Encyclopedia of World Problems

1. Constraints on communicability

It is readily assumed that new understanding of problems and opportunities can be communicated comprehensibly. This is not the case. Any new insight is understood to different degrees by different people. The resulting situation can be clarified using the work of Ron Atkin (Multidimensional Man; can man live in 3-dimensional space?, 1981) on q-analysis, namely the theory and application of mathematical relations between finite sets. He has applied this to the analysis of communication patterns within complex organizations.

1. Pathways and loops

The data collected together in the sections of this publication has been deliberately organized in a manner which stresses the interrelationships between the entities within a section and between those in different sections. (Each section is characterized by entities of a different type, and several types of relationship may exist between the same two entities). In effect, therefore, the entities and relationships in each section constitute a network, possibly composed of many subnetworks.

This section provides commentaries on analysis related to the Transformative Approaches to Social Organization area of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

Related Sections

• 3.1 Network analysis
• 3.2 Vicious cycles and loops
• 3.3 Social organization determined by incommunicability of insights
• 3.4 Examples of vicious problem cycles and loops

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The suggestion has been made that the representation of the relationship between theoretical entities (concepts, organizations, problems, etc) could best be accomplished using methods based on graph theory, network theory and topology. The relationships registered in this project could be plotted manually as networks. However, particularly since the relationships are already coded on computer tape in a suitable format, there are three major disadvantages to this manual approach:

1. Fuzzy and incomplete information

This section provides commentaries on interactive database use related to the Transformative Approaches to Social Organization area of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

Related Sections

Each of the approaches briefly described here is necessarily somewhat unconventional. Each has its value in isolation and some are already successfully used on that basis. The argument here is that, whether or not they are already used, each can also be usefully understood as having strengths and weaknesses not found in the others. In this sense their real value for the future lies in their complementarity.