How do Bouldings 9 System Types Relate to Wilber's 7 Levels of Global Awareness? - Working paper by David M. Boje September 12, 2004 Contact dboje@nmsu.edu

Table 1 - Typology of System Theories

Explanation - One hears a lot about mechanistic versus organic, and closed versus open system theory. Terms like mechanistic and closed, and organic and open (& General System Theory, GST) are used interchangeably. It is important to understand the history of various approaches to system theory, especially if we want to fulfill Lou Pondy’s dream of going beyond open system theory, we need to understand the various types of open system theory and what lies beyond. Table 2 is adapted from Kenneth Boulding’s (1956a, b) nine levels of system complexity:

Table 2 – Relating Levels of System Complexity to System Types

I assume you are somewhat familiar by now with the lower levels of system complexity, up to level four (open systems). Let us move beyond.

Level 5 - Formistic Growth- Pepper (1947) puts level 5 (Formistic/Genetic-societal blueprint growth) systems in the Formistic world hypothesis (see Pepper's Four types in Boje et al 2000 version of this table) It would be interesting to argue that Maruyama's (1963) deviation-amplification (Second Cybernetics) is part of the blueprint growth system model. However, I think that Maruyama is more complicated, a dialectic between deviation-counteraction loops (levels 4 and 5) and deviation-amplification (levels 5 and 6).

Level 6 - Contextualistic/Internal Image System - Both Pepper (1947) and Maruyama (2003) write about contextualism. As Pepper (1934, 1942, 1982) explains it The causal texture of the environment is strands of causal texture, contextualizing processes, and references that are (a) linear, (b) convergent fusion, (c) blocked, or (d) instrumental. There is an inter-rhythmic texture among organizations and institutions in the Type IV turbulent field that is both theatrical and (ante) narrative. It is the textured relations among changing and novel historical events that is the rhythmic contextualism of organization and environment. Historical events spread in time. Read an Example from Enron rhythms..

Level 7 - Dialogic/Symbol Processing Systems - It is time to move beyond the Shannon/Weaver communication model to a more dialogic philosophy of language. Social systems are not machines and not biological systems. Storytelling systems (see Boje, 1991 office supply STORYTELLING ORG SYSTEM study; Boje, 1995 critical postmodern analysis of Disney as TAMARA-land (STORYTELING ORG SYSTEM) ; the 2004 McDonald's, McDonaldland, & McDonaldization series). The more recent work is based in Bakhtin (see Boje's Management Communication Quarterly article on Bakhtin

Level 8 - Marxist/Social Systems - The level 7 language systesm are operative, as well as diverse hierachical social order and opposed ideologies at this lefe; relation between XYZ (knowledge, power, & ethics) is dynamic (Foucault, 1997). At this level the opposing cycles of deviation-amplification and deviation-counteraction (as in levels 5 to 7) are in play.

Level 9 - Vitalist/Transcendent Systems - the spiritual world view, the vitalist world of transcendence was according to von Bertallanffy (1964) deselected by physics when science moved away from level one to the mechanistic revolution (levels 2 & 3), and then into biological-organicist models (level 4), and on into levels 5 and 6. With level 7 discourses of the spirit are dialogic to those of science. The spirituality movement has made its inroads into business ssytems with the Social Darwinism of Spencer in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Now with the revitalization of the spritiual movement in business, as well as in forms of so-called "evangelical capitalism," the transcendent systems play a dialogic role at level 7, a dialectic role in level 8. At level 9, a multiplicity of transcendent worldviews come into play with less complex levels.

The next section looks at global and counter-global systems of capitalism.

Spiral of Becoming GlobalAware - The next cyclic model is more of a spiral, and integrates work by Plato (370 BCE), Hardt and Negri (2001), with Wilber (1996).[i] This cycle of becoming GlobalAware is a spiral, what Nietzsche would call an eternal recurrence. Figure 1 depicts the cycle, and Table 1 summarizes the relevant dualities (either/or logics) within and between each stage.  There are seven stages of becoming GlobalAware.

Figure 2– Cycle of Becoming GlobalAware

7 Stages in the Cycle of Becoming GlobalAware – Each stage of becoming GlobalAware adds its own special differentiation which creates a duality that must be overcome and integrated in the subsequent stage. And the integration can fail and awareness cycles back to some earlier stage.

Stage 1 – Egocentric Isolationism - in premodern times, humanism (science & human rights) began to differentiate and dualize with transcendence (belief in Devine Gods & Goddesses). Ironically, slavery throughout agrarian economies is acceptable.  Plato describes this stage as descending form belief in the one, to belief in the many; the conquest of the many and returning them to oneness, is the challenge of the next several stages. In Western hemisphere the mono-deity religions of Christian/Celtic (and later Protestantism) and Judaism did battle with Islam. In Eastern hemisphere there were many Gods and Goddesses. With the West’s Renaissance, came secular humanism, and the beginning of western versions of Enlightenment, the beginning of modernity (the epoch rooted in science and rationality, and rejecting transcendence). Plato attempts to integrate the transcendence (unity) with immanence (humanism) using rational dialogs.

Stage 2 – Ethnocentric Imperialism - Imperialism is a combination of state sovereignty, and the beginning of corporate power of trading companies. Timocracy (rule of military & sovereign) has yet to be eclipsed by an oligarchy (imperialism by wealthy traders). The dualism between stage 1 and 2 is over the unity of the world (with Transcendent-God or rational-science) and a dim awareness of differentiation between cultures.  Rationality culminates in mechanistic worldview of Newtonian science wedded to the rational empiricism of Enlightenment. Nature is denatured, and all spiritual properties supplanted by rational empirical and mechanistic science. This is the beginning of a postmodern rebellion against Enlightenment. There is growing awareness that the world of modernity has many tribes, but the global philosophy of nation states is still ethnocentric, “join our tribe or be damned.” 

Stage 3 – Script-centric Empire - We rely here on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) distinction between Imperialism (such as Greek, Roman, Spanish, & British) and what becomes Empire (the post-WWII and post-Cold War U.S. Empire). The duality between Stage 2 and 3 is whether to consume by colonizing or to govern the world. Modernity causes a fragmentation of the life world, and there is a struggle to incorporate the many social fragments into some kind of universal pluralism, but democratic imperialism is still stuck between the stages of oligarchy and tyranny. With industrialized economy, modernity has delivered the world from slavery, and released women from patriarchy in order to work in the factories, and oligarchy rules. There is only dim awareness of pluralistic social roles, or what I will call metascripts (the multiplicity of script fragments). In becoming aware of multiple scripts, such as the role of decaying Imperials or emerging Empire to govern the world, oligaric rules of trade, treatises and agreements become increasingly central to globalization. The Dominant script is still Imperial, but there are some vague visions between WWI and WWII of a “League of Nations” that would govern globally. After WWII, the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) begin as institutions. They will become increasingly dominant to the role relations in the script of Empire.  Plato’s oligarchy form of world governance dominates this stage, though there is still forced conversion by military conquest. New scripts are imagined, with more egalitarian, even democratic roles for Superpowers, in the dialectic of Empire and Counter-Empire. The world is still dominated by a mechanistic worldview. Counter-empire resists the dominant script of Empire, with new scripts.

Stage 4 – Net-centric Empire -  After some dim awareness of playing democratic global governance roles (the Devine right of Kings & Queens) in Imperialism and the sovereign right of oligaric transnational corporations in Empire, as corporate rule succeeds nation state rule, a new duality emerges, the worldview of mechanistic-rational science is opposed by the existentialist worldview. I call this the Net-centric stage since rational systems of network power (e.g. Foucault’s panopticon) come to the forefront. Existentialists (e.g. Kierkegaard & Sartre) want to shift these maps into a view where neither nature nor transcendence (deities) is important; instead the world is a flattened network of idea systems and perspectives, none of which (except the existentialist) has centrality. Hardt and Negri’s (2000) book, Empire, is a good example of Net-centric view. They build upon the postmodern theory of Foucault’s carceral network power, where instead of a sovereign center, as in the days of Egocentric or Ethnocentric Imperialism, there is increasingly a decentered map of Empire, criss-crossed by trade pacts such as NAFTA, FTAA, and institutions like WTO, and transnational alliances give institutions like IMF and WB a new role. This is of course the oligarchic governance that Plato envisioned (370 BCE).  Hardt and Negri, however, glimpse the emergence of more postmodern forms of globalization, taking over from the duality of humanism or transcendence (stage 1), and our tribe or be damned (stage 2) and the centralized scripting sociometry (stage 3) of emerging Empire. It should be stressed here that Hardt and Negri (like Plato) point out the tendency to revert to Imperialism, on the part of the United States, something they see as cured by the year 2000. However, I would be remiss if I did not critique this view, that is, with the crisis of 9/11 (collapse of World Trade Towers), fear and panic gripped U.S. Empire, and it is now more Imperial than it was during the cold war battle for world domination in its battle with the former Soviet Union. Plato anticipates that democracy is just one more form of imperialism, and degenerates into its cousin, tyranny. Net-centric adopts the logic of systems theory, where the parts are fragmented integrated by relations, all without spiritual sentimentality. The monological gaze of rational-empiricism, now wed to systems theory, is countered by a call to reenchant the denatured world, which leads us to the emergence of the next stage of becoming GlobalAware. Surely there must be something more than simple fragmentation and location theories in what Wilber calls flatland (a land of locations without transcendence).

Stage 5 – Eco-centric Empire - The forces of this flatland Empire are opposed by many Counter-Empire alliances, one of which is most certainly ecology idea systems. The premise is the Empire operates in Ecology, and like Imperialisms before it, when those resources are destroyed or exhausted, then every Empire will collapse. This is still a disenchanted, highly rational view compatible with industrial science. In the Road to Bottom scenario, the planet’s ecology can collapse, which will also spell doomsday for the human race. There main duality within the Eco-centric stage is between Deep Ecology (e.g. Murray Bookchin) and Ecofeminism.  Ecofeminist is a revival of transcendent religions and spiritual practices that pre-date Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The philosophy of these goddess religions is that Mother Earth is the womb, and that human kind needs to learn to live in harmony with Mother Nature. Deep Ecology is a more male oriented ecology (certainly its major priests are male). Deep Ecology, like Ecofeminism wants to reenchant our appreciation of the earth.  Whereas, Net-centric world view is very lateral in seeing relationships between institutions and corporations and nations, it does not have the transcendent (reenchantment of Earth as spirit) that the Deep Ecology and Ecofeminists practice.  This stage culminates in post-Fordist and post-industrial practices, where the grid of rational empirical science refuses the bid to give flatland a more transcendent dimension. Another stage opens up to accomplish reenchanting the ecology, this time by myth.

Stage 6 – Myth-centric Empire - Myth-centric is a reaction to reenchantment. It extends back to Plato, and the attempt to overcome the duality of the plane of immanence (rational-empiricism) and the transcendent (reenchanting nature). In postmodern critiques of Enlightenment projects, there is still the motto of “no more myths.”  There is a move to return to the ancient archetypes, made popular by Jungian psychology, as well as the imperials of Aztecs, Greeks and Romans. Nature, however, in the Mythic is still disenchanted, into quite a rational interpretation of archetypes. The archetype maps (e.g. Myers-Briggs) are not very spiritual, although there are some attempts to make them so. In fact the battle between Mythic archetypes that are exceedingly rational maps and more spiritual maps becomes the major duality of this stage of becoming GlobalAware. 

Stage 7 – Global Care – Global Care envisions a post-Empire worldview, a sense of sustainability and the obligation of rich to help poor, but it is certainly not realized in contemporary times. The causal understanding here comes from Western as well as Eastern philosophy (that later is more transcendent). An example from Western thought is William James “causal empiricism.” The idea is to get at the root causes behind phenomenon, which takes on into a meditation on consciousness. In Eastern philosophy it is the search for a nondual consciousness, something that is anciently rooted in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain traditions. In the West, William James radical empiricism is as close as one can get to a nondual concept of emptiness. This could be viewed as an Eastern mystic approach to existentialism that is to seeing existence as a vast nothingness (as Sartre writes about it). In East thought, the idea is to meditate to develop consciousness of an empty space, a self-reflection on seeing you observe the world, objects, nature, relations, and sensations. The idea is to see that the self is not an object, and that there is something (perhaps divine) witnessing this conscious space. It is an empty space that embraces the world, so that there is no separation between global and consciousness. A more pragmatic example is the think global and act local motto. The key duality is between Global and Empty consciousness. If you take this path, you become GlobalAware that what you do has consequence for Nature, your sentiments affect world sentiments, and your relation practices locally affect global practices. 

From here the spiral repeats, beginning at stage one, and the duality is between nonduality and more egocentric narcissism.  Figure 1 present a spiral model of becoming GlobalAware, and at each stage, it is possible to revert to the previous duality battles.