A unified open systems model for explaining organisational change - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 135

export entropy to their environment, thus creating negative entropy or negentropy,
which prevents the system from moving toward an equilibrium state. A negentropic
process is, therefore, the foundation for growth and evolution in thermodynamic systems.
For dissipative systems to sustain their growth, they must not only increase their negen-
tropic potential, but they must also eliminate the positive entropy that naturally accu-
mulates over time as systems are trying to sustain themselves. The build up of the sys-
tem's internal complexity as it grows is always accompanied by the production of positive
entropy ( d i S > 0), which must be dissipated out of the system as waste or low-grade
energy. Otherwise, the accumulation of positive entropy in the system will eventually
bring it to thermodynamic equilibrium, a state in which the system cannot maintain its
order and organisation (Harvey and Reed, 1997).
Implications for organisations
Although the argument so far is fundamentally based on chemical or biological systems,
we argue it also applicable to the organisation as an open system. It is suggested by
Leifer (1989) that the net resource used by an organisation can be viewed as being divided
into two parts. First is that concerned with the maintenance of the internal environment,
and second, that which is transacted with the external environment. The former is
treated as the change of entropy due to necessary maintenance and support processes
( d i S ), which is always positive due to the nature of indirect costs, and the latter as the
change of entropy in the input-transformation-output process ( d e S ), which may be pos-
itive or negative (e.g. a firm may experience profit or loss). It is suggested, further, that
d i S refers to all the activities that are necessary to keep the organisation maintained and
supported (e.g. management, administration, research and development, etc.) and d e S
refers to all the activities where there is interaction with the environment (e.g. purchasing,
selling, recruiting, etc.) and production of products and services. We further maintain
that, in order for the organisation to remain viable, the flow component of entropy must
be negative and greater in magnitude than that of the maintenance and support compon-
ent since the support and maintenance activities always result in a net drain or loss to
the organisation due to the exploitation of resources, but the input-transformation-output
process (i.e. production and sales activities) may result in a net gain for the organisation
if its earning is greater than its cost (Leifer, 1989). In summary, we conclude, albeit
perhaps at a metaphorical level, that in order for an organisation to maintain its order
it must be in a non-equilibrium state.
Order through fluctuations and system transformation
This section will address how fluctuations can lead to significant change in systems,
which results in higher degrees of order and complexity, and how this relates to the
concept of the systems' transformation and self-organisation. Fluctuation in this case
can be defined in general as a spontaneous deviation from average behaviour (Nicolis,
1979). In chemistry, it can be defined as follows (Jantsch, 1980, pp. 42-3):
The fluctuations referred to here are not fluctuations in concentration or other
macroscopic parameters, but fluctuations in the mechanisms, which result in
modifications of kinetic behaviour (e.g. reaction or diffusion rates). Such
fluctuations may hit the system more or less randomly from without, as through
the addition of a new reaction participant or changes in the quantitative ratios
of the old reaction system. But they may also build up within the system
through positive feedback, which, in this case, is called evolutionary feedback.