David G. Butt is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Division of Linguistics and Psychology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is the Director of the University Research Centre for Language in Social Life (CLSL). Over the last 5 years, this centre has conducted projects in many areas in which the relevance of systemic functional linguistics to community institutions has been at the core of the research activity. Current projects extend from typological linguistics to the analysis of communication (especially spoken) in contexts of surgery, mental health, HIV treatment, financial reporting, media bias, among others. The Centre is also concerned with the interrelation of different forms of discourse, from those of verbal art and philosophy to the arguments of sciences.

The Robustness of Realizational Systems
by Dr. David Butt, Macquarie University, Australia

Abstract

"Nature does not come as clean as you can think it." - A. N. Whitehead
"Empirical knowledge is no longer a topic for academic discussion but an issue of public concern." - Ervin Laszlo
"Sound theory is the most practical thing there is." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

A crucial first step in the maintenance of society's most valued services - including medical care, education, workplace safety, transport infrastructure, and financial services - is the accurate depiction of relevant aspects of the human experience of those institutions. Furthermore, the safe and effective management of such institutions requires the interpretation of more and more information, and from more diverse, and sometimes unpredictable, sources. This demand to process disparate and unpredictable information represents an intensification of complexity in our world. One of the ways in which this intensification of complexity has been addressed is through systems thinking. However, systems views of human experience typically omit certain defining characteristics of the most successful adaptive systems in our biological, cultural, and institutional histories. These characteristics are the basis for what is encompassed here under the classifier 'realizational' - hence realizational systems.

Realizational systems have been the object of careful and powerful investigation (eg. Laszlo 1972; Dietrich and Jochum 2004; Heilmreich and Merritt 1998; Strauch 2002). Nevertheless, the legacy of beliefs and assumptions concerning systems still reflects a 'non-realizational' approach to these systems. Essentially, systemic perspectives continue to be dominated by metaphors of cause and effect, mechanism, seriation/linearity (even if in parallel lines of development), individual modules, and components. All these concepts are themselves of fundamental importance to intellectual analysis and to technological enterprise in general (including in the construal of realizational systems!), but such metaphors do not capture the defining characteristics of realizational systems even when the term 'realization' is invoked in the accounts or theories of particular systems. The problem here is what these metaphors miss in the complex interaction of materiality, organic growth, and social/semiotic invention.

Of particular concern in both characterizing and tracking realizational systems is the way technologies are created in such interactions and then come to direct how those levels of material, organic, and semantic organization further interact. By 'technologies', I am not referring only to the overt tools of preceding revolutions in moving matter, or even in moving information, but also to the conventions of meaning making which structure our inner life and guide us through our strategies for dealing with change - the personal change of moments and days, as well as the transpersonal change of community institutions. These are, then, mental tools, after the characterizations of Vygotsky (1978) and Richard Gregory (1981).

Three preliminary questions to a characterization of realizational systems are:

1. What are examples of realizational systems?

Realizational systems are ubiquitous, being the typical formation of any clustering or integration of community actions. Examples of realizational systems include (setting off from our own current work at the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University), the various governmental services in Australia concerning general health care and (more specifically) the systems for mental health care, as well as systems (in individual states) for the delivery of residential support for the aged, for those with disabilities, or for families experiencing forms of crisis. Other broad domains which involve clusters of realizational systems are finance, media, security, and education. All these domains depend upon structures of mediation, professional advice, and continuous monitoring (with responsibilities variously divided between public and private organizations).

As the emergent formations of cultural evolution, any arrangement in one social environment will not correspond to, let alone equate with, arrangements in other societies or earlier periods of the same society - they will all display variable relational profiles (specific 'valeurs': as in Saussure 1906-11 published in 1915:99-126); but so too they will involve similarities in the substantial transactions by which they derive their denomination and defining business (Saussure’s 'signification': ibid).

2. What role do they play in current social, academic priorities?

Taken individually as systemic domains - viz. health, finance, media - or when sometimes taken in cognate sets or clusters, public investigations and academic research into these systems absorb enormous resources and involve continuous ferment, albeit controversy. And so they should! These systems are the parametric architectures within which we make our day-by-day, little, but consequential decisions about the conditions of living.

3. What promise does an alternative metaphor hold in relation to (those) urgent issues of social and academic concern?

It is not controversial to claim that our models of change and complexity in human affairs should reflect those dimensions of the social processes which make a difference. Models are built on metaphors, often unconsciously, but sometimes with conscious human design. Evolved systems - in particular those expressing human purposes but which incorporate material and biological levels as instruments of those purposes - rarely appear elegant or minimal (from the perspective of 'design'). Yet, these 'messy' accretions of levels, layers and redundancies persist while the 'elegant' interventions of social engineers and ideologues often have only spluttering passages of success and then disappear.

This paper will discuss in detail the defining characteristics of realizational systems, and will present research (especially with my current colleagues in the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University) that draws on realizational models to investigate institutional problems in the domains of health, finance and media (including projects: Butt, Moore and Cartmill 2005; Butt, Hoadley and Galloway 2004; and Matthiessen and Lukin 2005-6).

Much of this paper is motivated by the theoretical clarifications we derive from the work of? M. A. K. Halliday, and from others working in the Firthian tradition in linguistics - for example, Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian Matthiessen, Jim Martin. Important as a focus and a forum for building realizational theory was the project at RIKEN, Tokyo, on the modelling of a semiotic base for brain science - an initiative of Michio Sugeno. Also influential for my thinking here is the realizational theory of stratificationists, especially that of Sydney Lamb.

References:

1. Dietrich, R. and Jochum, K. (2004) Teaming Up: Components of Safety under High Risk. Ashgate Publishing Ltd: England.
2. Gregory, R. (1981) Mind in Science. A History of Explanation in Psychology and Physics. Penguin Books: England.
3. Helmreich, R.L. and Merritt, A. (1998/2001) Culture at Work in Aviation and Medicine. Ashgate Publishing Ltd: England.
4. Laszlo, E. (1972) The Systems View of the World. The Natural Philosophy of the New Developments in the Sciences. George Braziller: New York.
5. Saussure, F. de (1915/1974) Course in General Linguistics? trans. Wade Baskin. Ed. Jonathan Culler. Fontana/Collins: Glasgow.
6. Strauch, B. (2002) Investigating Human Error: Incidents, Accidents, and Complex Systems. Ashgate Publishing Ltd: England.
7. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society. Ed. M. Cole, V John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E.Souberman. Harvard Uni. Press: Cambridge.