Introduction We return now to the issues raised by the first blog in this series: what is involved in the doubling of the Harold Bridger’s double task (Bridger 1990)?[1] In order to compete effectively in…
Category: 3 Asymmetries
The different ways of managing the supply-demand relationship.
In the last blog, I described how the variety of possible 1st order behavioral closures constituted superposed states representing all the possible behaviors able to be realized by a living system. This restricted the possible…
Special thanks go to John Kineman who has acted as a reader for this blog, providing invaluable help in clarifying my thinking. I alone bear responsibility for the end result! The need to surrender sovereignty,…
The Tavistock Institute community was well aware of the challenges presented by ecosystems (Trist and Murray 1997), addressing the different nature of turbulent environments (Emery and Trist 1965), the referent or regulative organizations that arose…
I wrote a blog recently on how 21st Century Capitalism differs from 20th Century Capitalism (Boxer 2023). It argued that Marx worked with two dialectics: not only the dialectic between use-value and exchange value, but…
by Philip Boxer Why three kinds of symmetry-breaking? Because each symmetry is based on a different kind of basis for agreement: ‘how to do things’, ‘who to be’ and ‘what to want’. The need for…
by Philip Boxer Architectural evaluation usually focuses on the supplier’s domain from which a product or service is to be provided in response to some customer’s direct demand. The supplier approaches architecture from the starting…
by Philip Boxer PhD Why the interest in stratification? A colleague, Simon Western, referred me recently to Actor-Network Theory and the work of Bruno Latour in the context of a conversation about the behaviour of…
by Richard Veryard We can use the three asymmetries to appreciate different strategies for security and trust, such as deperimeterization. First we need some definitions: Boundary refers to a discontinuity in a physical system, Perimeter…
by Philip Boxer
By including the third asymmetry, stratification can no longer take the form of a universal hierarchy, but instead must be particular to the relationship to demand. It is this which presents the business with its double challenge.