On boundaries
Some sub systems are obvious and whilst we are dealing with the natural world we can see many clear boundaries; any surface Note: Water Cycle . When we come to animals, humans included, the boundary between the organism and environment is the skin. However even in the physical world care may be needed -the boundary may be look obvious until we take a closer look; fly out of a cloud slowly and what looks like a boundary from the ground may be a gradual change in the density of water droplets. What is the actual boundary of a cloud?
Boundaries are ubiquitous and important; in chemistry and materials science the boundary characteristics of materials, in business Coase wrote about the boundary of the firm which is important for making outsourcing decisions, in politics the boundary commission has the contentious job of fixing political constituencies and in sociology and psychology the whole subject of groups and the way we create the “other”outside our own group boundaries.
When it comes to social science we have become accustomed to using groups with boundaries that do not have any basis is systems, i.e. when the thing being studied is abstract. Where a boundary is proposed merely for the purposes of statistical analysis it may have no bearing on the natural or human systems world. Unlike the use of Maxwell’s statistics applied to physical things, people are different – the aggregate behaviour of gas doesn’t encounter the problem that only 70% of the gas particles behave in that way. However a statistical approach applied to people always faces the problem some of the people fit the profile whilst others do not. That is not to say this imagined grouping may not have any utility, for example, if we know the proportion of people who prefer vanilla ice-cream compared to raspberry, then we can produce flavours of ice cream in the right proportions. However there is no system boundary here. Class is therefore is a massive problem and the notion of class war even more problematical. By what input-process-output system does the middle class exist? Snobbery and exclusion based on wealth, manners, or “not being one of us” of course all exist (often with pernicious consequences) but that is not the same thing. We may say that Capitalism exists – being the mode of organisation for financing companies organised in a certain way but by that definition a CEO, even one with massive rewards is not a member of the capitalist class, she may be a swindler, confidence trickster or just plain greedy but that again is another thing altogether. Society does of course exist – it is simply the aggregate of all human activity sub-systems.
This is a fundamental observation and has implication for the practice of politics as we shall see.