The turbulent‐field environment of sociotechnical systems: Beyond metaphor

This article deals with the levels of the organization, the society, and the supranational system of living systems theory. The reasons for and bases of extending the idea of the turbulent-field environment of sociotechnical systems are briefly noted. The familiar information-decision-action-feedback model is expanded in terms of kinds of uncertainty, the cognitive models of decision makers, and the counterintuitive effects of seemingly straightforward and rational decisions. The concept of turbulence is specified more fully via recent work on chaos, and the possibly unexpected and drastic effects of decision making in complex systems are explicated via the concepts of attractors, epigenetic landscapes, and basins of attraction. The structural stability/instability of systems and environments is then defined in terms of order parameter, potential functions, and catastrophe-theory models. This approach is continued using dissipative-structure theory. Two illustrative cases of real-world turbulence, the destruction of the ozone layer and the generation of social networks in migration, are next presented. It is considered likely that environmental turbulence will expand greatly both qualitatively and quantitatively and, if present trends and parctices continue, will be decreasingly beyond human understanding and control.

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