Jaques and the Stratified Systems Theory

With the Canadian-born psychoanalyst and management expert Elliott Jaques, a comprehensive body of insights that explains organizational behaviour was produced under the name of Stratified Systems Theory or SST (Jaques 1976). This is a general theoretical construction of how organizations and human nature affect each other with special reference to bureaucracy. Among other things,

Introduction to the Communication and Information Theory

Communication and information theory was first formulated in telegraph and telephone engineering, which makes it natural that its benefits were first exploited by engineers in this field. Both areas are closely interlinked as the identification of information separated from its context is not possible. It is only idenftifiable as part of a communication situation with

Basic concepts of communication theory

The theoretical problem of communication is possible to define as: to make a representation in one place of a presentation already existing in another place. This formulation is, however, not complete as the communication process often is used to disinform or deceive a receiver. To get a total definition the words trustful or misleading

Interrelations between time, place and channel of communication

In reality, time and place influence all other parameters of a commu- nication situation. If these concepts are combined, an arrangement like Table 4.2 can be created and some different situations of communication defined. From the table with its comments it is possible to see how environmental factors and needs determine choice of and

Shannon’s classical theory of communication

In his paper from 1948, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon presents the foundation of classical communication theory and differentiates between three conceptual levels: the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. As we will see, these levels can be adapted to all main concepts within information theory, such as noise, redundancy, etc. The syntactic level,

Basic concepts of information theory

Information theory is concerned with the problem of how to measure changes in information or knowledge content. It is based on the fact that we can represent our experience by the use of symbols like the alphabet, pictures, etc. Generally, we only need information when faced with some kind of choice. If you know

Information, exformation and entropy

Apart from the above-presented perspectives on information, two views are predominant among researchers. The mathematical/ statistical view is primarily used in connection with telecommunications and databases to quantify and measure channel and storage capacity for information exchange and processing. This concept has no epistemological aims to explain the nature of information. It was used

How to measure information

If information is to be treated scientifically rather than philosophically it has to be expressed numerically and quantitatively and not be interpreted as synonymous with meaning. Much confusion is caused by attempts to identify meaning with the change generated in the receiver. What is actually sent is not a measure of the amount of

Entropy and redundancy of information

The natural increasing of entropy in a closed system has its counterpart in the decreasing of information. The fact that information may be dissipated but not gained, is the information theory interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics where entropy becomes the opposite of information. A message may spontaneously lose order during the communication,

Channels, noise and coding information

A communication channel is defined as any physical medium whereby we may transmit or receive information. It may be wire, cable, radio waves or a beam of light. The destination and/or source may be a person or a memory device like a tape or a computer disk. As a matter  of physics, the capacity

Some Theories of Brain and Mind in system perspective

In comparison with other animals, human beings are relatively slow and ineffective. Our physical strength and general performance fall far below that of animals of our own size. The human life-span is also short when compared with such different animals as the elephant or the Galapagos tortoise which limits the amount of human accumulated

The need for consciousness

An important tendency of life on earth is that it resides in individuals separated from each other. Therefore, in the hierarchy of nature, consciousness is found at the level of organisms where highly centralized nervous systems with a brain exist. It is not possible, however, to imagine consciousness without an existing memory. Awareness of

A hierarchy of memory

A crucial step in the development of the human race was the possibility of using a language. It liberated the individual from the compulsion to merely learn from his own experience. We became a new and advanced kind of information processor. Use of natural language presupposes an extensive memory, something which in itself has

Brain models

The human brain uses about 20 per cent of the body’s energy but is just two per cent of its weight. In proportion to the body mass, the brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. It has more than ten thousand million neurons, interconnected by means of a thousand

A model perspective of Brain and Mind

In the past many models of the mind have been constructed in an attempt to explain the phenomena of emotion, learning, perception and behaviour. None of them can however disregard the basic connection between the development of the hand and the brain. Freeing the hands by two-footedness made the brain able to grow. Without

Self-Organization and Evolution in system perspective

An important quality of what we call dead matter is that it organizes itself. It transforms  itself  into  states  of  higher order  and  escapes chaos under its own power if the flow of energy is strong enough. The universe has demonstrated its predisposition to create structures in all scales and kinds from snowflakes to

Evolution as self-organization

The most fundamental evolutionary mechanism is natural selection working together with genetic variation, a kind of decentralized biological trial-and-error method. By definition, selection is the very opposite of randomness. It implies that some qualities are preferred (those enhancing survival) while others are avoided. It reduces the number of possibilities and therefore variation is held

Basic principles of self-organization

Self-organization may be defined as a spontaneous process of development of an organized structure in open systems far from equilibrium. A slightly different definition is: “The evolution of a system from random initial conditions into an organized form in the absence of external pressures”. It may be taken as the opposite of construction. Systems

Some rules of the game for self-organization

Many systems have specific purposes which only can be fulfilled by a high degree of complexity characterized of many parts which interact in a well-regulated fashion. A good example is how a mind could emerge from a collection of mindless parts in the human brain. What we need to understand is not the behaviour

The city as self-organization

The largest known human artifact during history is the city which belongs to the most complex space-time structures existing in the world. Being with us for 6000 years, it represents the rise of civilization and have survived all socio-cultural changes. In the city, new surprises are always waiting around the corner and possibilities exist