COMMUNICATION (Line of)
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 511 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Human sciences |
K. BOULDING stated that the lines of communication “… grow at a much slower rate than the total organization. Hence organizations eventually limit their growth by the sheer difficulty in getting communications from the ”surface“ of the organization, where it is contact with its environment, into the decision-makers who are not in direct contact with the environment, but have to make decisions on base of increasingly less realistic images of the world” (1972, p.70-71).
Organizations, and also other kinds of social systems react to this problem in two different ways, none of them totally satisfying:
- increasing hierarchic centralization, which reduces the general adaptability of the system.
- admitting more decentralization, which may produce in very large systems a tendency to fractioning and eventual disintegration.
The subject is also related, in more general terms, to the subject of interrelations between “Growth and Form” (d'ARCY W. THOMPSON — reed.1952).