The Story of the Information Chain Theory

The Story of the Information Chain Theory

Bob Blain

The Information Chain Theory:

Population + Motivation + Technology + Codification + Centrality + Symbols

à Scale of Cooperation (ICL) à Wealth.

The Short Story

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) inspired the theory. Georg Simmel (1858-1918) provided the focus, social form abstracted from content. Gordon Allport (1897-1967) and Leo Postman (1918- ) supplied the paradigm that information gets lost as people pass it along. Auguste Comte (1798 -1857) defined the quest, the integration of all social science through sociology.

Inspired particularly by Parsons and Comte, I set out to find the central focus of each social science. For economics it was money, which became part of the symbols variable. For political science, it was collective decision-making, which became the centrality variable. For sociology it was norms, which became part of the codification variable, and values, which became part of the motivation variable. The industrial revolution idea required a technology variable. It all depended on people, which became the population variable.

Adam Smith’s (1723-1790) The Wealth of Nations (1776) contributed the dependent variable, wealth. I found the measure of national wealth, life expectancy, in demography. Emile Durkheim’s (1855-1917) Division of Labor (1893) and Edward Bellamy’s (1850-1898) Looking Backward (1888) encouraged me to call it cooperation.

I think theory should be useful, supported by evidence, and as simple as possible. You can find evidence in support of the theory on my web site (www.siue.edu/~rblain/index.htm) Please judge my information chain theory by those standards (Blain, 1985).

The Longer Story

The moment I remember as the beginning of the information chain theory was walking through Harvard Yard with fellow graduate student, Andrew Effrat, in the fall of 1961. We were in a course taught by Talcott Parsons, then probably the best known sociologist in the world, trying to make sense of his four-function paradigm. I had spent a year as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where the emphasis was quantitative research methods. The faculty encouraged us to conceive everything in terms of measurable and scalable variables. At Harvard, the emphasis was theory. Parsons used the word variable from time to time but his thinking was categorical, suitable for ‘nominal’ rather than numerical variables. For example, in his Four-Function Paradigm, Adaptation, Goal-attainment, Integration, and Latent pattern maintenance are each qualitatively different. He conceived none of them as matters of degree that might be arranged on a continuum.

I mentioned to Andy that I thought Georg Simmel’s idea of social form abstracted from content might be a good way to improve Parsons’ paradigm. He thought the idea was promising and encouraged me to pursue it. Jacob Moreno used the same idea for what he called sociometry (1938), where people are represented by letters and relationships by lines: A à B.

At the University of Massachusetts as part of the coursework to complete my Ph.D, I did a paper for Hilda Golden on the concept of culture. From Clyde Kluckhohn's compilation of definitions of culture, I saw that cultures could be ranked by the distance people could communicate information. Where people had only a spoken language, they could communicate short person-to-person distances, cooperating groups would be small, and product small. Where people could also read and write, they could communicate longer person-to-person distances, groups would be larger, with the consequence that they could produce more and the society would be wealthier. The concept of information chain length was born:

Oral language: A à B à C.

Written language: A à B à C à D à E.

My first faculty teaching job was at The Ohio State University in Columbus. There I completed my dissertation and focused on writing an article critical of George Homans psychological reductionism. Homans had argued that variables about rewards could explain all human behavior. He also argued that functionalism had not produced a theory because functionalists had not defined what they meant by the survival of a society. I thought Homans was dead wrong on psychological reductionism. Andrew Effrat had become editor of Sociological Inquiry, and suggested I debate Homans on psychological reductionism in that journal. I thought Homans was right about functionalism’s failure to produce a theory because it lacked an appropriate dependent variable; so I began to look for one.

I moved to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville in 1968 where I finished the debate article (Blain, 1971). Returning to development of the Information Chain Theory, I decided to use Adam Smith's concept of national wealth, which he defined as people having the necessaries and conveniences of life, as the dependent variable. I rejected Gross Domestic Product as a measure of national wealth because it did not differentiate between bombers and schools and failed to reflect how goods were distributed among people in a nation. I decided that life expectancy was the best measure of national wealth because it reflected the general wellbeing of the entire population of a nation.

Gordon Allport and Leo Postman's study of rumor (1945) supplied the form of the Information Chain Paradigm. They had found that descriptions of a picture relayed orally from person to person lost details rapidly. The idea of paradigm came from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1971) in which he suggested that sciences are built on basic ideas. The idea of an information chain seemed to me to be such a basic new idea.

The Information Chain Paradigm identifies the two properties of communication that explain why each of the six independent variables of the theory relate as they do to information chain length (Figure 1). The slope of the line represents the rate at which information is lost or misunderstood as people pass it along. This I called entropy, from the second law of thermodynamics, referring to energy being dissipated or made unavailable as work is done. For messages, entropy refers to people misunderstanding, changing, and forgetting ideas. To enlarge the scale of cooperation and, thus, to increase national wealth, people needed to find ways to reduce the rate of information entropy.

The area under the entropy line describes the amount or volume of work that had to be done to get the desired information communicated. I was sensitized to an information overload problem when Alvin Toffler visited SIUE to publicize his book, Future Shock (1970). The work of communicating had to be minimized, otherwise people would spend lots of time and effort communicating instead of doing the tasks their communication was intended to get done. Therefore, to enlarge the scale of cooperation (increase information chain length) people need to simultaneously reduce information volume and entropy. Messages must become more effective as well as more efficient in order for information chain length to increase.

The symbols variable includes four types; speech, writing, numbers, and money. In that order, they carry decreasing amounts of information, increasing distances. The invention of writing reduced entropy because people could write their messages in a more durable form than the sound waves of spoken language. Simon Dinitz, a colleague at Ohio State, suggested that Marshall McLuhan's, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (1964) might be helpful to me. McLuhan suggested that money was a form of communication like speech and writing. Parsons also had suggested that money was a medium of communication, especially important in the transactions that occur between households and business firms. After reading a small paperback by a retired dentist, Dr. Edward Popp, Money: Bona Fide and Non-Bona Fide, (1970) I understood money as a medium of communication that conveyed less information than ordinary writing but longer information chain distances. This relation of money to speech and writing was reinforced by how easily the economic concepts of inflation and money velocity fit the paradigm. Inflation is loss of value, that is, loss of information, with money. Money velocity is the number of times money changes hands in a given time period, that is, information chain length.

Seeing money as a medium of communication immediately raised the question, When money talks, what does it say? Quickly, I realized that money does not say what people want. People must say what they want with a spoken or written statement, or perhaps with a gesture. Perhaps money says how much people want something, but that would not explain why someone would give it to them.

Dr. Popp explained the money message with the example of a man who works for a farmer planting potatoes. When the hired man is done with the work, the farmer gives him a note promising the bearer of the note a certain weight of potatoes when they are harvested. The hired man then takes the note to his mechanic who accepts it as payment for work on the hired man's car. The mechanic then pays his dentist with the note. Eventually, the note reaches the grocer who takes it to the farmer and collects the promised weight of potatoes. By this example, money tells the person to whom the money is offered that the bearer has done productive work and deserves to be paid in return. The money is not the pay; it certifies that the bearer deserves to be paid.

I was not satisfied with Popp's use of weight of potatoes as his money unit, but it made me realize that dollar has no unit like weight to define it. It is just a word. How can people give each other the amount of pay they have earned if the unit is undefined? My answer is that they cannot. The result is that money transactions lack the accuracy that is normal with other standards of weight and measure. I realized that money needed a unit, what is called a known quantity. For example, the length we call a foot is a distance we can see on a ruler. The volume we call a gallon is expressed in containers that we can see. If money is to transmit its message accurately, it needs a known quantity, not just a name like Dollar or Yen.

I thought the economists might have the answer because they have a Quantity Theory of Money. I was disappointed when I realized that what they mean by quantity is the number of pieces of money in circulation. Their theory says that the more pieces of money in circulation, the less the money is worth. The equivalent for measures of length would be to say that the more yardsticks in circulation, the shorter the yard would get! We know that is the opposite of what happens. The more yardsticks available, the more accurate measurement tends to be. The economists had a theory, but about the wrong kind of quantity.

Realizing that money lacks a known quantity also sheds light on inflation. Maybe its root cause is that money lacks a known quantity to define and, therefore, to stabilize it. It always seemed weird to me that the remedy for inflation was supposed to be to raise interest rates. I knew that raising interest rates increased the cost of everything bought with borrowed money, which is almost everything. How could raising prices keep prices from rising? I knew that was wrong. Lengths and volumes don't inflation, or deflate, because they are governed by known quantities. So it seemed reasonable to expect that money's value would neither inflate nor deflate if it were defined in terms of an appropriate known quantity.

But what could be the known quantity for money?

Adam Smith in his 1776 classic wrote that labor was the real price of everything. Labor is measured in hours. Why not use hours of work as the known quantity for money? Smith rejected work time because work effort and product vary from one hour to the next. I thought he rejected the idea much too quickly. Karl Marx (1818-1883) proposed that we use "socially necessary labor time," basically, the average work time needed to do a job. The general standard would be an hour of work for an hour of pay. However, people who could do things faster could receive more pay; while people who did it more slowly could receive less pay. Using the hour would not prevent people from negotiating their particular pay. The hour would simply mean they both knew the value of the money.

The idea made sense to me then and it makes sense to me still. Everything about an economy is organized by time: hourly pay, work days, work weeks, monthly rents, annual salaries, periodic dividends, and taxes. And they are all paid with money. We measure work precisely with clocks and calendars. Time is stable. The hour today is the same hour as last week and last year. We measure inflation by the month and year. Time and money! People are always referring to time and money together. We spend time and money, save time and money, and waste time and money. People intuitively recognize the intimate relation between time and money.

Since first realizing the relevance of time to the money denominator problem, I have researched currency exchange rates and found that 86 percent of the value of national monies is already work time (Blain, 1996).

I first presented the idea of using the hour as the denominator for money at a conference of the Eastern Economics Association in Boston, on May 10, 1979. I remember the exact date because, while riding the subway to the hotel, I saw on the back page of the newspaper of the person in front of me that Talcott Parsons had died in Germany on May 8. I felt that the hour money idea I was about to explain to an eager (and large) assembly of economists was a worthy legacy of the course he had set me on 18 years earlier. I would be showing a totally unexpected way that his work was relevant.

Alas, there were only five people in the audience: my wife, Mary, my brother, Leo, and his wife, Joyce, and two people who were there to hear the other guy. So much for high expectations.

With the six variables of the theory identified, I typed it up, thousands of pages and all on a typewriter! Was I glad when computer word processing came along! At one time, Christmas 1978, the manuscript was more than 400 pages. I thought that at last I was done. I got comfortable and sat down to read my magnus opus. Oh, what a disappointment. I had no sooner read the first few pages when I realized I had to rewrite once again. So in January 1979, I started the rewrite. I finished in six weeks, helped by several heavy snowfalls when the University had to cancel classes. I titled that version, Toward World Cooperation and used it in a class for several years.

Reactions, Rejection, and Redirection

When I showed Toward World Cooperation to people, I got extreme opposite reactions. Some readers thought the information chain theory was a great achievement. They gave it glowing praise. Others thought it was worthless, a shame that anyone would waste time on it.

I sent it out to a few publishers, but not to enough. I was too easily discouraged. They were not interested. They wanted to know the courses where it could be used as a textbook. Since it was not a textbook in a conventional sense, I couldn't say. They did not want to publish it as a trade book because I, unlike Parsons, was an unknown, teaching at a branch campus of a Midwestern University whose main campus fame seemed to consist of its basketball team.

What to do?

The theory was a bit hard to teach in the sense that it was so abstract, supported only by words and graphs. The idea of Hour Money was sure to raise questions (if anyone besides my wife, a brother, and his wife were ever to find out about it). Could I think up a way to test and demonstrate the idea?

So my friend, Bob Gill, and I invented Cooperation: the Wealth of Nations Game, a board game based on rules derived from the theory. Students have played the game in my Cooperation and Conflict class for the past 25 years. I'm tempted to tell you all about the game, but I won't. Just let me say that they play Barter: The Beginners' Game; Majority Rule: The Socialist Game; Making Money: The Capitalist Game; and Autonomy: The Expert, Tournament Game. Students like it and you can now get a computer version.

I retire on August 31, 2001. From now on, I will work to get the Hour adopted as the world money unit. The Information Chain Paradigm and Theory support the idea and the Cooperation game shows how it would produce a better system than either capitalism or socialism. I'm glad to have these tools for positive social change in this first month of the first year of this new millenium: January 2001 or 1/18/1. We are starting over. Let's do it better this time! We can by making our money Hour Money. About 65 groups around the country have already done it (http://www.ithacahours.org/).

Bob Blain is Professor of Sociology , Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. rblain@siue.edu.

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The Information Chain Theory

Population	Motivation (Amitai Etzioni)	Technology (Gerhard Lenski)	Codification (Talcott Parsons, Jerome Bruner)	Centrality (Alex Bavelas)	Symbols (Leslie White)	à ICL
Maximum human competence and autonomy
Billions (William Godwin)	Good Will (L.E. Frailey, Pitirim Sorokin)	Electronic (Marshall McLuhan)	Philosophy (Lewis Beck, Will Durant)	Urban (Emile Durkheim, Robert Park)	Hour Money (Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons, Edward Popp, George Knapp)	Global (Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, Charles Cooley)	Wealth (Adam Smith)
	Values (Talcott Parsons)	Electrical	Science (Auguste Comte, Jean Piaget)			Nations	(Jeremy Rifkin) Entropy à
Millions (Thomas Malthus)		Mechanical	Democracy (Henry Roberts)	Hierarchy (Max Weber, C. Wright Mills)	Decimal Numbers (Lester Ward)	Cities
	Rewards (George Homans)	Animal	Bureaucracy (Max Weber)		Phonetic Writing (I.J. Gelb, Alfred Moorhouse)	Villages
Hundreds		Manual	Tradition (Max Weber, William Sumner)	Small Groups	Articulate Speech (Gordon Allport, Leo Postman)	Families
	Coercion (Thomas Hobbes)		Categories (Emile Durkheim)	Isolation			Poverty
Little ability to utilize human potential.

SOURCES OF ICL THEORY IDEAS

Rather than listed alphabetically, these references are listed according to ideas contributed to the Information Chain Theory.

The Dependent Variable:

From Poverty to Wealth

Smith, Adam (1963). An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin. Originally published in 1776.

In his opening sentence, Smith defines wealth as: "the necessaries and conveniencies of life" p. 1. More generally, I take it to mean that people are well in body, mind, and spirit.

Rifkin, Jeremy (1980). Entropy: A New World View. New York: The Viking Press.

Rifkin sees entropy as the supreme law of nature that governs everything we do. Entropy is disorder, disintegration, decay. We must work to counteract entropy, but work itself creates entropy. So we must increase wealth with minimum work.

Weeks, John R. (1999). Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues. 7^th edition. New York: Wadsworth.

I measure national wealth with life expectancy. Weeks explains its meaning on pages 130-131 and its calculation on pages 588-594. Basically, take the death rates for all age groups in the population, apply them to a hypothetical population of 100,000 people. Reduce that population as if those age specific death rates applied to them throughout their lives. Add the years these persons would have lived, divide by 100,000 and you have average life expectancy. The death rates are all for one year. So life expectancy reflects the "w/health" of all the people in that society that year. Life expectancy as a measure of the wealth of a society is comparable to temperature as a general measure of the health of a human body.

The Intervening Variable:

Scale of Cooperation (ICL).

Simmel, Georg (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Kurt R. Wolff (ed.). New York: The Free Press.

Simmel thought that sociologists should focus on the forms or geometry of social relationships such as dyads and triads. That way, we could identify the causes and consequences of these different forms whatever might be their content. For example, two friends are a dyad, as are two co-workers, a married couple, a teacher and student, and so forth. How do these dyads compare to triads is a Simmel kind of question.

Cooley, Charles Horton (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order.

Known for the "Looking Glass Self," Cooley conceived of human development as enhancing persons’ ability to participate in ever larger social systems.

Moreno, Jacob (1938). Who Shall Survive?

Moreno applied Simmel’s idea to draw "sociograms." For example, by asking students whom they wanted as friends, he could draw a sociogram for "stars" (chosen by many) or "isolates" (chosen by none), and the various combinations in between.

Homans, George (1964). "Bringing Men Back In." American Sociological Review

Homans criticized structural functionalism for not producing a theory, then claimed that any theory would have to resort to psychological propositions to be truly explanatory. The Information Chain Theory refutes Homans’ claim since its variables describe properties of groups, which, in Emile Durkheim’s terms, are sui generis, meaning of their own kind, not reducible to properties of persons.

Blain, Robert R. (1971). "On Homans’ Psychological Reductionism." Sociological Inquiry. 4 (Winter):3-25.

In this debate with Homans, I argue against Homans’ psychological reductionism and he makes his counter-arguments.

Blain, Robert R. (1970). "A Critique of Parsons’ Four-Function Paradigm." Sociological Quarterly 11 (Spring):157-168.

I argue that the two main propositions of Parsons’ paradigm, that there are four functions and that they must be performed at each system level, are contradictory because each "level" contains three levels. Parsons failed to solve the system levels problem. Information chains, on the other hand, are one variable covering all levels, from the lone person to lengths that can include the entire human population.

Blain, Robert R. (1971). "An Alternative to Parsons' Four-Function Paradigm As a Basis for Developing General Sociological Theory." American Sociological Review 36 (August): 678-692.

I criticized Parsons’ paradigm as a "house of mirrors" and proposed that some of its valuable ideas could be saved by reorganizing them in relation to the continuous quantitative variable, information chain length.

The Information Chain Paradigm

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kuhn concluded from a study of the history of physics, that science develops less cumulatively and more by periodic dramatic paradigm shifts. A particular paradigm (basic idea) dominates for a time. When anomalies accumulate that cannot be explained in terms of the dominant paradigm, the stage is set for a new paradigm to emerge. I regard the information chain paradigm as such a new paradigm.

Allport, Gordon and Leo Postman (1947). The Psychology of Rumor. New York: Russell and Russell.

Rumors during World War II prompted Allport and Postman to study how details of a story are lost as people repeat a message from person to person to person. A person standing in front of a picture describes 20 details to someone else who cannot see the picture. That person then repeats what they can remember to a third person, that person repeats it to a fourth person, and so forth. The graph summarizing their findings suggested the ICL paradigm.

Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver (1964). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Shannon and Weaver contributed detail about the communication process, including sources, channels, noise, semantics, and amount of information.

The Six Independent Variables

1. Symbols

White, Leslie (1949). The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc.

Anthropologist Leslie White saw the human ability to create symbols as our most distinctive quality. All human society depends on it. Symbols are physical things given meaning by the people who use them. The word "blue" when spoken is physical sound waves, when written it is marks on paper, yet we see in the word meanings far beyond its purely physical characteristics. That power to "symbol" has enabled us to create culture.

Speech:

The meaning-rich, short-distance symbol system.

Barber, Charles L. (1964). The Story of Speech and Language. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Hockett, Charles (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.

Linguists Barber and Hockett provide concepts to account for the meaning richness of speech, such as "prosodics" that include speed of delivery, volume, inflection, and voice rhythm. They also provide a lot of information about the evolution of writing from idiographs to pictographs to the phonetic alphabet.

Writing:

Less meaning per unit, but longer information chain distance

Moorhouse, Alfred Charles (1953). The Triumph of the Alphabet: A History of Writing. New York: H. Schuman.

Gelb, I. J. (1952). A Study of Writing. Revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moorhouse and Gelb explain the success of the alphabet as due to its phonetic character. That is, each letter has a corresponding sound, so that people who know how to speak a language can more easily learn to read and write it. This suggests the more general idea that each symbol system varies in a pattern similar to the pattern across symbol types. For example, pictographs are rich in meaning but only carry information short distances – like speech. The alphabet is totally abstract, letters having no intrinsic meaning, but capable of conveying messages much longer distances because the alphabet facilitates literacy, like numbers.

Decimal Numbers:

A subset of writing, less meaning, more distance.

Ward, Lester Frank (1907). Pure Sociology.

Ward saw social evolution occurring through "human achievements." Each step on the great "staircase of civilization" consists of these tools of the mind, which include language but also numbers and mathematics.

Hour Money:

A subset of numbers, money is more specialized and travels more distance. Without a known quantity, its value is eroded by inflation. The hour could stabilize its value.

Marx, Karl (1967). Capital. New York: International Publishers. Originally published in 1867.

Critic of capitalism as self-destructive, Marx thought prices should be set according to the labor time socially necessary to produce a good or service.

Blain, Robert R. (1996). "Defining Exchange Rate Parity in Terms of GDP Per Hour of Work." Applied Behavioral Science Review. 4:55-79.

For 60 countries in 1980, exchange rates as they were and what they would be if based on GDP divided by hours worked correlate r = .86. Overall, exchange rates are already 86 percent work time.

Parsons, Talcott (1960). Structure and Process in Modern Societies. Glencoe, ll.: The Free Press.

Parsons stated that money was a medium of communication similar to speech and writing, but he did not take this idea the next step to making the money message explicit.

Popp, Edward E. (1970). Money: Bona Fide and Non-Bona Fide. Port Washington: Wisconsin Education Fund.

Popp conceived money as a way that people communicate what they did for others, thereby earning the right to receive an equivalent in return. "Bona fide" means that the money note has real backing in goods or services.

Knapp, George (1924). The State Theory of Money. London: Macmillan.

Max Weber cited Knapp as an authority on the role of government in money creation. Knapp defined money as a "Chartal" means of payment, meaning that it is a symbolic message certifying that a person has paid the price and deserves a service, similar to a postage stamp or a token one receives when checking a coat. He chose the word "Chartal" because he thought calling it "symbolic" would imply that it is not substantial. However, Knapp saw no way to define the value of money other than historically, like we do with the Consumer Price Index.

Ederer, Rupert J. (1964). The Evolution of Money. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press.

Ederer described the evolution of money through favorite commodity exchange to coinage, fractional reserves and paper. The story parallels the evolution of writing from pictographs to the alphabet, reinforcing the view of money as a medium of communication.

2. Centrality

Bavelas, Alex (1950). "Communication Patterns In Task-Oriented Groups." In Group Dynamics. Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander (eds.). Evanston, ll.: Row, Peterson & Company.

Bavelas arranged people in communication chains, wheels, circles, and Y’s to study which pattern facilitated problem solving. People in a wheel (four persons on the outside send their answers to a person in the center) solved the problem quickest but were vulnerable if the person in the middle did not understand the task. People in a circle made the most mistakes and took the most time to solve the problem. Bavelas used the word "centrality" to refer to the centeredness of a network.

Weber, Max (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, edited with an introduction by Talcott Parsons. New York: The Free Press.

Weber attributed supreme importance to bureaucratic organization in the rise of modern society. Bureaucracy increased the scale of organizations comparably to how machines increased the scale of production. However, he also saw bureaucracy as trapping people in an "iron cage."

Barnard, Chester (1938). Functions of the Executive.

In this classic, former president of the Bell Telephone Company, Barnard, noted that lines of communication from the top to the bottom of an organization need to be as short as possible, the shorter the line, the greater the speed and the less the error.

Durkheim, Emile (1933). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press.

Durkheim saw social advancement occurring through increasing "dynamic density" as populations concentrate in cities and elaborate their division of labor.

Park, Robert and Ernest Burgess (1925). Introduction to the Science of Sociology.

Park and Burgess, also responsible for the concentric zones theory of urban growth, saw cities as centers of cultural development. Park, previously a newspaper man, appreciated the special importance of that medium.

Key, V. O., Jr. (1958). Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Key described how businessmen are constantly meeting together, which gives them enormous power to influence events.

3. Codification

Unique, categories, tradition, bureaucracy, democracy, science, philosophy.

Toffler, Alvin (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House.

Toffler popularized the term "information overload" meaning that we are overwhelmed with too much information. We need ways to organize information to handle it.

Blain, Robert R. (1974). "Parsons Hierarchy of Control and the Codification Variable of the ICL Theory." Indian Journal of Social Research 15: August and December: 179-189, Meerut, India.

Parsons’ hierarchy of control is cybernetic, a word from Greek meaning steersman. Intelligence controls muscle. For example, the man on a horse controls the superior strength of the horse. The person steering the ship controls the ship. Generalizing that idea to multiple levels of control, we get the codification variable. At the low end of the hierarchy, codes are complex and local. As one ascends the hierarchy, codes are more abstract and general, facilitating change, personal autonomy, and responsibility.

Unique:

Everything is one of a kind (zero coding).

Piaget, Jean and Barbel Inhelder (1969). The Psychology of the Child. New York: Basic Books.

By studying children, Piaget identified a hierarchy of cognitive growth. At birth, infants have no way to organize the sensations that flood their consciousness. Life is a buzzing confusion. Words are the categories that soon give them ways to classify things, which is the beginning of cognition.

Categories/Words:

Durkheim, Emile, (1954), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Joseph Swan (trans.) Glencoe, Il: The Free Press.

Society shapes how we view the world. The categories of language are formed from our experience of social relationships.

Tradition:

Complexes of rules that stabilize relationships.

Sumner., William (1906). Folkways. Boston: Ginn.

Sumner’s image of mankind is living on the bottom of an ocean of air, moved by forces beyond our control. Folkways are deep-rooted rules of behavior that keep us in order.

Max Weber’s concept of traditional authority also fits here. The rules are considered sacred, unchanged for as far back as anyone can remember.

Bock, Jerry (1966). Fiddler on the Roof. New York: Crown Publishers.

This popular musical is a good example of tradition as the basis for social order. Their village and traditions are destroyed by change.

Bureaucracy:

Hierarchical and centralized, like tradition, but able to move people in and out of positions more quickly.

Weber, Max (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, edited with an introduction by Talcott Parsons. New York: The Free Press.

Max Weber’s rational-legal authority fits here. Whereas position in a traditional structure is determined by birth, sex, and age, position in a bureaucracy is based on written position descriptions and credentials.

Mills, C. Wright (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sitting atop the bureaucracies in the United States is an elite of corporate, military, and government heads who make the important decisions. White collar bureaucrats below them obey.

Democracy:

A flat structure, one person one vote, can change even a bureaucracy.

Roberts, Henry M. (1971). Roberts' Rules of Order Revised. New York: William Morrow and Company.

The role of the chair exemplifies the difference between a democracy and a bureaucracy. The chair makes sure that everyone has an opportunity to express their views on any motion under consideration. In contrast, the head of a bureaucracy has the authority to issue orders without explanation.

Science:

Through observation, comparison, and correlation, persons become autonomous, able to make decisions independent of democracy, bureaucracy, or tradition.

Comte, Auguste (1851). System of Positive Polity.

Tracing the history of science, Comte saw all fields passing through the three stages of theological, metaphysical, and positive or scientific.

Jean Piaget’s ideas on cognitive development also fit here. A high stage of development is the ability to understand abstract relationships exemplified by the scientific method.

Bruner, Jerome (1966). Studies in Cognitive Growth: A Collaboration at the Center for Cognitive Studies. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

"Cognitive growth might be conceived as achieving a capacity for simplicity in dealing with information." People who have achieved a high level of cognitive development can handle large amounts of complex information because they know how to organize it.

Philosophy:

The frontier of codification.

Beck, Lewis White (1952). Philosophic Inquiry; An Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Philosophy teaches us the limits of science. From the Greek philos meaning love and sophy, meaning wisdom (wis ways, dom domain), philosophy is the love of many ways.

Durant, William James (1929). The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing.

A very readable introduction to the need for philosophy to give life purpose and meaning.

4. Technology

Manual, animal, mechanical, electrical, electronic.

Lenski, Gerhard (1966). Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lenski traces social development through stages of technological change.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McLuhan told us that "the medium is the message." He urged us to focus on how the form of a medium shapes our thinking perhaps more than its content. Electric media link us into a "global village." He anticipated the Internet.

5. Motivation

Coercion, material reward, commitment, good will.

Etzioni, Amitai (1961). A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations. New York: The Free Press.

Etzioni compared prisons, industrial organizations, and churches. His findings contributed the hierarchy of coercion, material reward, and value commitment as types of motivators. Coercion takes a lot of work and cannot be relayed very far. Value commitments are internal, therefore, take little effort to enforce and many people can share value commitments.

Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan.

In this classic, Hobbes emphasized overwhelming force as essential to order.

Homans, George (1961). Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Homans emphasized rewards as motivators, borrowing from his Harvard colleague, B.F. Skinner’s, theory of operant conditioning.

Spencer, Herbert (1896). Principles of Sociology. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Spencer saw society evolving from coercion to contracts. For a society to enlarge, military force would have to become less prevalent and people would have more freedom to make contracts based on self-interests.

Parsons, Talcott (1967). Sociological Theory and Modern Society. New York: The Free Press.

Throughout his work, not than just this one, Parsons stressed the importance of norms and values. Counter to the Hobbesian view of the importance of force, Parsons argued that the use of force is too expensive to be relied upon for routine behavior. Instead, people need to accept certain behaviors as duties to be done because they are right.

Such internalized value commitments reduce the costs of enforcement.

Frailey, L. E. (1965). Handbook of Business Letters. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Frailey’s advice about how to write business letters suggested the importance of good will to harmonious social relationships. If a business wants to maintain good relationships with suppliers and customers, letters must express good will, especially when their purpose is to remind someone of a debt. Similarly, if people with different value commitments are to get along, they must view their differences with good will.

Sorokin, Pitirim (1950). Altruistic Love: A Study of American "Good Neighbors" and Christian Saints. Boston: Beacon Press.

Sorokin found that altruism increases life expectancy. Although we often say only the good die young, Sorokin’s research showed the contrary, that people of good will live longer on average than others.

6. Population

Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions.

Malthus, Thomas (1958). An Essay on Population. New York: E. P. Dutton. Originally published in 1798.

In response to William Godwin’s book, Malthus asserted that population grows geometrically while the food supply grows only arithmetically. Therefore, population growth would be arrested at a relatively low number.

Godwin, William (1946). Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Originally published in 1793.

Godwin argued that poverty was the result of concentrated political power. If monarchy were replaced by democracy, he argued, there would be enough of everything for everyone.

Godwin, William (1964). Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, Being an Answer to Mr. Malthus' Essay on that Subject. New York: A. M. Kelly. Originally published in 1820.

Shocked when intellectuals believed Malthus' unsupported claim, Godwin published a response in 1820 with little effect. He said that each new person has the potention to add to productive capacity. Only if people remained unskilled would Malthus’ dismal forecast of death by starvation, vice, and disease be true.

Van Loon, Hendrik Willem (1937). Van Loon's Geography: The Story of the World. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing.

Van Loon calculated that the world's population could fit in a box that would measure one half mile on each side. The current world's population could fit in a box that would measure one mile on each side. We could not live in such a box, but it suggests that we are a small element in the vast area of earth.

Evidence

Blain, Robert R. (1985). "The Information Chain Theory of Cooperation." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 26 (March-June):75-89.

Propositions of the information chain theory are supported by country data from many sources including the United Nations, the World Bank, and Arthur S. Banks and Robert R. Textor (1963). Cross-Polity Survey. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.