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two examples. The Company is certainly not alive, but it has to
behave
very
much like a living organism. It is essential to the Company that it develops
techniques for survival in a changing environment: it must adapt itself to its
economic, commercial, social and political surroundings, and it must learn
from experience.
Beer's exceedingly complex systems, were, then, as discussed already, in a
different ontological space from the referents of OR (or physics). They were
not fully knowable or adequately predictable, and they were “the province
of cybernetics” (18). Beer's enduring goal was precisely to think about man-
agement cybernetically—to inquire into how one would run a company,
or by extension any social organization, in the recognition that it had to
function in and adapt to an endlessly surprising, fluctuating and changing
environment.
7
Toward the Cybernetic Factory
MY GOD, I'M A CYBERNETICIAN!
STaFFORd BeeR,
ON FIRST READING WIENER'S
CybernetiCs
(BEER 1994C)
Beer first read Norbert Wiener's
Cybernetics
in 1950 and plunged into the
field, establishing an individual presence in it and close personal connections
as he went. By 1960, “I had known McCulloch for some years, and he would
stay at my house on his Sheffield visits. . . . The British pioneers in cybernet-
ics were all good friends—notably Ross Ashby, Frank George, Gordon Pask,
Donald MacKay and Grey Walter” (Beer 1994 [1960], 229). “Norbert Wiener,
as founder of cybernetics, was of course my great hero,” but Beer did not meet
him until his first trip to the United States when, on 25 May 1960, Wiener
“almost vaulted over his desk to embrace me,” greeting Beer with the words “I
have become increasingly conscious that the growing reputation of my work
[Wiener's] in Europe derives in large measure from your lectures and writ-
ings, and from the fact that you have built Cybor House. For this I should like
to thank you” (Beer 1994 [1960], 281, 283).
In what follows, we will be largely concerned with connections between
Beer's cybernetics and Ashby and Pask's. Beer and Pask actively collaborated
in the work on biological and chemical computers discussed below and in the
next chapter, and one can trace many parallels in the development of their
work. But the defining features of Beer's cybernetics were Ashby's homeostat
