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I can't seem to find a good canonical reference at the moment, but there's some interesting writing in organizational theory about the extent to which some of t
by _delirium 14y ago
I can't seem to find a good canonical reference at the moment, but there's some interesting writing in organizational theory about the extent to which some of those kinds of bureaucracies are themselves basically mechanical systems, controlled by code that just happens to be manually executed by human operators. In general, code executed by computers tends to be executed more "rigidly", but in some systems humans can also be quite automaton-like in just executing instructions. In those cases it's not clear the human operators, rather than the algorithms they're executing, are in control of the decisions (it may not even be true that any one human knows what algorithm is being executed). Of course, you could argue someone can always change the bureaucratic protocol, but that's even true with computer code: someone at Google can always edit the code, at some times more easily than others.
- akozak 14y agoDo you have a reading list you could share?
- cecilpl 14y agoI had this exact thought while walking to work this morning. It came to me that the vast majority of modern society is completely independent of the actual people executing it. There are very few jobs that could not be done just as well by another person with the same training. Most jobs are like coded modules. They have well-defined inputs and outputs - even creative jobs can be defined in terms of "create something people will pay for". The system is what runs the world, not the individual people who carry it out.
- _delirium 14y agoI had an interesting hallway discussion with a SAP integrator who mentioned that SAP sort of starts from this view, but then weirdly feeds back in on itself. One of the ideas of SAP is that business processes do have the kinds of pluggable, formalizable patterns you mention, which can be modeled within SAP. And the official idea is that you go from documenting these processes to formalizing them in code. But then over the years SAP's code starts to become a sort of de-facto framework for "this is how you run a company", and people actually start patterning business processes on how SAP models business processes.
- rhizome 14y agoThe source code for those kinds of systems is commonly referred to as, "policy."