On the Transformation of Systems

Abstract

How and why things change are topics that have long fascinated thinkers. My purpose, Ovid (1955: 29) wrote two thousand years ago, to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of different kind. He went on to relate still more ancient stories about how out of Chaos a shapeless uncoordinated mass, nothing but weight of lifeless matter, whose ill-assorted elements were indiscriminately heaped together in one place our world was created, how gods took on the form of swan or golden rain, how mortals were metamorphosed into stone and ivory statues into beautiful women. In later centuries scholars used more empirical means to account for such natural transformations as the evolution of the species and social transformations as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Recent decades have seen renewed interest in the transformation of large-scale social systems. Dissatisfaction with theories of progress, which saw humankind moving purposefully and inexorably if by fits and starts toward some particular goal, as well as cyclical theories of social development led scholars to undertake the conceptual analysis and empirical studies which would contribute to our understanding of how societies change. The emphasis in the last three decades on modernization of developing countries gave such scholarship major impetus, besides casting some of it into the mode of social engineering. One important development in our understanding of transformation in societies has been increased reliance on the concept of systems. A system, in brief, is set of components connected by regular and hence predictable patterns of interaction, and