Cybernetics and Society, 1981

In his 1981 "Cybernetics and Society: An Analysis of Social Systems," Hanken explains, that there are different ways to analyse societies as a social systems. A common approach is to see society as a network of interacting persons or groups, called actors. In those days these actors were "usually represented by either stimulus response or normative models."^[7]

The problem with these analysis-techniques of social systems was, according to Hanken, that they were not detailed enough. They didn't "include a number of essential psychological attributes."^[7] In his work he proposed to extend the existing methods, and presented a new framework to make this possible.

Classification of social systems

Hanken (1981) argued that in the social systems can be classified in three main types:^[8]

• Autocratic systems
• Collective systems, and
• Democratic systems

This systems differ in ways of decision-making, social interaction, dominance relationship, principles of coordination, communication, bargaining, coalitions, etc.

The social system itself can be pictured with three types of subsystems:^[9]

• The system S
• The environment E, and
• The decision-maker D

Furthermore, these systems contain five essential variables: the control variables, the input variables, the state variables, the output variables, and the information variables.

Reception

In the sociocybernetics of the 1980s, it was an ongoing question what constitutes social systems. In his 1981 Cybernetics and Society, Hanken stated that social systems consists of actors, inline with Tom Baumgartner in his 1978 paper entitled "An actor-oriented systems model for the analysis of industrial democracy measures." Other scientists in those days defined the components of social systems simply as individuals, or communications.^[5]

In summarizing the different approaches in cybernetics on evaluation processes Levin-Rozalis (2010) stated that developments has led to "relativist and subjective perceptions of knowledge."^[10] Is this matter Hanken (1981) had shown that "two actors in the same system will not absorb the same information from sources either outside or inside the system, nor will they perceive or weight it in the same way."^[10]

Articles, a selection

• Hanken, A. F. G., and B. G. F. Buijs. "Systems analysis and business models." Annals of Systems Research. Springer US, 1971. 9–16.
• Hanken, A. F. G., and J. C. Zadoks. "Kunst, kitsch of kunde: het vraagstuk van de integratie en de integriteit der wetenschappen." (1978).