FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENTIATION, HIERARCHY AND SUBSIDIARITY IN COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

CHARLES R. DECHERT

After World War II the social sciences witnessed the growth of a new mode of thinking based upon the results of interdisciplinary work in the life sciences, the newly opened areas of communications theory and the study of control processes in self-regulating systems. An interdisciplinary Behavioral Science group at the University of Chicago under the leadership of James Mil ler laid the groundwork for the theory of Living Systems. Big elow, Rose nblueth and Wi ener had published their epoch-making paper on "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" during the war, followed by Wiener's work on Cybernetics-Communica- tion and Control in Animals and the Machine. Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the United States and Ross Ashby in Britain laid the groundwork for a General Theory of Systems while in the social sciences Parson's structural/functional approach was built on foundations laid by Pitirim Sorokin. Glenn Snyder and his associates at Princeton emphasized decision-making in the conduct of international affairs, paralleling the work of management theorists who were much taken by the new "hard" approaches to organizational decision-making provided by the various techniques of operations research, including linear and dynamic programming, the critical path method and network analysis. Ethics published "The Functional Prerequisites of Society" by Aberle, Cohen et al, suggesting a basis for values underlying decision-making founded upon the commonalities of human nature and experience in group life.

In a paper dating back nearly 20 years, "A Tran sactional Approach to Environmental Planning," I attempted to apply this new mode of thinking to the city and region. These were considered as social systems having geographic boundaries that were also human communities, capable of satisfying the full range of human needs and human values, each at its own level in the hierarchy of communities.

I speak here of a hierarchy of human communities and of social systems, and suggest that the notion of subsidiarity is intimately linked to this concept. Unfortunately the term "hierarchy" tends to be identified with power relations of inferiority-superiority, dominance and submission, differential access to values, and invidious distinctions of class and social rank. As used here the term is more neutral; it refers to the inter-relations of system components into groupings that are themselves components of a more extended system, which, in turn may be a component of a system yet more vast as the earth is part of a solar system that forms part of a galactic system, which in turn belongs to a "cluster" of galaxies in the physical universe we know.

An organism consists of differentiated organs, often associated in functionally defined subsystems, e.g., circulatory, reproductive, etc.; the organs consists of tissues which are in turn composed of individual cells. Social systems demonstrate certain analogous structural characteristics. In some sense individual persons may be conceived as the ultimate components of social systems--both functionally specific social systems such as banks or universities or automobile plants and omni-functional communities. If we look at these omni-competent "communities" we find that at successive levels of aggregation there tends to be greater functional differentiation of the group components and a correspondingly greater range of products, goods and services satisfying human values. From family to neighborhood, to town or city, to county and region, to nation-state (or political federation or confederation of peoples), to the global community inhabiting "space ship earth," there is an increase in community size, functional complexity, communications and other exchanges and interdependencies. In turn, increased functional differentiation, enchanced productivity and the challenges produced by intellectual and cultural exchanges showed increase in the possibilities of a "good life" for each group and person belonging to the whole.

Anyone who has lived under primitive conditions must be aware of the "liberation" and leisure for more human pursuits provided by a social and technical machinery which obviates the need to chop wood for heat, cultivate a garden for food, and care for horses and sheep for transport and clothes at the individual family level. Note, incidentally, the functional differentiation by sex, age, strength and skill that seems to arise naturally in farm families and more recently in Israeli agricultural Kibbutzim--despite their ideological commitment to equality. In the presence of such differences, "equality of opportunity" seems to result in something approaching more traditional patterns of social role differentiation.

Let us now examine more closely the rationale for hierarchical organization, that is, the underlying structural characteristics of social systems that require some degree of functional differentiation, especially in the communications roles that link together the human (and group) components to achieve coherence as a recognizable social system characterized by some degree of functional unity. At the base level and in its simplest form the group is held together by continuing coordinative communications among its members.

In theory, at least, such groupings [insert fig. 1] may be completely egalitarian although in practice leadership tends to come to the fore. German military psychologists in World War II would send an unstructured, leaderless group of raw recruits to another part of the training base to dig a ditch, lay a pipe or erect a structure, providing maps, materials and tools. Psychologists as participant/observers would attempt to identify "natural leaders," those who could help find the way to the site, gain cooperation, analyze the job and encourage an efficient division of labor to facilitate the work. These were singled out for leadership training in NCO or officer candidate schools.

Creative and scientific work is most effectively accomplished in "horizontally" organized peer groups with complete freedom of intercommunication. The "bull pen" in large architectural and engineering firms with easy visual and physical access to all one's professional colleagues reflects this form of organization. The Salk Institute at La Jolla was designed around an easily accessible and amenable atrium that facilitated colleagues' meeting in informal, interdisciplinary encounters among peers.

Note that in our three [insert fig. 2] person group above (n=3) there were six unidirectional communications flows (f=6). Since by definition, a system is characterized by multiple components, a boundary and functional unity, it is clear that a social system is integrated by the communications that link its elements. Each member is a self-regulating system, a living system that perceives its environment, decides, and acts in a continuing process of short term adjustment and long term adaptation to that environment. For an individual member the group itself is a most significant "environment" to which the individual responds on the basis of signals conveying expectations, values, plans of action, affective relations, orders or suggestions, praise or condemnation, etc. These are the basis for the unity of group action. As the number of group components (n) increases arithmetically, the number of communications flows (f) increases geometrically (f=n²-n).

[insert figure 2]

This may also be expressed as a matrix.

[insert figure 3]

Similar considerations apply to organisms and non-human social systems.

Organizational theorists have long recognized the concept "span of control," namely, that the primary work group normally numbers five to ten persons in more or less continuous communication. Larger groups tend to get bogged down, devoting inordinate time and resources to the process of communication. Coordinative communications channels in a horizontal organization of 57 persons number 3192. If, however, the group is organized hierarchically, employing the "linking pin concept," we find eight such groups of eight persons arranged in two echelons and communications flows reduced to 498.

Three such echelons would permit the systemic integration of 400 components with only 3192 communications flows (1596 two-way channels) as opposed to fifty times that number required by a non-hierarchical organization.

[insert figures 4 and 5]

When we use the "linking pin concept" we do away with the need for rigidly defined "lines of authority" or formal relations of superiority-inferiority, order-giving and order-receiving. The various groupings might well be quite open in their deliberative structures, although the communication node obviously has the structural advantage (power) deriving from his being the first to receive information from the institutional environment and his control of the information going from his group (and the groups reporting to its members) to the institution's central/coordinative information processors, who, in turn, normally possess effective decision-making powers.

Even informal "networks" take on this hierarchical character; communications nodes in the network may effectively control much of the net-worked groups' decision-making. When, in the 1950s, the question arose of who, in actual practice, was running a major element of the U.S. defense establishment I suggested that the source and destination of all internal telephone calls be tracked, suspecting that the administrative officers in personnel, supply, travel, etc., to whom everyone had to make requests and render accounts, had a substantial degree of effective control through administrative vetoes (e.g., claims of lack of funds, personnel freeze, etc.), opportunities to introduce delays (misplaced or lost documents, regulatory requirements for interagency coordination, etc.), or the representation of alternative uses of scarce resources.

More recently the anti-Vietnam-War network of the late 1960s and early 1970s demonstrated the rapidity with which a network of millions of activists can be brought into existence and deployed with a surprising level of strategic and tactical coherence using a hierarchically organized yet informal communications network. The Armies of the Night that moved on Washington for the March on the Pentagon in October 1967 took some six months to mobilize. A few years later their continuators could rally over a weekend hundreds of thousands to march on Washington, and millions to take over American college campuses to protest U.S. incursions into Cambodia employing an informal capillary communications network that reached virtually every university campus in every region of the nation.

What has all this to do with urban society and the principle of subsidiarity? A great deal, actually, for the theoretical considerations raised suggest that the relegation of decision-making power and authority to the lowest competent level in the hierarchy of social groupings is based on the very nature of groups. The coordinative information exchanges necessary for participative decision-making are possible only in relatively small groupings. Representative government, by elected officials or virtual representation, involves at best only sporadic participation and is amenable to manipulation by those controlling resources, especially the mass communications media. Due to its being one or more steps removed from day-to-day reality representative government may lose moral contact with its constituents and/or physical contact with the environment(s) it tries to order. In any society, especially those having some pretense of democracy, participative institutions are the key to legitimacy.

By allowing lesser communities and functional groups to retain most of their resources and allocate them prudently in terms of concrete felt needs the welfare of the whole tends to be well-served. The higher echelons, encompassing more people, greater geographic areas, larger market shares and more inter-related functional specialties serve best by restricting themselves to what is beyond the scope or capacity of the smaller (lower) groupings, namely, coordinating, regulating in terms of the common welfare, sustaining, defending, providing encouragement, counsel and community resources as needed to complement and supplement the activities of smaller communities and functional grouping. Such areas as monetary and fiscal policy, national defense and internal security, infrastructure and other collective goods beyond the capacity of individuals and lesser groups clearly lie in the domain of political decisionmakers, legislators, some at the city and regional level, others at the national or even global level. Environmental pollution, for example, has become a critical issue at each of these levels.

On the other hand, we have witnessed an increasing recognition in recent years that many areas are handled more efficiently and economically at the level of the smaller and smallest communities, neighborhood and family: educational and vocational choices, personal and family budget in terms of values maximization with limited resources, neighborhood watches for neighborhood security, neighborhood councils to discuss and decide local issues. City, county and state authorities are increasingly jealous of their limited autonomy and prerogatives vis-a-vis larger political units. More questions are being raised about the competence of the omnicompetent state: Are the goals of economy and efficiency best served when administered by remote bureaucracies governed by abstract norms that increasingly ignore, when they do not openly offend, local traditions, customs, usages and values?

We can apply the notion of a pluralistic social order to urban analysis and to the encouragement of those participative social institutions which integrate people into communities. The French revolutionary model of an omnicompetent state cementing together a nation of isolated individuals, equal in their impotence and enervated by a dense web of minute regulations, is being replaced. In its stead is an acceptance of multiplicity in unity and the legitimacy of diversity in a multitude of communities capable of joint action in matters of common concern. Constrained to live together in an orderly manner, each inhabits a "life space" adequate to its legitimate requirements.

Early in this century Arthur Bentley proposed a Group Theory of Politics in a volume entitled The Process of Government. Basically he identified "group" and "interest" and suggested that legislative policy outcomes in a democracy are the result of a kind of parallelogram of social forces. In my own work on transnational business and political parties I have found it very useful for analytic purposes to deal with a wide variety of organized groups in terms of a variety of defining criteria. Countries have geographic boundaries, their political parties are defined by ideology while their government agencies are differentiated by function. Business concern produce specified goods and services as they buy from and sell to other businesses and households. They relate to government as suppliers and taxpayers, campaign contributors and the object of regulation. They relate to labor unions and educational institutions, as well as to other firms in their industrial sector. Most adults in advanced countries form part of some corporate entity which serves as employer and source of income and life opportunity.

Each individual has a broad range and variety of group appurtenance and loyalties: to family and friends, to local community, region and country, to corporation or university or agency of government, to associations of like-minded people, to labor union and church and political party, and to the values these embody or represent. Harold Lasswell has suggested that the following values, broadly defined, largely encompass the universe of social groups: Power, Enlightenment, Wealth, Well-Being, Skill, Affection, Respect, and Rectitude. A single group may pursue several values; groups on one values plane may relate to those pursuing other values. All are in continuing dynamic interaction, adjusting and adapting to one another as part of the overall natural, artifactual, and social environment to which each must continually adjust and adapt.

This is no Leibnitzian universe of monads, without windows or doors, in pre-established harmony. It is rather a busy, bustling, dynamic universe subject to will and chance, to calculation and plan, to precision and pre-emptive action on the part of others. Only by identifying the social actors, their structures, resources, aspirations and operations, their communications inputs and outputs, their suppliers and clients, their co-operators and adversaries can we begin to sort out the social reality of the community.

"Community" is the term we apply to the omnicompetent social grouping whose only evident end, like that of an organism, is itself, the common welfare of the whole. To this each functionally specialized person and group in the community contributes, each in its limited but (presumably) constructive way, as a part of the whole. One of the most serious errors of modern social thinking has been to conceive community principally in terms of large social aggregates: the nation-state, the volk united by history, culture and language, or the class united by its status as victim or exploiter in a radical adversarial relation with the "other." Yet if we look at community from another perspective--the hierarchy of omnicompetent communities with each succeeding level characterized by a larger population, greater complexity and functional differentiation, and usually encompassing a greater geographic area--then the natural complementarity of communities becomes clear. Each level of community possesses its appropriate "common welfare," which contributes to and is enhanced by the greater resources, diversity, and enhanced functional specialization and integration of the larger community.

The ever-present temptation is for decision-makers, political authorities, to employ the power of the larger community to over-ride or pre-empt the legitimate roles and appropriate autonomy of lesser communities. The world has become very sensitive to the individual's human and civil rights; it must be sensitized to the rights of families, local communities, peoples, voluntary associations and corporate entities. Does the notion of "academic freedom," for example, apply primarily to individual professors or to individual universities as corporate entities engaged in the pursuit of truth according to the founders' and constituents' values and frame of reference.

Similar considerations are relevant to towns and cities, peoples and ethnic groups, associations and corporations. Must the "rule of law" and "equality under the law" liquidate all social subsystem boundaries, autonomy and discrete identity in the pursuit of some egalitarian homogeneity? Or should the "rule of law" provide rules of the game that respect the diversity, legitimate autonomy and inherent rights of communities and mediating groups while assuring the conditions of their peaceful and orderly convivence? Does "equality" demand the liquidation of all social boundaries in the greater society? This produces an inevitable tendency toward social homogenization at ever lower levels of economic, intellectual and moral achievement. Perhaps equality as a desirable social characteristic might better be sought in terms of opportunity and the coexistence of a variety of "life spaces" that are both accessible and satisfying in terms of men's multiple and diverse allegiances and value orderings.

Not least, we must think of social groupings longitudinally over time. Communities and corporations are potentially perpetual. Families endure and successive generations build on the achievements (or may recoup the failures) of their ancestors. The same is true of larger groupings, urban aggregates, regions, nations, cultural areas and the great globe itself. Intellectually, we are pygmies standing on the shoulders of a few giants and a lot of other pygmies. Within our cities we gain increasing respect for the past. Contextual building and historic preservation recognize that men cannot live comfortably without roots in their past, a sense of place, identity within a structured and hence delimited (and to some degree intractable) physical, artifactual, social and cultural environment.

The applicability of these notions to urban analysis are, I think, clear. It is entirely feasible to map the formal and informal social structures of the city as well as its physical facilities, buildings and public places, and relate them to the functional requirements and values orderings of the community. Secondly, we can trace these over time, determine trends and more or less probable futures. Not least, we can begin to make explicit the value orderings governing group life.

In turn, inevitably we must confront again the most basic issues of social philosophy. What is the good life, the common welfare? What are the limits of freedom? What is the range of diversity compatible with an ordered life in society? What are the limits to individual and group behavior in terms of social protection and the defense of the very young and very old, the weak, the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginal? And above all, what is the range of provisions, the rules of the game, compatible with the autonomy, freedom of action and welfare of the individual persons and the social groups that comprise the polis?

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.