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chapter 6 Organizations It is important to characterize the relationship between the ideas in the idea systems and their use in building organizational charters and social relationships. This question has two main aspects: How are the images and conceptual relations defined in the idea systems transformed or transposed in forming agreed-upon conceptualizations of behavior, and how are the choices defined in the idea systems transformed or transposed to choices for individual and collective action? Michael Fischer and his students (2002) have focused mainly on the latter problem in trying to formulate the way cultural ideas derived from textual analysis can be deployed in agent-based models of the way people use resources. To extract the ideas that make up cultural information systems from texts, Fischer has experimented with various applications of information theory. To model the use of ideas in behavior, he has used multiagent models. Although he may not see cultural information sources as being quite as definite and clearly delineated as I do (we are still discussing it), his basic observations of their relation to organized behavior have been the same. First, the ideas are both vague and flexible. Second, there are many more possible combinations and interpretations than are actually utilized or can be utilized. So there must be some process of selection. This being so, how do we characterize the process? Fischer’s answer is that the logic cannot be determinate. You cannot use a logic that requires statements such as “If A then B” when the actual state of affairs is “If A then maybe B.” In Fischer’s view, the appropriate logics are more likely to be deontic (Fischer 2002, 370). Deontic logic was originally developed in philosophy as a formalization of moral, rather than factual, assertions. It continues to be an area of dispute and analysis among philosophers; it is not something we can apply off the shelf. But since it does examine notions such as “oblige” and “permit” as well as the more usual “is” or “is in the class of,” it does seem to be the sort of logic we need to simulate the process of going from cultural idea systems to ideas in use. This can be done with agent-based models, and Fischer and some of his students have done it (Lyon 2002; Bharwani, Fischer, and Ryan 2002; Bharwani 2006). Read, on the other hand, has focused more on the problem of characterizing the way that the images and relations of the idea systems are transposed, and in this context he has employed the mathematical notion of instantiation, as I have. Instantiation is the process of transposing a set of defined elements from the form it takes in an abstract system to a form in which it is concretely applied (Read 2002). Here, it is the process by which the implications of an element defined in one or another of the cultural information systems takes on the shape it has in a social charter, the organization that that charter enables, and the contexts that take shape when that organization is enacted or evoked in communicative behavior. The implication of describing ideas as instantiated in behavior is that there can be a precise mapping from a cultural information source to an organizational charter derived from it or from the charter to its uses in context. At the same time, however, when ideas are instantiated they respond to different constraints than they do in the idea systems by themselves. One of the main differences between the form an idea takes in its information system and the form it takes when instantiated is that instantiations are constrained by time. Further constraints come from the fact that the ideas must be represented by material symbols. As noted, a kinship terminology may represent generations as vertical ranks, one above another, but when this idea is represented in behavior, the verticality must be symbolized by something else: words, gestures, patterns of deference, or different locations in a single horizontal space. In actuality, Fischer’s and Read’s analyses are complementary, or at least there is no absolutely sharp line between the transposition of images and the transposition of choices. The indeterminacy that Fischer describes pertains to the actor’s problem of choosing one idea or another along with one purpose or another, while Read’s contention that there is a regular and describable instantiative logic applies to the way the ideas work once they are chosen. What we find is that the instantiations we...

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