14 DESGRABACIÓN DE ENTREVISTA SEMIESTRUCTURADA A EXPERTO :

The extensiveness of the social field, the area within which individuals and associations perceive themselves

to share some common conditions of life, and within which their behaviours form part of the relevant environment for the

others, is most strongly influenced by personal mobility (geographical and social) and the power of communications. In making possible higher degrees of interdependence within the field, these factors also have the effect of extending its boundaries. Television via satellite, telex, faster and more voluminous jet aircraft; these and other refinements of

communications are currently 'shrinking the globe', in the same way that the railway era had the effect of shrinking countries. Greater fluidity of stratification systems and

more opportunities for travel, permit individuals to experience and share in a far wider sphere of life experiences than is possible in less mobile societies.

The popularity of McLuhan's term 'global village' is no doubt in part due to the accuracy of his perception. Commenting in a recent article on Boulding's recognition of a 'second great transition', Wooton writes:

Post-civilized society is a global society, and, just as civilized man had to adjust to one type of environment, post-civilized man will have to adjust to a new type of environment. It is

important to understand the global dimensions of this post-civilized environment since we cannot adequately formulate policies concerning the process of development unless we first of all have a correct understanding of the historical period in which we live. [Wooton:1971:5]

One of the portents of this new supra-national environment is the rise in importance of a new form of

enterprise:

The multi-national corporation is perhaps the best example of an institution operating within the constraints of" the present while at the same time developing the institutional frame­ work for the emerging global society. [ibid:6]

Perlmutter has coined the term 'global industrial estate' to draw attention to the pervasiveness of modern industrial technology and the trans-national economies of scale that it makes possible, while Steiner and Cannon, in their study on 'Multi-national corporate planning', note that

rapidly accelerating foreign activities of business enterprises is an impressive development of the past ten years, and continued growth of inter­ national business is readily predictable for the future. [Steiner and Cannon:1966:vii]

As a corollary, the Marxian dream of workers of the world uniting moves closer to some sort of fulfilment, as interna­ tional labour organizations seek ways in which to combat the new degrees of manoeuverability in negotiation, and flexibility

in production, that are acquired by the international corporation.

Other economic and military developments contribute to the same tendency. The development of intercontinental ballistic missiles has reduced the whole world to a single theatre of war, whereas a few fields at the most were used at Agincourt. The complexities of the international currency system are well beyond the comprehension of the average

mortal (including therefore the author), but there are occasions, such as the devaluation of sterling some years back, and the contemporary crisis of the American dollar, when the extensiveness and the seeming precariousness of

international monetary relations is made evident, testifying again to the extent of our global interdependencies.

the expansion of the field relevant to particular activities can be identified. The farmer must recognize the city as a more and more important part of his world, as agriculture becomes 'industrialized' and its success more directly

dependent upon the city's mass markets, finance, and export facilities. The indications are, that those sectors of the rural economy which fail, for whatever reason, to move into the ambit of metropolitan influences, become 'dissociated' segments within the wider system, requiring active interven­ tion merely for them to survive.

National and regional planning and development activities have been given an increasing amount of attention, and they typically have the effect of forging new links

between previously segregated, or only loosely connected areas. River basin development schemes for example, of which the work of the T.V.A. is a classic instance, often

have the side-effect of uniting the occupants of the basin within a larger system. Co-ordinated regional development and management of employment, education, transport, and the like, again widens the system of interdependencies and extends the horizons of the field for its participants. In general, the extensiveness of these interdependencies is most clearly revealed during the occurrence of labour strikes affecting the key distribution, maintenance, or communication systems.

For the individual and the family, no less than for the business enterprise, the relevant social world has become larger, more complex and more variegated. As

progressively fewer of the needs of individuals are directly provided for by the home and the family, so their dependence upon other outside agents increases. The expansion of urban areas and of the proportions of the population living in

them, advances 'cosmopolitanism' at the expense of 'localism'. As television is defined as a necessity rather than a luxury, it assumes a major role in extending peoples vision into

other worlds, and becomes a dominant source of shared experiences.

The overall complexity of the social world increases for all its participants, as they become increasingly inter­ dependent. Their interrelations become less and less

predictable under the impact of the field's rapid but uneven transformation.

Symptoms of Turbulence

These four dimensions of the transformation of industrial society are of course abstractions from the concrete situation, of which they are different facets, rather than separable components. In reality they overlap and support one another in their effects on social worlds. As we have tried to suggest, the transformation has an impact upon all social units within the field - individual, family, community, formal organizations, the state, itself; environ­ ments characterized by accelerating but uneven rates of

change, by ever-increasing size and complexity, and higher degrees of interdependence among the constituent parts, make very different demands upon individual, group, and organiza­ tional adaptive capabilities than do the more regulable environments of both pre-industrial and industrial society.

Emery and Trist have described environments of this sort as turbulent, in contrast to other simpler types of environment which are 'placid' or 'reactive'. Whereas in these less complex and less dynamic environments

significant sources of variance for the actor originate only from other behaving systems, turbulence implies that the field itself has become dynamic, and that important sources of variance for the individual or the organization can emerge from practically any point in the field. Thus organizations caught up in these transformation processes are likely to be

subject to a radical increase in their area of 'relevant uncertainty':

The consequences which flow from their actions lead off in ways that become increasingly un­ predictable; they do not necessarily fall off with distance, but may at any point be amplified beyond all expectations; similarly, lines of action that are strongly pursued may find them­ selves attenuated by emergent field forces.

[Emery and T r i s t : 19 65 : 2 6]

The critical consequence from the point of view of purposive human activities in general is that the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability associated with all future- oriented activity increases. The relevant environment of the actor becomes so complex and so dynamic that the ramifi­ cations of any of his possible behaviours cannot be adequately anticipated beforehand. The acceleration and the uneveness of change mean that the future cannot be safely extrapolated from the past, and these forces, together with the increasing overall size and complexity of the set of interconnections relevant to the attainment of a particular outcome, render

'comprehensiveness' in the analysis of choice situations, and in decision-making, impossible. Trist writes:

turbulence grossly increases the area of relevant uncertainty of for individuals and organizations alike. It raises far-reaching problems concern­ ing the limits of human adaptation. Forms of adaptation, both personal and organizational, developed to meet a simpler type of environment no longer suffice to meet the higher levels of complexity now coming into existence. [Trist: 1970:5]

Transition from industrial to post-industrial society has proceeded furthest in urban North America, but their are signs of stress within the industrialized societies of Europe that are indicative of a similar transition. Unless we can learn to control and guide the transformation process it seems likely that the social field for purposive human

behaviours in these societies will be thrown into a state of turbulence„

The turbulent social field becomes prone to the fragmentation of the social fabric, and the breakdown of co-ordination and regulation among the sub-systems. It experiences widespread lags and breakdowns in the formation of the cultural and other symbolic apparatus which stabilize interpretations of new realities into theories and concepts, values and understandings, by means of which men can adjust to change. It is characterized by increasing vulnerability of the ecology of man-nature relations, and by increasing susceptibility to outbursts of violence and conflict between groups experiencing different rates and kinds of change. It is a domain in which the increasing size, transience, novelty, and unpredictability of his primary social world is more and more likely to result in the individual becoming alienated.

This, at least, is the pessimistic scenario - a projection of the impact of turbulence which assumes that our abilities to understand and to act appropriately within such highly complex and dynamic environments will not have been subject to radical improvements; that our institutional arrangements for decision-making, policy-making, and planning will not have caught up with our technological prowess.

This study aims to contribute in one particular area, that of city planning, to research currently being undertaken towards finding a solution to the problem of how man and his institutions can best adapt to the conditions

of a turbulent environment.

Let us look at some of the symptoms of the drift into post-industrialism that have already been identified.

1. Future shock

turbulence that have been described - the one about which there is most agreement in the literature, and the one with the most vigorous effects upon all of the others, is the acceleration of change, innovation and diffusion, dominated itself by the rapid growth of science and technology during

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the last 200 years» Commentators on the phenomenon, with their prognostications, gloomy and utopian, are abundant. Toffler is one of the most recent, and one of the more dramatic«. His study explores:

...the roaring current of change, a current so powerful today that it overturns institutions,

shifts our values and shrivels our roots.

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it

closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it. The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. This accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological consequences.... unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change

in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown. [Toffler:1970:4]

Human life is characterized as a constant flow of 'situations', and situations can be broken down into six components:

...while the boundary lines between situations may be indistinct, every situation has a certain

'wholeness" about it, a certain integration. Every situation also has certain identifiable components. These include ’things" - a physical setting of natural and man-made objects. Every situation occurs in a "place1 - a location or arena within which the action occurs. Every

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A different view can be found in Horowitz [1969], who questions the thesis that innovation is accelerating, and argues that significant discoveries are in fact decreasing.

situation also has, by definition, a cast of characters - people.. Situations also involve a location in the organizational network of

society and a context of ideas or information... situations also involve a separate dimension which, because it cuts across all the others,

is frequently overlooked. This is duration - the span of time over which the situation occurs. [ibid:32]

It is instructive to note the similarities between this con­ cept of the situation, and the more systematically defined concept of behaviour setting that has been formulated by Barker and Wright in their development of a naturalistic psychology [1955, see also Barker:1968].

A behaviour setting is a standing behaviour pattern together with the context of this behaviour, including the part of the milieu

to which the behaviour is attached..., [Barker and Wright:1955:9]

They have used this concept to order the naturally occurring behaviours observed in an English and an American town, and to try to understand individual psychological acts in terms of the physical and social settings in which they occur.

Toffler's thesis is that the acceleration of change has the result that the stream of situations we experience in our everyday lives, become increasingly characterized by translence (high rates of ‘turnover, temporariness,

impermanence), novelty (the non-routine, unpredicted, surprising), and diversity (situations of ’overchoice'), and it is the inability to adapt to these phenomena which gives rise to “future shock'. Relationships with the six components of human situations may be equally affected by transience, novelty and diversity: man-thing relations, man-place relations, social relations, man's relations with

the social organization - the 'organizational nexus', the context of ideas and information, and man's relations with time, may each become more impermanent, more unpredictable,

and more variable:

It is precisely these relationships that, as acceleration occurs in society, become fore­ shortened, telescoped in time. Relationships that once endured for long spans of time now have shorter life expectancies. It is this

abbreviation, this compression, that gives rise to the almost tangible feeling that we live; rootless and uncertain, among shifting dunes.

[ ibid: 43]

Elsewhere he writes:

We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision­ making processes. Put more simply, future

shock is the human response to overstimulation.... Caught in the turbulent flow of change, called upon to make significant, rapid-fire life

decisions, [the victim of future shock] feels not simply intellectual bewilderment, but disorientation at the level of

values. [ibid:290,322:emphasis

The new form of society latent in these developments, Toffler refers to as 'super-industrial society'. This he

intends to connote: "...a complex, fast-paced society dependent upon extremely advanced technology and a post­ materialist value system." [ibid:434]. What happens when

the changes confront an unprepared population at too great a pace is revealed in America's experience:

...the United States is a nation in which tens of thousands of young people flee reality by opting for drug-induced lassitude; a nation in which millions of their parents retreat into video-induced stupor or alcoholic haze; a

nation in which legions of elderly folk vegetate and die in loneliness; in which the flight from

personal added]

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For some evidence concerning the relation between the occurrence of significant life changes and the onset of psychiatric illness, see Rahe, McKean and Arthur [1967] and Brown and Birley [1968].

family and occupational responsibility has become an exodus; in which masses tame their raging anxieties with Miltown, or Librium, or Equina 1, or a score of other tranquilizers and psychic pacifiers. Such a nation, whether it knows it or not, is suffering from future shock. [ibid:325]

Other authors have been particularly concerned with the strain placed upon cultural adaptations by the pace of scientific and technological advance. The greater the rate and the dimensions of innovation, the greater the problems of refashioning concepts and value systems to cope with the changes. Thus Ozbekhan makes the following judgement:

The prime reason for the failure of the rules and values on which our rationality rests can, as I and many others believe, be found in the massive changes and the rapid rates of change

that most Western societies are undergoing. The phenomena generated by change are not only stressful, they are not only disquieting - but they put to question the validity of many

general concepts that, for a long time, have provided muscle to our world view. It is

admittedly difficult to maintain a world view predicated on a particular definition of

facts when we are no longer sure what a fact is, or, on scarcity when we, in the industrially advanced West, are experiencing the birth pains of abundance; or, on the sanctity of toil when the possibility of a leisure society has already raised questions of social organization so

fundamental as to be frightening, and so alien to out traditional modes of thinking as to be unanswerable.... [Ozbekahn:1968:50]

Health services is one particular area in which western societies are currently facing a large set of quite severe moral and ethical problems, as a result of the revolutionary progress being made in the biological sciences. Results already achieved in spare-part surgery, contraception, and genetic control, pose an immense challenge to widely held belief systems and values.

The population explosion, perhaps in itself the single most threatening example of accelerated change, poses a different order of ethical problem for the developed

societies, over the question of immigration. It is of

interest that while the Australian government has officially repudiated the existence of a 'White Australia' policy, a former Prime Minister has publicly acknowledged that the existing immigration practices are immoral. In the end,

Australia's co-existence as a white European society in close proximity to an overcrowded Asia, may in moral terms be as little defensible as the policy of apartheid in South Africa.

There are signs that within science itself, the rapidity with which new disciplines, concepts and methods are being developed, is forcing changes on the traditional structure of subject-matters, that will encourage synthesis as well as specialization. Nevertheless, the problems of methodological esoterica and scientific jargon are still a huge handicap in the crossing of disciplinary boundaries.

The characteristic of turbulent society that we are talking about is known and experienced by millions of people as the 'rat race'. Further evidence of the existence of the phenomenon is that it begets its negation - in groups of people known as drop-outs and hippies, in institutions such as Free Universities, and in social relationships of