BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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AFFILIATION 1)4)

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F. ROBB resumes as follows G. AHRNE's concept of affiliation (in his critique of this author's book in Syst. Practice and Action Res.12(3), p. 312):

"People are related (in organizations) by "affiliation ", which is usually compulsory in the cases of kinship and citizenship and which is usually entered into by choice in other cases (i.e. in entreprises and voluntary organizations) "Affiliation allows access to certain material resources accumulated by the organization and it entails the performance of some more or less well-defined obligations.

Almost all goods…are owned and controlled by organizations. Hence, if people want to have access to anything more than the most simple goods, they have to join organizations, and promise to come back again.

"To become an "affiliate", you have to be admitted, perhaps by passing some test, and to be recognized by others in the organization as having a unique identity: but only an identity in relation to the organization. You have to exchange a loss of some autonomy for access to the organization's collective resources and power, you have to promise to submit to surveillance, recorded control, and coercion, and you must return to the organization. But all affiliates are substitutable, no one is indispensable to the viable organization"

While in this description affiliates are human, members of human organizations, it is obvious that affiliation is a feature in different forms of all elements of all types of systems, from cells in the living being to ants in the anthill. It is in fact a basic feature of sociality.

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Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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