Society as a Complex Adaptive System

Abstract

Originally published as Buckley, W. (1 968). Society as a adaptive system, in W. Buckley (ed.), Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist, Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company. Reprinted with kind permission. Although the phrase complex adaptive is one usually thought to have been coined at the Santa Fe Institute sometime during the 1990s, we can see by the title of this classic paper that the systemsoriented social thinker Walter Buckley had already been using the phrase complex adaptive as early as 1968 and with pretty much the same connotations as it is used today. Thus, similar to how the phrase is contemporarily employed, Buckley explicitly crafted complex adaptive to counter an equilibriumbased, closed view of systems which he felt was endemic at the time of his writing this paper. The idea that the dynamics of social systems were dominated by an equilibriumseeking tendency had become entrenched in social thought ever since the great economist Vilfredo Pareto (who, interestingly enough, had also introduced early speculations on power-law type distributions which are so popular today in complexity circles) had enunciated it strongly in his early version of sociology in the late nineteenth century. For Pareto, as was true among most economists at the time (and, as hard to believe as it is, is still so), equilibriumseeking dynamics were at the core of economic theory (for a discussion of the idea of equilibrium-dominating in social and psychological systems, see Goldstein, 1990, 1995). According to Laurence Henderson (1935), himself an early general systems theorist from within the discipline of physiology (and from which Walter Cannon had derived his own notion of physiological homeostasis), Pareto's thesis at the Polytechnic School of Turin was on the mathematical theory of equilibrium in elastic solids. Pareto had it that a social system was bound by equilibrium, as in any mechanical system so constructed, which meant that the system would automatically return to its former state after any sort of perturbation of its key variables (within a certain amount; see the Appendix below for Henderson's mathematical formulation of this understanding of equilibrium). Henderson also indicated how close Pareto's equilibrium model of social systems was to the equilibrium model of physical chemistry put forward and made a keystone of that discipline Le Chatelier. It was against interpretations of social dynamics as being dominated by equilibrium that Buckley offered his inspired exposition of adaptive systems. Unlike a system governed by a propensity to return to equilibrium after being disturbed, and in so doing losing structure as entropy increased, Buckley's adaptive systems built-up structure as they adapted in the face of new internal and external interactions. Buckley's classic paper Society as a Complex Adaptive System (Buckley, 1968) can be seen as providing a useful bridge between the interests of complexity scientists and those of social entrepreneurs as they struggle to apply the concepts of adaptive systems to societal (social) change and innovation. The paper exemplifies the early sociological formulation of the concepts of complexity and system-adaptation in the context of social value creation and societal change. Buckley's career as an American sociologist spanned the micro-meso-macro social divides by bringing a pragmatic understanding to social contexts that both social entrepreneurs and complexity scientists will appreciate. In general, Walter F. Buckley (1922-2006) is considered a pioneer in the field of modern social systems, sociology, and sociocybernetics. His early academic career resulted in the publication of Sociology: A Modern Systems Theory (1967) in which he constructed a foundation for a very contemporary-sounding dynamic, morphogenic conceptualization of coevolving social structures that was not dependent on the ideas of equilibrium- or homeostasis-seeking processes. …