Response quotes

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Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Time for Equilibrium

“Misfit provides an incentive to change; good fit provides none. In theory the process is eventually bound to reach the equilibrium of well-fitting forms. However, for the fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. The process must be able to achieve equilibrium before the next culture change upsets it again... The direct response is the feedback of the process. If the process is to maintain the good fit ... while the culture drifts, it needs a feedback sensitive enough to take action the moment that one of the potential failures actually occurs.”

David_E_Nye

Technology Contested

“Technologies are contested terrains. World's fairs, spectacular lighting, and media events all have changed in response to shifting public tastes. Americans had divided reactions to the Apollo Space Program, and they created divergent narratives to understand computers, the electrification of society, and the meanings of energy sources. Technologies are contested, and a close reading of such events... reveals not hegemonic control but a welter of meanings. The public understands technology not as one-dimensional agents of change, but as both enabling and disabling innovations.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Introduction, page 3.

Richard_Pascale

Efficiency and Variation

“Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by 'getting all the ducks in line'. To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff results - as long as the music lasts. But in the face of nontraditional competitors or major environmental discontinuities, all that streamlining and reengineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization by those closest to the disruptive change, and curtails a bottom-up emergent response to cope more effectively... Nothing fails like success. Over-adaptive organizations become inflexible. Disruptive change leaves them as helpless as a beached whale.”
  • Source: Richard T. Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2010). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.190, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press

Rittel_and_Webber

No Correct nor Optimal

“In a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good, there is no objective definition of equity, policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false, and it makes no sense to talk about 'optimal solutions' to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no 'solutions' in the sense of definitive and objective answers.”

John_Archibald_Wheeler

It From Bit

“It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.”
  • Source: John Archibald Wheeler from a paper originally presented at the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop. Published in the book "Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information: Volume I", edited by Wojciech H. Zurek, section "Physics of information", as a paper entitled "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links". Published in 1993 by the SFI Press Archive Series. ISBN: 978-1-947864-27-6.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Skill and Effort

“These twin functions of the body -- as a source of skill and as a source of efforts -- complicated the way in which employers confronted the problems of labor discipline and the speed with which they invested in labor-saving technology, just as they complicated workers' responses to that technology.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 36. ISBN:0465032125.

Frederick Taylor

“The man who emerged as the chief symbol of the rational approach to management was Frederick Taylor. Though much has been written on Taylor and the philosophy and methods of scientific management, it is worth highlighting a few central themes for three reasons. First, Taylorism explicitly treats the worker's body in its two dimensions -- as a source of effort and as a source of skill. Second, workers' responses to Taylorism reveal the ambivalence that this dual role of the body can create, as it did among the bleach plant operators or the nineteenth-century glassmakers. Third, the logic that motivated the early purveyors and adapters of scientific management has continued to dominate the course of automation in the twentieth-century workplace. As will be argued later, it is a logic that must undergo a fundamental reevaluation as information technology is widely adapted to productive activity.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 41. ISBN:0465032125.