviets, at the executive level at least "were suspicious" of cybernetics.
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In fact, the information I have had leads to the opposite conclusion -- that cybernetics, as a good theory of how systems work, was perhaps the only hope that the Soviets had to supplant or replace the information processing power of the price mechanism found in the West. I believe that had the Soviets held out for another 10 or 20 years, the processing power of computers, coupled with cybernetic theory, might have begun to make a difference in Soviet economic viability. (We are of course leaving aside questions of morality and democracy etc..)
As evidence for this point of view, the well known cyberneticist (and later a bit of an "enthusiast") Stafford Beer ("Brain of the Firm") spent some time working for socialist Salvador Allende in Chile, with the avowed purpose of increasing governmental command and control of the economy.
The flipside of the view is that cybernetics -- as control science at least, but possibly excluding the worlds of ecology etc. -- has not been popular in the West. I would say that the main reason for this has been that cybernetics is often presented in a rather top-down fashion (thus the Soviets) and managers in the West are somewhat suspicious of giving up their perogatives to central planning, even in their own firms. Lord knows, most execs ensure that industrial engineering and operations research stay where they belong, i.e. on the plant floor.
What is the future? Insofar as cybernetics really is a solid discipline, with a lot to offer, and recognizing that there is a lot of overlap with other management science approaches, could we see an uptick in interest? Overall not a bad thing I think, if one accepts cybernetics as just a form of rationality. Questions of power are another topic entirely.
JHM
Biting the hand that feeds IT
