COMMUNICATION (Line of) 1)4)
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K. BOULDING stated that the lines of communication "& grow at a much slower rate than the total organization. Hence organizations eventually limit their growth by the sheer difficulty in getting communications from the surface" of the organization, where it is contact with its environment, into the decision-makers who are not in direct contact with the environment, but have to make decisions on base of increasingly less realistic images of the world" 1972, p.70-71).
Organizations, and also other kinds of social systems react to this problem in two different ways, none of them totally satisfying:
- increasing hierarchic centralization, which educes the general adaptability of the system.
- admitting more decentralization, which may produce in very large systems a tendency to fractioning and eventual disintegration.
The subject is also related, in more general terms, to the subject of interrelations between "Growth and Form" (d'ARCY W. THOMPSON – reed.1952).
Categories
- 1) General information
- 2) Methodology or model
- 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
- 4) Human sciences
- 5) Discipline oriented
Publisher
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).
To cite this page, please use the following information:
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]
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