infonet-economy

Where should one begin with a design for the self-control of social systems? That is the question addressed by this paper. The traditional concepts of control reset on the feedback loop; control is essential to the attainment of goals. However, the simple feedback loop is insufficient for the modeling of a control system for an organization or other social system. For those systems, which search for multiple goals, it is necessary to design multilevel control systems incorporating the notion of pre-control. This eminently anticipatory function has hardly been considered by past research. Pre-control as understood here is a higher-order control that takes place between different logical levels of a control system. The Model of Systemic Control (MSC), a framework for multilevel control with pre-control relationships, is expounded and illustrated by means of a System Dynamics model.