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problems had arisen at the system 1 level which could not be addressed there,
and which therefore needed assistance from higher levels in their resolution.
Beer assumed that the upper levels of the system would adapt a benevolent
stance relative to the lower ones and would seek to provide genuine assis-
tance on the receipt of an algedonic signal. Critics pointed out instead that
such signals could also constitute a surveillance system that would sooner
or later (not necessarily under Allende) be used against the lower levels. A
profit-maximizing higher management might readily translate too many alge-
donic warnings into a rationale not for assistance with problems but for plant
closures. Again, it is hard to spring to Beer's defense. He might have replied
that to think this way is to denature and degrade the biological model behind
the VSM. Brains do not jettison arms and legs every time we get pins and
needles, but the obvious reply would be that this simply brings into question
Beer's biological model for social organizations. For Beer, this was a norma-
tive aspect of the model, but no one could guarantee that higher management
would accede to this.
A more detailed version of this same critique acknowledged that there
must be some vertical communication within organizations but questioned
the automaticity of “cries for help.” In the VSM, this was simply a matter of
statistical filtration of data. If production indices remained anomalous after
an agreed period of time, the algedonic signal automatically passed on to the
next level. Werner Ulrich (1981, 51-52) pointed out that in a less automated
system there would be a place for management learning—managers come to
recognize patterns in the signals arriving at their level and thus to discrimi-
nate between which needed to be passed on and which did not—thus pro-
tecting the lower levels to some extent from vindictiveness above. I do not
know whether Beer ever addressed this point, but, again, the VSM was not
exemplary of the cybernetic ontology in action to just the degree to which this
automaticity was a fixed part of the VSM.
3. Following the lines set down by Hanlon, the VSM's critics asserted that
the VSM prescribed a “top-down” mode of organizational control: manage-
ment or government gave orders that the workers were then expected simply
to implement. Cybersyn “has some kind of built-in executive power. . . . Its
strongly hierarchical organisation and its concept of 'autonomy' one-sidedly
serve the top decision maker, the government” (Ulrich 1981, 52, 54). As be-
fore, there is something to this critique, but it is worth taking it slowly. Though
the critics seem to have read Cybersyn as implementing a classic “command
and control” form of organization, with a unilinear flow of orders descending
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