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Self-construction of desirable social systems

Raul Espejo

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Self-construction of desirable
social systems

Self-construction
of desirable
social systems

Raul Espejo

University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, Lincoln, UK

949

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Keywords Cybernetics, Social systems, Organization

Abstract Social systems are produced by people's interactions. They are by and large the
outcome of self-organising processes, which often produce undesirable properties like corruption,
violence and other forms of social malaise. Yet, we want transparent, fair and effective social
systems. Explores some of the issues involved in the production of desirable social systems. It is
argued that this production requires more than self-organisation, it requires also the participants'
awareness of the processes grounding their purposes and values in social reality and the use of
this awareness to steer their recurrent interactions towards the production of a desirable social
system. This is called a process of self-construction. Understanding this process requires clarifying
the role of organisation in the transformation of collectives into social systems. In the end, more
than clarification, this paper offers a research agenda.

Introduction
Social systems are produced by people's interactions. They are by and large the
outcome of self-organising processes, which often produce undesirable properties
like corruption, violence and other forms of social malaise. Yet, we want
transparent, fair and effective social systems. In this paper we explore some of
the issues involved in the production of desirable social systems. We will argue
that this production requires more than self-organisation, it requires also the
participants' awareness of the processes grounding their purposes and values in
social reality and the use of this awareness to steer their recurrent interactions
towards the production of a desirable social system. This is what we may call a
process of self-construction. Understanding this process requires clarifying the
role of organisation in the transformation of collectives into social systems.
In this paper we first introduce complexity as an important concept
underpinning the construction of social systems. Second, we focus on the
organisation of social systems. Social systems emerge from people's
interactions, but these interactions may be the outcome of poorly or well
structured organisational processes. An effective organisation offers
opportunities for self-reflection and increases flexibility and capacity for
appropriate action. Third, having established at a general level the
requirements for an organisation to build up its complexity, that is, its
bodyhood, we explain the problem of producing desirable social systems. This
production requires social systems with organisations capable of aligning their
emergent identities with their declared purposes. This alignment depends on
learning processes. Learning is a generative mechanism for increasing and
decreasing the complexity of social systems as they co-evolve within their
medium. It is a mechanism for producing desirable functional capacity. Finally,
we explain structural aspects of this generative mechanism. We will argue that

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Vol. 29 No. 7/8, 2000, pp. 949-963.
# MCB University Press, 0368-492X

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950

the components of a social system should be determined by its declared

purposes and moreover that alignment requires constituting these components
as autonomous social systems which, in their turn, constitute their components
as autonomous units and so forth. This is the idea of recursive organisations.
Complexity: language, conversations and grounding
What is complexity? Something complex is not the same as something
complicated. In a particular situation understanding the behaviour of many
dynamically interrelated variables may be very complicated, but not necessarily
complex. In such a situation a good model of the situation may be enough for us
to manage it with a relatively small number of alternative actions or responses.
This is the case, for instance, of a general manager who often has a limited
number of alternative actions to deal with complicated policy issues. For him/her
the situation is complicated but not complex. It is complex for the organisation
coping with the details of the policy issues. Therefore a situation is complex if
dealing with it requires a very large number of actions or responses, even if each
situational state is very uncomplicated. For instance, we may assess the
performance of a computer as complex simply because it has the capacity to
produce differentiated responses for a very large number of possible states, even
though each of the states may be just a string of noughts and ones.
Complexity as detail rather than as complication can be related to Ashby's
concept of variety (Ashby, 1964). Variety is defined as the ``number of possible
states of a situation''. It relates to the idea of possibilities and proliferates even
for relatively simple situations. For instance, the number of possible patterns of
interaction in time among seven people is 242, but naturally the number of
actual patterns we observe in such a situation is much lower. This is the
situational complexity for us. In spite of the very large number of possibilities
(i.e. variety), we only see a handful. Our complexity in this situation evolves
from the distinctions we can make, but the distinctions we need to make relate
to the required actions to perform satisfactorily in that situation over time.
More stringent performance requirements will force us to make more
distinctions and produce more actions.
At a personal level a more demanding situation will make it necessary for
me to have both a larger capacity to make distinctions and a larger repertoire of
responses. The distinctions I am able to make for which I can produce
differentiated responses define my complexity in this situation. And my
personal complexity is defined by the practices I have incorporated for the
distinctions I have made over time in my multiple domains of being. Of the
many possible futures or variety I have had in time and space, I have
recognised and incorporated the ones precisely defining my current
complexity. I am the outcome of a myriad contingent selections. In this process
of selection I have reconfigured my complexity. But now my personal history,
that is, my grounded experiences, restricts the realistic possibilities for action
that I have in any situation. My abilities to language situations restrict the
distinctions I can make at any point in time. While history relates to my

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incorporated practices bodyhood or complexity language (grounded in my Self-construction

history) relates to my space of possibilities. Indeed, my possibilities, however
of desirable
creative I might be, are restricted by the distinctions (i.e. states) I can invent,
social systems
appreciate and act upon and not by the number of logically possible states,
which are beyond me. Implicit in my language is the possibility of
deconstructing and reconstructing my incorporated practices; hence the
951
possibility of reconfiguring my complexity.
Incorporating distinctions and practices is part of a learning process. As this
happens some of my practices may become transparent to me; they are already
part of my bodyhood. These distinctions and practices are my detailed
complexity or the complexity in my operational domain. For instance, if I were a
musician I would have started incorporating very simple distinctions and
practices, like notes and scales. It is only after these distinctions and practices
became transparent to me, that is, after I produced them without effort, that
mastering more complicated scores would have became possible, and so forth.
That is, this learning provides me with the platform for further learning.
On the other hand, when this transparency is interrupted by a break and I
have language distinctions I am experiencing variety or complexity in my
informational domain. Languaging these distinctions is creating possible
futures (Espejo, 1994). If as a result of this languaging some old practices
become irrelevant and new practices are incorporated then learning is
occurring and I am developing complexity in my operational domain (Figure 1).
Complexity in the informational domain may help to produce new distinctions
but if these are not supported by action, they are wasted distinctions.
Figure 1 illustrates the interplay of the informational and operational
domains. The thick arrows represent complexity in the operational domain.
They represent our life world, that is our moment-to-moment interactions

Figure 1.
Individual complexity

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952

grounded in our histories. But Figure 1 also illustrates break experiences, that
is variety or complexity in our informational domain. The thin lines in between
the ``person'' and the others represent this complexity. The interplay happens as
we develop awareness of the situation, make new distinctions and develop new
practices. We may reconfigure our complexity in the operational domain or
create new possibilities in the informational domain. Reconfiguring usually
implies questioning the assumptions, values and norms that we take for
granted. Creating new possibilities is usually the outcome of conversations for
possibilities. This is the process by which we invent the world (Winograd and
Flores, 1986, p. 65; Espejo et al., 1996, Chapter 7).
In summary, learning takes place when we embody new distinctions and
practices. As these practices become incorporated, our ``bodies'' change. Our
complexity evolves. Once these distinctions and practices are grounded to the
point where they become transparent, this complexity is part of our ``operational
domain'' and therefore ``unseen'' to us. The trigger for this grounding is in our
``informational domain''.
The embodiment of social systems: institutions and organisation
Social complexity
A social system emerges from a collective as we begin to produce and conserve
relationships. Our moment-to-moment interactions take place in a shared
interactive space. If these interactions produce over time stable linguistic
structures, norms and values, a social system is emerging. These stable aspects
give form to our interactions, that is, generate our relationships. Relationships
are the forms underlying our interactions. Through them the identity of a social
system is being established. This identity is what the collective conserve
regardless of the disturbances they might experience. If our interactions fail in
conserving these relationships, the collective cease being that social system
(Maturana, 1988).
As the social system emerges from our interactions it constitutes us as the
roles whose interactions produce the system. Roles are the system's basic
components. Therefore the social system emerges from its roles' interactions and
not from particular individuals. The social system will exist for as long as the
specific forms of their interactions are conserved. This kind of self-production,
where the interacting roles are constituted by the social system emerging from
their interactions, is a form of social autopoiesis (Luhmann, 1995)[1]. It is only
when this recursion happens that we have an autonomous social system;
otherwise it may be argued that there is only a collective of people.
It is apparent that without people constituted as roles, that is, without
resources, there is no social system. There is no energy producing the social
system. People and other resources are instrumental in producing the social
system, but specific people and resources are not essential to its emergence. The
social system is constituted by the roles in interaction, and not by the specific
individuals. They can be any, as long as they conserve established forms of
interaction. There is a process of reciprocal ``structuration''; people in interaction

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are responsible for structuring a social system, which in its turn is responsible for Self-construction
structuring their social roles. Therefore, it is apparent that a collective of people
of desirable
in interaction is not the same as a social system; however, these people (as
social systems
constituted roles) may embody one. It is this embodiment process that often is
unnecessarily costly to us. As we will argue later, emerging social systems are
often either dysfunctional or undesirable. This suggests the need to understand
953
better how to enable the production of desirable social systems[2].
It is in conversations that we co-ordinate our actions with others (Maturana,
1987). The chances for stable social systems increase if these conversations
happen in cultural contexts in which practices have already been encoded, that
is, in contexts in which we communicate effortlessly (almost) ``without the need
for channel capacity''. The stronger this culture is the less channel capacity we
need for routine communications with others (Espejo et al., 1996, Chapter 4)[3].
Indeed, this is complexity that has already been incorporated by the social
system. Existing social contexts make possible our moment-to-moment
conversations and the emergence of social systems[4]. Our tacit culturally
based sharing of distinctions and practices, to the point where we co-ordinate
our actions transparently without apparent effort, enables our contribution to
the emergence of a social system. From the perspective of complexity, these
effortless collective co-ordinations of actions are the system's complexity.
Therefore, when we communicate (almost) without channel capacity we know
there is a social operational domain, supported by a history of learning (Figure
2). But, as we experience breaks and in response create new linguistic
structures and learn new practices, we may become, as we interact, the
components of new emergent social systems. In this process we are operating
in the informational domain of an existing social system. This is the
mechanism for functional differentiation, opening possibilities for new
organised collectives. Through these breaks we are experiencing the system's
variety, that is, the possibility of different futures. It is when breaks happen that
opportunities for different futures emerge. However, these opportunities for
different futures are restricted by what we want to conserve of the system we

Figure 2.
Complexity of social
systems

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954

are producing; any linguistic structures and values perceived as threatening to

its identity are likely to be rejected. We are locked in our history, that is, in our
operational domain. However, we will construe our break experiences in one
form or another and sometimes ground them into new practices through our
conversations, thus developing the system's complexity. Of course, it may also
happen, as we respond to breaks, that we lose already learned practices. Indeed,
at a global level we lose every year several languages!
The trend in modern societies is towards increased complexity. We are
constantly witnessing an increased functional differentiation, responsible for
more and more specialised conversations and related linguistic structures. This
means that in modern societies we have an increased number of embedded
social systems, each of them constituting new roles from which emerge
new social systems with their own identities. This trend may be a positive
feature of social evolution but it may also be responsible for our increased
fragmentation. In this increasingly more complex world it may become more
and more difficult aligning the purposes and values of new systems with those
of existing social systems.
Institutions and organisation
Institutions, that is, collectives formally constituted and created for a purpose,
may or may not support the evolution of desirable social systems. We will
argue that supporting the evolution desirable social systems requires, first,
understanding the systemic meaning of these institutions and, second, that
they have learning capabilities. If their resources remain fragmented from other
resources necessary to produce their intended meanings they may never
produce desirable social systems. If their relationships are rigid and inflexible
they may never produce desirable social systems.
To support our discussion of desirable social systems we need one further
distinction. This is organisation. Organisation is defined as a closed network of
people in interaction creating, regulating and producing its social meanings[5].
If a collective achieves this closure it is producing a social system, regardless of
whether it is a formal institution or not, or whether it is producing its intended
meaning or not. But the challenge is achieving an organisation with the
capacity to produce the intended meanings of the collective. Organisation may
transform a collective into a social system. But, how difficult is it for a
collective to create, regulate and produce its intended meanings? Perhaps most
collectives, in particular public institutions, run short of these requirements.
Too commonly they fail to produce their intended meanings. They lack an
effective organisation. The most common situation is institutions lacking to
different degrees the necessary resources and relations, that is the structure, to
create, regulate and produce their own meanings. This is an outcome of
institutional fragmentation. Public institutions are perhaps the clearest
example of this; a ministry may wish to create a meaning for the sector it
represents (e.g. Health) but may fail to do that. It lacks capacity to produce an
effective organisation out of its relations with those other institutions

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responsible for regulating and producing health. The necessary resources to Self-construction
create, regulate and produce health are fragmented in different weakly related
of desirable
institutions. Other institutions, like, for instance, business enterprises, may
social systems
have themselves resources to create, regulate and produce their tasks, but still
may be unable to produce their intended social meanings. Their structures may
be unfit or inadequate for the purpose. The challenge is establishing the scope
955
for designing effective organisations able to produce desirable social systems.
It is important to deal with the problem of meaning creation avoiding the
reification of social systems. We create social meanings in our moment-tomoment interactions. These are their purposes-in-use. But our espoused
purposes are often very different. The challenge is bootstrapping our espoused
purposes in the complexity of social processes so that they become purposes-inuse. Social systems by definition are self-constructed, that is, their meanings-inuse are created and produced by themselves. In this sense they are purposeful
human activities. On the other hand, it is common for institutions to have their
espoused purposes defined for them by others. Others impose these meanings
on them. They are purposive rather than purposeful. The implication, most
likely, is a mismatch between the self-constructed purposes and the externally
imposed purposes. There is structural fragmentation between those creating
meanings and those producing them. Overcoming this fragmentation is the
relevance of effective organisation in the embodiment of social systems.
An implication of this purposeful nature of social systems is the need for
coherence between their informational and operational domains. It becomes
necessary to relate their choices and decisions to the bodyhood necessary to
produce these desirable meanings. To facilitate this we need to appreciate the
complexity of our social systems. We need to become conscious actors of our
social construction; we need to become aware of our own organisation. We need
to appreciate our shared communication spaces in which our conversations are
grounded into shared practices.
The alignment of the operational and informational domains becomes an issue
only if there is awareness of social meanings. For a system without self-awareness
this alignment is not a problem. Its identity evolves naturally as break experiences
are grounded in its bodyhood. But, for us as self-aware roles constituting a system,
there is the clear possibility that our constructs in the information domain, as we
ascribe and agree purposes (that is, meanings), are inconsistent with the constructs
emerging from the system's bodyhood. There is a need for alignment.
Producing desirable systems
Processes underpinning the transformation of collectives into social systems
are often painful and difficult. This transformation is the outcome of selforganising processes in which all of us spend much time and effort. We learn
one way or the other. But, it makes sense to make this learning less painful.
Achieving this kind of learning requires the effective embodiment of social
systems. This is the process of creating desirable organisational complexity.

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When our interactions produce a social system they get locked in particular
forms or relationships. We, as roles in interaction, increasingly see the need to
conserve the relationships producing the system's identity. As this learning
happens the system becomes locked in particular linguistic structures and
paradoxically it becomes less able to learn. This is particularly problematic if
we are producing a dysfunctional social system. It is there to stay! Overcoming
this all too common problem of social sclerosis is the concern of selfconstruction. Self-construction implies the conscious participation in the
creation and production of social meanings.
We as roles need to produce social systems that enable us in creating and
producing desirable social systems. This is in contrast to the more common
situation where we tacitly operate in restricting systems producing undesirable
and unchangeable meanings. We need structures that allow us to bootstrap our
desired meanings, values and norms in the system's operations. The dilemma
is that often this bootstrapping means finding the way to produce a different
system altogether. We need to change the system's identity. This kind of
double loop learning (Argyris and Schon, 1978) is particularly difficult when
the social system does not have capacity for self-reflection. This is a major
obstacle for double loop organisational learning (Kim, 1993; Espejo et al., 1996).
There are multiple reasons why institutions become locked into rigid linguistic
structures, adding to the cost of producing desirable social systems. Here I only
point to this issue, but this is an aspect that requires far more study.
Society relies on institutions to conserve aspects that it considers worth
conserving. But often institutions evolve as dysfunctional social systems. They
lack an appreciation of the wider frameworks they ought to be parts of and
therefore of their systemic roles in the creation of desirable social meanings.
This makes it more difficult for them to appreciate what it is they must
conserve. It is socially necessary ``to see'' and develop desirable social systems
beyond institutions. It is the organisation of these desirable systems that must
have the capacity to create, regulate and produce their tasks. Once these
functional capacities are embodied in desirable social system we have together
in one body the generative mechanism for reflecting about identity and
producing it. If effectively structured this is a learning device of major social
significance (Beer, 1979, 1985).
No doubt the cohesion of biological systems is stronger than that of
collectives, but social cohesion, when based on systems of meanings produced
by constituted roles, is strong as well, as is made apparent by the systems
produced by religious beliefs and values. Roles' interactions, and not specific
individuals, give cohesion to social systems. We may defect from our systems
but our roles may be constituted again and again. The challenge for collectives,
and also for existing social systems, is learning how to constitute roles whose
interactions produce desirable social systems.
Whether a social system will emerge from particular networks of
interactions in a collective is an empirical matter. Often space and geography
are offered as a source of cohesion, and indeed we can witness the cohesion and

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identity of nations and communities throughout the world. However, in Self-construction

multicultural societies, when the essential diversity of the collective is not
of desirable
recognised, conflicts and wars may also emerge from these interactions. But,
social systems
we still are far from knowing what kinds of interactions produce a desirable
operational closure, that is, a social system with desirable properties. For
instance in communities with social problems, it is more likely that people's
957
interactions focused on ``survival networks'' rather than on arbitrary
neighbourhoods will produce ``operational closure'' (Vahl, 1997). In other words,
in a modern society it is more likely that social cohesion will be the outcome of
conserving social interests like sports, child care, employment and so forth,
than of conserving spatial proximity. People's local presence, for instance, is
not enough for getting them involved in community work. Of course, social
systems are realised by individuals, and they would not be possible if they
were not there, but they are more likely to emerge as a result of people
conserving rich linguistic structures, such as those for ``survival networks'',
than as a result of conserving local proximity. In a multicultural, diverse
community, individuals are likely to feel they have less in common with others
locally than with those sharing history and values. In order to develop
bodyhood it is critical that resources are related to ``aspects of conservation'',
around which people see the point in co-operating. This identity is more likely
to emerge if people's interactions are supported by an effective organisation.
If we as observers distinguish an identity we can be sure that, however weak
and poorly structured it might be, there is already an organisation producing it.
Most commonly these organisations are unintended and emerge from the
fragmentation of the resources necessary to produce the intended meanings.
However, wherever there is a stable linguistic structure there is some form of
organisation behind it. In order to enable the development of socially desirable
systems we need to understand how to produce an effective alignment of
resources with desirable social meanings. This is an important research
programme for the future (de Zeeuw, 1996).
It is apparent that learning is necessary for this alignment to take place.
First, we as individuals need to learn new distinctions and practices to interact
effectively with those producing with us our social systems. Second,
institutions need to learn to align their resources with those of other institutions
in order to produce desirable social systems. And, third, social systems need to
learn to align their own linguistic structures with those of the social systems
they accept to belong to. These alignments and learning processes have
profound social implications for individuals, institutions and social systems.
Against these alignments are the mismatches between our espoused meanings,
values and norms in the informational domain and the meanings, values and
norms emerging in the operational domain of our social institutions as an
outcome of the resources that society has allocated to sustain them. When
resources are inadequate institutional norms-in-use are unlikely to be
consistent with those we espouse in our informational domain. Particularly this
is a problem if others impose these espoused meanings on us. This is where an

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effective organisation structure is critical. It allows us to achieve, at least cost,

the social systems we want to have and maintain. We need to learn to overcome
the many obstacles for individual and organisational learning. These are
obstacles limiting bodyhood development, that is, limiting the structuring of
the necessary organisation to realise desirable social systems.

958

Structural aspects of complexity: the construction of complexity

Developing skills to account for our complexity and the complexity of systems
may help in bridging the gap between espoused theories and theories-in-use.
This accounting is a means for anticipating problems and supporting
necessary learning. It gives us an awareness of the gap between the existing
complexity and the required complexity to produce desirable change. Our lack
of appreciation of complexity must be responsible for multiple interpersonal
and institutional problems, adding to costs and unfairness in society. We must
do much more in terms of increasing this awareness.
For us this accounting is not only about how complicated our decisions are,
but also about how much bodyhood (i.e. complexity) our systems need to
develop in order to carry out their tasks[6]. Producing desirable meanings
under stringent performance criteria depends on already incorporated
distinctions and practices. In relative terms, experiencing many breaks
suggests high variety (in the information domain) and low complexity (in the
operational domain). These breaks might be a symptom that not enough
practices have been incorporated. Based on this idea, we can say that the
multitude of moment-to-moment transactions already incorporated in the
operational domain of a traditional institution may make its complexity much
larger than that of a similar but younger institution. The latter may be facing in
relative terms more ``breaks'' than the traditional one (that is, is experiencing a
much larger variety), something which gives it the chance of being more future
oriented, but also may be suffering more the consequences of a ``smaller''
operational domain of already incorporated practices. The same is the case for
politicians and senior managers. They have far more complexity in the
informational than the operational domains of their institutions. They see their
institutions' ``variety'' rather than complexity. This complexity is likely to be
very small for them as they rely on others to do whatever they do. Therefore,
while the (institutional) task complexity of a chief executive is likely to be very
large, his/her personal complexity in this domain is likely to be very small. He/
she is not dealing directly with all the already incorporated practices (like
paying bills, sending orders to suppliers and the like). The executive's activities
are more likely to be focused on the organisation's informational domain, where
he/she will be dealing with a relatively small number of (complicated)
distinctions and related responses, for which learning is necessary. His/her
action is focused on the organisation's variety rather than on the organisation's
complexity.
The issue is that in order to manage social change it is necessary to account
for the system's complexity in both the operational and informational domains

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and not only in the latter as often happens. Indeed it is a common experience for Self-construction
people to commit themselves to implement change without recognising the
of desirable
system's relevant complexity in its operational domain. At the personal level, if
social systems
we want to do something physically demanding, where our lives may be at
risk, we will account for our built-up practices and see that we can cope with
the requisite stretching. Organisationally, this complexity is less easy to
959
account for and often we see that politicians and managers commit their
institutions to perform tasks for which they have not developed the requisite
complexity. This is often referred to as the ``problem of implementation''. They
fail to account for the organisation's complexity.
In social terms the problem is to assess whether a social system has
developed or can develop the necessary bodyhood to produce from within
particular meanings or purposes. A system structurally coupled with its
medium has as a matter of fact operational stability in it but not necessarily to
produce these particular meanings. This implies that there is a system but not
necessarily the one implied by the ascribed purposes. The system's identity is
grounded in its components' relationships and this is much deeper than any
purpose ascribed to it in its informational domain. On the other hand, if we as
participants are aware of this identity we can create many possible meanings.
If what we consciously conserve is a relevant core competence then the chances
are that many purposes and related tasks will be possible (without threatening
what we want to conserve). On the other hand, if we attempt to conserve a
particular task (rather than a core competence) we may lock the system in an
inflexible situation, that is, in social irrelevance. When we are engaged in the
self-construction of a social system we need awareness of what we are
conserving and producing.
Creating an institution requires more than providing it with resources.
Resources are necessary but not sufficient to have a system. They need to be
underpinned by relationships to become a social system. That some form of
identity will emerge from the resources allocated to an institution is not the
issue; the issue is its institutional quality. It may fail to produce socially
desirable meanings or it may be dysfunctional to the wider systems it accepts
or needs belonging to. It can be argued that violence, tensions and other
undesirable meanings are the result of a poor understanding of meaning
creation processes (self-construction). Unreasonable external impositions and
fragmentation of resources may be responsible for an inadequate development
of an institution's bodyhood. In either case, empirically, we may not recognise
operational closure, that is, a coherent whole with a large capacity to absorb
environmental and internal variations.
Behind unreasonable external impositions we may find big communication
gaps between those creating and those producing social meanings. This is one
of the problems we find in democratic processes in modern societies, where
people often feel alienated and unable to contribute to the global processes for
meaning creation, leaving them in the hands of a few politicians. Global
purposes are likely to be seen as remote and far from an individual's concerns.

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People may feel alienated and unable to understand what is going on. It is
necessary to bridge this gulf in communications. The solution we are offering
to overcome these problems is enabling effective self-construction processes.
Self-organisation processes the ones that dominate social construction are
distinctly inadequate and costly. They produce many dysfunctional social
systems with undesirable properties that add to cost and pain.
A system's meaning is produced by the interactions of its components. But
which are these components? Are they just individuals as roles as suggested so
far or are there other components as well? What is the case for a complex
society or a global corporation? We can hypothesise more complex structures.
Our interactions produce social systems that are constituted as roles of larger
social systems and so forth. From the other side general social meanings
constitute subsumed autonomous units (roles), which themselves constitute
subsumed autonomous units and so forth. This constitution/unfolding of
complexity is at the core of the recursive organisation of social systems (Beer,
1979, 1985). However, their alignment depends on being aware of the meanings
we want to produce. Working out which are/ought to be these components in
complex societies is a major challenge. This has important implications for the
production of desirable social meanings.
A complex task is only possible if functional specialisation takes place.
This specialisation is responsible for a variety of social systems. Are all these
systems desirable? Often within institutions we find professional functional
specialisation. In large corporations, for instance, we find accountants and
lawyers working harder to conserve their professional functional
specialisation than the enterprise's viability. While both types of professions
are important in modern enterprises, it would appear that functional
specialisation in, say, a manufacturing organisation, should happen along its
core competencies and not along such professions. In other words, it makes no
sense to restrict organisational change within a manufacturing enterprise in
order to conserve, per se, the values and norms of the accountancy profession.
Its bodyhood will be experiencing the cancerous development of
dysfunctional resources. When this specialisation happens, the organisation
suffers fragmentation hindering its capacity to learn and develop bodyhood
in those aspects that are relevant to its purposes[7]. Hence, constitution/
unfolding should be of primary activities, that is, of subsumed systems
producing through their interactions the system's intended meaning, and not
of subsumed autonomous regulatory functions (Espejo and Harnden, 1989).
The production of the products and services implied by the system's declared
purposes should rely on autonomous units with their own purposes (for an
effective bodyhood development) producing the system's purposes. It is this
reflexive and recursive aspect of purposes that may allow systems to develop
a healthy organisation.
A system's complexity is built up over time as its roles language breaks and
develops related practices. The codes and maps they create over time provide
the context for their co-ordination of actions. This is the system's operational

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domain. However, experiencing breaks is the engine for learning. The Self-construction
embodied operational domain for those ``over-viewing'' this system is that of its
of desirable
subsumed systems (i.e. components). The management of breaks in these
social systems
subsumed systems is, to a large extent, transparent to them. The implication of
this structural recursion is subsumed autonomous units, incorporating
practices in their operational domains and experiencing breaks in their own
961
informational domains. This is repeated as many times as necessary to absorb
in full the complexity of their self-constructed tasks. This implies that the
operational domain of a system is the outcome of recursive learning processes.
The transparency experienced by people is the outcome of their structural
position in the organisations, rather than the outcome of already fully grounded
practices. The transparency they experience is built on top of the breaks of all
those who are experiencing the variety of their realities at different levels of the
structural recursion.
All (primary) components in a social system need to have capacity to create,
regulate and produce their own meanings. If this were not the case the
subsumed units would not be systems and therefore they would lack the
learning capabilities necessary for building up an effective bodyhood. And,
lack of awareness of people about the processes producing meanings increases
the chances that unwittingly their contributions will be counterproductive. It is
in this sense that we are arguing for self-construction rather than just selforganisation.
Conclusion: an overview
This paper has offered an approach to understanding social systems. This
approach relies on an appreciation of complexity. Complexity in the operational
domain has been related to our history of incorporated practices over time.
Variety or complexity in the informational domain has been related to future
possibilities at each moment in time. Learning has been presented as a process
of incorporation, which requires resources and organisation.
Social systems emerge from people's interactions. It is collectives who
provide the resources and energy for these systems to emerge. To a large
degree this emergence is the outcome of self-organising processes. However, in
modern societies, we have argued, self-organisation is not enough; beyond it,
self-construction is necessary to avoid dysfunctional systems and speed up the
emergence of desirable social systems. We need to account for a growing, but
often inflexible, functional differentiation. Institutions of different kinds,
because of their fragmented origins, lock social systems into inflexible
arrangements reducing their capacity to learn. They may have succeeded in
creating social systems with the capacity to produce themselves, but not in
producing what is socially desirable over time.
It has been emphasised that there is the need to talk about social systems
rather than institutions. Social systems have been presented as closed networks
of interrelated roles, purposefully creating meanings. It has been proposed that
collectives become social systems when they develop the capacity to create,

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962

regulate and produce their meanings. By this definition they are selfconstructed. In the end the challenge is harnessing self-organisation processes
towards the production of desirable social systems.
Notes
1. It is at the level of roles' interactions that social systems can be seen as self-producing, that
is, as autopoietic. This argument for social autopoiesis is based on Maturana and Varela's
biological autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1980).
2. In this paper we only advance preliminary ideas about this production. We suggest this as
a key topic for further research at the core of social transformation processes.
3. Most of our interactions with others take place indirectly by the simple fact of sharing a
common culture. In these indirect interactions we make distinctions and recognise new
practices; thus we build up our operational complexity. This is a kind of ``communications
without channel capacity''.
4. According to Maturana, conversations are interactions in which people braid language and
emotions. For example, when a family constitutes itself as a social system in conversation,
the languaging of their interactions is modulated by emotions like love and solidarity.
While their language is the outcome of a long-term social codification of distinctions, their
conversations make them apparent with particular emotions. If they maintain cohesion
over time, that is, if they conserve the forms of their interactions without loss of cohesion,
they are enabling the emergence of a social system. Otherwise they are only a collective. In
any case, the social codification of distinctions is the result of learning processes where
people have learned to operate together in a shared context.
5. These meanings are those emerging from its components' interactions rather than those
ascribed by people to the social system.
6. As anticipated in another footnote, the idea of task we are using is very much related to the
idea of meaning creation. Our assumption is that meaning implies some form of
transformation and that making this transformation happen is the task. A related concept
is that of performance. While we are aware that these are very much managerial concepts,
we think that they have a wider social relevance and that it is worth exploring this
extension.
7. Therefore an embedded social system may support through its constituted interactions the
embodiment of several social systems. This is an issue that requires further attention.
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European Management Journal, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 414-22.

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Espejo, R. and Harnden, R. (Eds) (1989), The Viable System Model. Interpretations and
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