Sociocybernetics

Abstract

Sociocybernetics consists of applications of first- and second-order cybernetics, and their further theoretical development, within the social sciences. First-order cybernetics originated in the 1940s, especially in the hard sciences, and second-order cybernetics in the 1970s, especially in biology and the social sciences, in reaction to what what was perceived as the overly mechanistic character of first-order cybernetics. This article concentrates on second-order cybernetics, and discusses the usefulness and theoretical underpinnings of its five main concepts: (a) self-organization, including a discussion of cognitivism vs. connectionism; (b) self-reference, with self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies as special examples; (c) self-steering, and the importance of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety; (d) autocatalysis and cross-catalysis, e.g., Prigogine's Brusselator; (e) autopoiesis, a biological concept presently applied to the social sciences. Finally, the methodological difficulties are described when applying these theoretical concepts in empirical social science research, and testing hypotheses derived from second-order cybernetics. Nevertheless, the shift from first- to second-order cybernetics is in line with the transition from a mechanistic and deterministic Newtonian world view (stability, order, uniformity, equilibrium, linear relationships between or within closed systems) to a modern one, reflecting accelerated social change, which stresses disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, and nonlinear relationships between open systems.