[Dialogue] Social Process Triangle Roots?

[R Williams]

Given what Steve and Wayne have shared, I wonder if a more apt description today might be "social system" rather than "social process."  "Process" seems to be a somewhat linear, one-dimensional word.  "System" on the other hand, as it is used today, seems to indicate the web-like, dynamic inter-relatedness of all the parts into the whole, and allows for the nesting of other systems within the system, as with the various levels of the triangle.  This might also fit nicely into "field" theory.
 
I was not aware that Boulding had worked in this area.  The leading thinkers today are, I would submit, Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer.
 
Randy

--- On Tue, 1/18/11, steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com> wrote:


From: steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Dialogue] Social Process Triangle Roots?
To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Date: Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 12:46 PM


I suspect the intelectual origin of the Social Process Triangles  was with Kenneth Boulding. 

I guess it is widely known that Boulding contributed 2 items to our "lore"
-the image theory regarding behavior change
-the invisible college

not widely known was that he was an originator of general systems thinking.

But, I guess he influenced the development of the triangles, something like this quote:

Partly, as Kenneth Boulding warned, we must be careful not to expect too much from a single theory. "General System Theory does not seek to establish a single, self-contained general theory of practically everything." Such an attempt would be absurd. "All wúe can say about practically everything is almost nothing," Instead, he suggests, that general systems theorists search for an "optimum degree of generality" for each level of abstraction. This optimum degree is not normally reached in classical scientific approaches. His contribution to hierarchy theory is a set of what he calls "levels of theoretical discourse," quoted in "A Paradigm for Complex Systems http://n4bz.org/gst/gst9.htm


Raul Caruso, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Institute of Economic Policy has written about rediscovering his his "triangular theory" of social interactions http://works.bepress.com/raul_caruso/25/ [translate in google]

Lately, I've been studying on and off how the field has evolved. Lately there is a lot of new work constructing simple system models in software like iThink and Stella that are not static but dynamic -you can change a value in one place and it has an impact in other places something like a "pressure point". 

There is a lot of curriculum going on in elementary and high schools that replaces linear and static models with feedback loop logic, that have enough clarity that you can quantify variables and make charts of change in things like population. Here are some articles: http://www.iseesystems.com/Resources/Whitepapers.aspx

It will be interesting to see what John Eps has been working on in his Social Process Triangles workshop in San Antonio for the ToPs network.

-- 
Steve Harrington

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