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BOOK OVERVIEW
1. INTRODUCTION
We all participate in and are affected by the behavior of social systems. We will define social systems precisely later but, in brief, we mean collections of individuals interacting with each other. It could be a small group like a sports team, a work group or musicians in a band. It could be a larger, more impersonal organization, such as a corporation or the stock market, or it may be a very large social system like a city, a country or a political party.
In most of these systems we understand well enough their day to day behavior, and we can do a fairly good prediction of future behavior. In essence, we examine today's behavior, extrapolate it based on past performance, and then add in future events that we can anticipate. Thus, we can forecast demographic trends by knowing the present population and the rates of births and deaths. Similarly, we make economic forecasts or product sales estimates by extrapolating past behavior and then allowing for new future events such as the rapid growth of, say, internet shopping.
Such forecasting often gives reasonable results. What it does not allow for is a major change in the character of a social system—fundamental changes, for example, resulting from the appearance of the iPod, iPhone, or iPad and the revolution in the music market, or the collapse of financial bubbles, whether it be tulips in the Dutch markets in the seventeenth century or housing in the recent major recession. On a much smaller scale, it can be the sudden turnaround of sports teams as in teams that have come back in playoffs after being behind three games to zero. Other examples include corporate collapses such as Enron or AIG. Such outcomes are the result of major and relatively sudden changes that move the social system under consideration into a new state.
It is our objective to provide a basis for understanding such large changes and increase our ability to predict them and perhaps offering an analysis that can affect those changes directly.
We first define what we mean by a major change of state and then present the two variables whose interaction, we will argue, is a prime determinant affecting such major change. We establish from a vast number of studies of virtual discrete systems that there are only four states that a social system may be in—two types of order, or a state of chaos or complexity—and outline the characteristics of these states. The major changes we are interested in are changes from one of these states to another state. We utilize our interpretation of the variables differentiation and centrality, whose definition and measurement have developed in the sociological literature over the past fifty years, and which can help us understand what causes changes in the state of a social system.
We have applied this analysis to the study of economic cycles, corporate histories, evolution of artistic styles, the development of jazz music, the history of social movements among indigenous peoples in North America and small group interactions. We present three of these studies in this book, namely, small groups, business and economic cycles, and changes in art styles before, during, and after the Renaissance.
We begin by describing the four states, based upon studies of virtual discrete systems.
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