Richard Newbold Adams, "The Emergence of Hierarchical Social Structures: The Case of Late Victorian England", Self-Organization and Dissipative Structures, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1982.
Human organisms clearly display a long adulthood which is a steady state. The human species, in contrast, has never, so far as we know, manifested a steady state but rather has been in a state of constant expansion. Between the two are societies which may or may not manifest a steady state. Human societies particularly manifest cases of control by internal mechanisms that give evidence of having developed in response to the consequences of outside constrictions. While individual human societies vary in this, they have shown progressively less inclination to exercise such controls as they have become more complex.
Recently a good deal of evidence has been adduced to show that not only have many human societies achieved a steady state but also human history has consisted of an irregular oscillation from a condition of ecological equilibrium to one of intensification of exploitation and depletion of resources. [122]
One way to identify when a new structure has come into being is to observe when the existing components - in this case we can look at Britain - give evidence of subordinating themselves to the larger whole. In doing this, they are giving up decision making to decisions made beyond their area of control. These new decisions are being made in the larger structure, and in that way we can see that a new level of self-organization and self-maintenance is coming into being.
At first these outside decisions will be uncoordinated among themselves; that is, they will be responding separately to different set of actors. As the various participating structures expand, as the amount of energy being used by the systems increases, as interactions among them intensifies, they will tend to centralize in a few places that will be more highly coordinated among themselves. The gradual centralization of this new level of decision making is what allows us to differentiate the emergence of a new structure.
What Britain was building was a worldwide social structure that, on the one hand, necessarily led to her own slowdown but, on the other, was unquestionably essential for her own survival. She was building survival devices or mechanisms, which, if we see them as parts of an emerging whole, we can regard as a kind of survival vehicle; an extensive social, political, and economic complex that would both sustain and supply her. At the same time it required that she make important internal readjustments - among which were those resulting in a deceleration in the growth energy consumption per capita. [126]
A survival vehicle is, then, in the first instance a social assemblage that is brought into being by individuals to better the conditions of their own survival. It is a larger dissipative structure, within which the individuals may hope to be buffered against harsher elements of the environment and to receive specific things that they need.
Vehicles will, however, follow their own evolution. Some expire rapidly; others may become of special interest to a few of the members. The leaders all have a particular interest in the survival of the vehicles. Thus the survival vehicles often incorporate mechanisms leading to their own perpetuation. [127]
This development, of course, means that the very survival vehicles that individuals have helped to construct may be taken from their control (if they were ever in their control) and may follow a path that is in fact against the best interests of individual members. Thus survival vehicles, once in being, become autonomous and independent of the interests of the individual members. [127]
Not only can the amount and kinds of energy that are expended and channeled by survival vehicles be calculated, but we should also initially assume that the laws of thermodynamics are as applicable to these processes as to those observed in nonhuman biological activities. Thus we should expect, following Fred Cottrell, that where vehicles are using increasing amounts of energy, the amount required for the maintenance of a survival vehicle will increase more rapidly than the increase in the total energy flow of the vehicle. We should also expect, following Ramon Margalaf, that as vehicles of greater scope come into being they will do so by the systematic exploitation of lesser vehicles, including especially those that compose them. They will take more energy away from the lesser vehicles, especially in the form of controls. They will compete with other units, other vehicles - often of quite different kinds - for resources. [128]
Expanding social systems are entirely a part of nature and their ultimate elements are no different from those composing the more easily visible physical world. Their inevitable expansion carries the emergence of higher levels of hierarchy, and these must be recognized as real dissipative structures that will take on their own behavior. In the present case, the lesser components lose their autonomy of action; they lose their ability to respond individualistically to an unstructured environment because they now confront one that is structured. In the nature of social structure, they become subordinated to the larger expanding dissipative structure that encompasses them. [129]
The emergence ofteh larger industrial, capitalist world structure, to which Britain made such an important contribution in the late nineteenth century, is still an uncentralized, coordinated arrangement. As such, it would have to be regarded as essentially amoral, incapable for the moment of making decisions as to what was best for itself. However, the direction was towards higher-level centralization within that structure that would result in its own morality, displacing that of the separate nations and firms operating within it. [130]
The application of dissipative structure analysis to social organizations requires the development of a sociology appropriate to it. [130]
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