Reading about systems is a little strange, only because I’m so used to them being inherent in different organizations — from larger structures like libraries and classes to smaller things like my own file cabinet. Speaking of organizations, the Ackoff reading made me pause with the assertion that “an organization consists of elements that have and can exercise their own wills.”

It makes sense, but my impulse was immediately to argue — I work at a library, in which there are definitely elements that have and can exercise their own wills, but often do not due to the larger system that encompasses them. The argument isn’t that the elements do exercise their own wills, just that they can, and that they have a common purpose.

Boulding’s article was entertaining — to quote, “One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.” And the skeleton metaphor in his conclusion was helpful, if a little overextended. He makes a good point about the “unwilligness of science [...] to shut the door on problems and subject matters which do not fit easily into simple mechanical schemes.” I think this is something I’ve been struggling with as well — when things don’t fit neatly into a map or system, it’s more difficult for me and my ultra-linear brain to try and arrange them into a pattern that makes sense.

In this course I’m finding that I tend to apply the concepts to much smaller-scale scenarios than things like e-Choupal and Indian women – e.g., when the sentence “control is exercised when sending a message,” is presented, I immediately think of group work at SI. Everyone has run into a problematic group member at some point, it seems, and speaking or writing to those group members is always a laborious process — what to say; how to say it; and whether anything should be said at all. Or: how to encode, what to encode, and whether to transmit the message.

Transmitting the message so that it is received as intended seems to be where this comparison runs into an issue, though — there’s not much one can do to force specific readings or interpretations of the message.

e-Choupal is a good example of a company working with a community to improve its conditions, but I don’t think one can extract from an individual example that “companies with extra cash is a good thing.” While it’s true that some companies may invest in providing micro-finance and computer access, looking to other major corporations (Wal-Mart, Nike, etc.) doesn’t paint a particularly glowing portrait of well-off companies or suggest that all companies with extra cash lead to investment in communities and thus to the empowerment of women.

“Virtuous circle” is an interesting phrase and one that had never occurred to me — “vicious circle,” of course, but never its opposite.

Thinking about topics for the group project, I’m leaning toward doing something with collection policies in various library settings. Especially in light of Banned Books Week, it’s been on my mind a lot. Living in Idaho, I got to see a lot of uproar over books in the library system — when a parent left their child unattended in the Nampa Public Library, the child managed to pull “The Joy of Gay Sex” off the shelf, much to the parent’s chagrin. The Idaho Values Alliance sprang up to rally against the library’s inclusion of “pornographic materials.” The Nampa Public Library declined to remove the book and instead moved it to a higher shelf, but it’s one of those issues that I wonder about a lot — how public collections are controlled and what forces exert control over them. (The Idaho Values Alliance is not particularly powerful, as far as I know.)