The informatic approach looks at human thinking, organized activity, electronic data processing and management as symbolic phenomena, whose behavior is regulated by a multiplicity of models and programs, all of them instances of information systems; of course they differ because of the diversity of the hardware employed, and even more because of the enormous variety of problems encountered [Newell, Allen, Herbert A. Simon. 1972. Human Problem solving. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, p. 870]. The symbolic solution to problems must be therefore understood along three lines [Newell, Allen, Herbert A. Simon. 1972. Human Problem solving. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, p. 789]: (1) Description of problems presented by the task environment; this is the typical area of Operations Research, (2) Description of the man-machine processor, be it a group or an institution; Behavioral Sciences study the human processors, which may be significantly influenced by computer technology, and (3) Description of the program which is gradually compiled by the social processor to adapt itself to a task required by the environment. This is the enormous endevour to be undertaken by Management Science.
Except for a few misunderstandings that I will try to dispel, Dr. van Gigch's use of the metalinguistic framework is, of course, the same I refer to in my paper. Albeit there is a profound epistemological disagreement: he believes that he is viewing a world which exists independently of the ways we build its facticity; I am concerned with the symbol system (Newel1 & Simon, 1976) with which social reality is constructed (Clegg, 1983, 124).
The symbol system and/or information-processing approach launched by Herbert Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon has not yet achieved its full epistemological and methodological potential in the behavioral sciences. This paper tries to explicate the full implications of this informatic approach to behavioral science, with special emphasis on systems on the level of the organization, administration, and politics.Social sciences deal with symbolic phenomena. Human thought, social interaction, administration, and politics are essentially symbol manipulations that could not be studied with rigor and precision until languages and systems were available to describe symbol processing. This approach leads to the conscious use of symbols to describe symbols, and hence to the definite possibility of studying symbols themselves as if they were objects, neither attributing existence to them, as idealist philosophy did, nor ignoring them, as positivism attempted to.
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