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Abstract
This paper describes the interface between Sociology and Systems Engineering and the
foundation of a new discipline called Social Systems Engineering. That foundation is described as
being related to Special Systems Theory which is a part of General Schemas Theory. Special
Systems theory describes a mathematical basis for modelling Life, Consciousness and the Social.
believed that some of the trepidations about the rigor of social science might be allayed. General
Schemas Theory provides a foundation for both Systems Engineering and for understanding the
emergent properties of the social via Special Systems Theory. Concern with the social impact of
technological systems has increased over the past few years with the arising of social networks
and other technological systems that facilitate social networking. The new discipline would
concentrate on understanding and building systems that focus on the social interface of the
technological infrastructure.
Introduction
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This paper will present the need for a new discipline that brings together Sociology and Systems
Engineering and examine the augmentation and facilitation of social networks by technological
systems. We can read the title of this new discipline as Social Systems Engineering or Social
Systems Engineering. But, of course, we want to distinguish it from what is called “Social
Engineering”, which is characterized as the means of obtaining identity information by some sort
of trickery. Social Engineering is seen as something wholly bad even if it is not connected with
Scams because it could mean the engineering of social structures, such as in Corporate Re-
engineering, which seeks to design the organization as if it were a machine. Rather, Social
Systems Engineering reflects the augmentation and facilitation of spontaneous and non-fabricated
social systems by technological systems that are designed, such as social networking systems, or
market exchange systems, or other types of systems like online games that allow the free
connection of individuals within the social system to have representation and communication
within the social network. This is the meaning of Social Systems Engineering, which is the
engineering of systems to support social interactions. On the other hand, Social Systems
Engineering has to do with the production of designed social systems, for example, organizational
structures that are redesigned so that they can interface with technological and other systems in a
more effective way. Social Systems Engineering is part of the discipline of Organizational and
Communication studies and has to do with studying the efficiencies of different structures and
processes of organizations and teams. Social Systems Engineering brings together all these
aspects that are scattered and dispersed within different disciplines and are normally side issues in
other disciplines. Social Systems Engineering could be used to study how to combat Social
Engineering, or how to create better designed social structures and processes so that they may be
facilitated and augmented technologically, or it may study the technological infrastructure that
does augment and facilitate social interactions that are normally voluntary, informal, and freeform
within society. We are really talking about the interface between social structures that are studied
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ubiquitous within our culture, be it through the internet and web, or mobile devices, or other
means of connection and communication between various appliances and machines that we
interact with and operate within our environment. Our society is being transformed by networking
technologies and devices that are interlinked by networks. Social Systems Engineering will study
the new types of social structures that are needed within this new ubiquitously networked
Engineering can examine the way the network needs to be designed in order to reflect the social
structures that exist now and how they may change in the future due to their unforeseen modes of
facilitation and augmentation that could cause unexpected consequences within society and its
institutions. For example, we have social networking on the web through publically accessible
sites, but what happens when we try to implement that within corporations? How would that
change corporate culture? How would the social networks themselves have to be modified in that
context? And what effect does that have on the actual social networks that exist when they
become visible within some medium within the company? Or, consider the effect on the
globalization of social network representations in various parts of the world. When we have these
social network representations that are worldwide, how does that change the flow of information
between various countries and cultures? All of these are the types of questions that Social
Systems Engineering might seek to answer and there is an infinite variety of such questions that
form a problematic.
The problematic of Social Systems Engineering relates to the interaction between the soft human-
centered sciences and their representations of social phenomena within the concrete
pushed to the periphery in both those hard and soft disciplines whereas Social Systems
Engineering will bring what is peripheral in these Hard and Soft Sciences and Engineering
disciplines to the fore and make this interaction the key focus of study and engineering practice.
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Of course, we need to distinguish between Social Systems Science, which would study this
interaction, and Social Systems Engineering, which would talk about the specific interface
between the Social Systems and the Technological infrastructure that is augmenting, facilitating,
and creating new avenues of interaction. Social Systems Engineering needs to be founded on a
Social Systems Science that studies the phenomena of the interaction of the phenomena and
artifacts that appear when the hard and soft science and engineering disciplines interact. In
academia, these two areas remain very distant from each other and, in fact, it is hard to find any
papers that talk about this interaction from a theoretical point of view. For that reason we need to
consider the possible theoretical foundations of that interaction and the discipline that studies it.
Because I am both a Sociologist and a Software Systems Engineer I have been thinking about this
problem for a long time. Most technologists know little about social sciences, and, on the other
hand, Sociologists do not tend to study Technologists or the ramifications of technology within
society except in terms of extrinsic relationships. It is also true that both Software and Systems
Engineers normally do not know much about Systems Theory either, so, although engineers are
engaged in building technological systems, they do not fully understand the general theory
underlying those systems. Systems theory has made a much greater impact on Sociology than it
has on various the Engineering disciplines. Now there is a new discipline of Systems Engineering
that is trying to make in-roads into academia and it is trying to establish its own foundations. This
foundation should be Systems Theory, or Systems Science, which will provide the link for
Sociology and other Social Sciences to connect with Systems Engineering. However, Systems
Theory may not be enough to describe what is going on in the Systems Engineering milieu; a
higher order theory called Schemas Theory is better adapted to capturing some of the richness of
the Systems Engineering environment that is dealt with in Systems Design. Various separate
schemas are used by different disciplines but they are not unified into a general theory. So, for
instance, there is no Pattern Science, Form Science, or Domain Science in the manner that
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Systems Science exists as an interdisciplinary subject of study. Here, we suggest that Schemas
Theory could serve as a rich foundation for Social Systems Engineering, which would connect
Sociology and the Social Sciences to Systems Engineering and the other technological disciplines
that support it, such as Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Hardware Engineering, as
well as other specialty engineering disciplines like Human Factors Engineering. In this paper we
will explore this deeper foundation and its implications as we generate conversations and mutual
tolerance between the soft and hard sciences and engineering disciplines. Disciplines have been
counterpoised in their domains of specialty for a long time but we will have to find common
General Schemas Theory was developed as an answer to the question concerning the foundations
of Systems Engineering as a new discipline within academia. It is clear that Systems Science or
Systems Theory should be at least one of the foundations of Systems Engineering, and that
Systems Engineers need to be cognizant of the advances made in Systems Theory over the last
half century. At this point in time Systems Engineers do not study Systems Theory as part of their
curricula. Rather, their curricula mostly transmit received wisdom from industry about how things
should be done, which have been codified into standards, best practices, and process descriptions.
But, Systems Engineering is ripe for a paradigm change as it begins to look at its own practice
from an academic perspective. Software Engineering has undergone several paradigm shifts such
as the object oriented approach, which has gained dominance over the earlier functional approach
influence and transform the object oriented paradigm and we can see that there is a new paradigm
on the horizon represented by hybrid programming languages such as Scala. But the same kind of
paradigm changes have not, for the most, part occurred in the academic research in Systems
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Engineering1. Software Engineering has Computer Science as its Academic basis, but Systems
Theory never became more than an interdisciplinary subject and has seldom had its own
department within the university, so Systems Engineering cannot rely on an institution that is in
place (like Software Engineering that has relied upon Computer Science) for its academic basis.
Also, for many years Software Engineering has had the Software Engineering Institute and other
consortia that support research in the area of software development, whereas government funding
for Systems Engineering has only recently begun. It is interesting to note that when we try to
ground Systems Engineering in Systems Science we find that there is more to Systems
Engineering than is covered by General Systems Theory, and this is what instigated the search for
what is missing from Systems Theory. Eventually it was realized that we needed to go up yet one
more level of abstraction from General Systems Theory to General Schemas Theory. The
question that leads to General Schemas Theory is: What constitutes the next higher emergent
level of abstraction above Systems Theory? And, What else is there like a System but essentially
different? The answer to this is General Schemas Theory and the best introduction to that subject
is Umberto Eco’s book Kant and the Platypus. This book discusses the history of Schemas within
our tradition. As Engineers, we are concerned with just one type of schema that he identified,
which called the ‘Geometrical and Mathematical Schema’, i.e., the schemas that organize
tradition we see that there are many different schemas that are used by various disciplines to
understand the phenomena that they focus upon such as Pattern, Form, Domain, World, etc. Thus,
we realize that normally when we talk about emergent hierarchies we are talking about ontic
hierarchies such as string, quark, particle, atom, molecule, macro-molecule, cell, complex cell
with organelles, multicell organism, social group, species, ecosystem, or gaia. Yet, there is
another completely different set of projected organizational constructs that are ontological, such
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The one exception is perhaps the extension of the idea of Systems to “System of Systems”
which is a recursive application of the system to itself to produce the super-system.
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that they are ‘a priori’ projections of templates of pre-understanding on Spacetime. These various
schemas have different scopes and different organizations from each other, and several of them
can be applied to the same level in the ontic hierarchy as a tool in order to understand a particular
emergent level. The ontological and ontic hierarchies have become mixed up in our thinking
about phenomena within individual disciplines, and the ontological schemas with their own
hierarchy have not been fully understood because there is no interdisciplinary study of them
except for the System. Now, once we understand that schemas of different scopes exist that are
different from the ontic emergent hierarchies, then the question is: What are the schemas that
exist and how are they related to each other? In order to kick start the study of schemas I decided
to come up with a hypothesis I call S1 that says that there are ten specific schemas: facet, monad,
pattern, form, system, meta-system, domain, world, kosmos, and pluriverse, which appear as a
hierarchy of increasing scope but are related to dimensionality such that there are two schemas
per dimension and two dimensions per schema, and also such that they reach from the negative
one dimensionality all the way up to the ninth dimension. String Theory takes over above the
ninth dimension. This hypothesis, S1, allows us to actually begin testing our theory of the
schemas in order to find out what may be wrong with it. For instance, the first thing is to make
sure that phenomenologically there are no gaps in the nesting of these schemas. So far none has
been found. But it also allows us to begin thinking of the set of schemas as a whole as we try to
find out what their properties are separately and together. Thus, once we reach the level of
abstraction that General Schemas Theory has to offer above that of Systems Theory, we can then
begin exploring this new theoretical space. And what we find is that it allows us an approach to a
unifying science that is stronger than Systems Theory alone, because many disciplines use
multiple schemas to describe the phenomena that they study. These templates of understanding
are immersed in their background assumptions and the schemas themselves do not come to the
fore until we study them in terms of General Schemas Theory, which moves across disciplines
where we can view the schema across various phenomena and under various terminologies
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because different terms in various disciplines can indicate the same schema. Len Troncale refers
Now that we have the idea of General Schemas Theory in place as the deeper foundation beyond
the Systems Theory of Systems Engineering, we understand that we should really be calling this
discipline Schemas Engineering and these implications have been developed in a series of papers
about Schemas Theory presented at CSER conferences by the author. But perhaps since it is
unlikely Systems Engineering will change its name we should consider General Schemas Theory
as part of Design Theory, which operates as one of Systems Engineering’s core processes.
What we want to do here is explore the consequences of Schemas Science and Schemas Design
Engineering for Social Systems Engineering, and the first thing we will note is that this is a subset
of Social Schemas Engineering. We can take this back to E. Durkheim who said that the Kantian
Categories were socially constructed. The Kantian Categories are related to time through his
concept of the Schema. Schemas, as we understand them, are ‘a priori’ projected templates of
pre-understanding of phenomena of different scopes. And we note that one use of the schemas is
in Design, i.e., whenever we design something we design it according to the schemas. Thus,
Engineering in terms of design is about the projection of the schemas onto nature to produce
artifacts that do not appear in nature naturally but are cultural objects produced by society.
Schemas are socially constructed and projected as ways to understand phenomena, so, when we
consider Science and Engineering, we see that schemas are merely a study of nature through the
‘a priori’ schemas or the production of artificial products based on the projected schemas. So,
suddenly Social Schemas Science and Design Engineering can be seen as one thing, the social
projection of schemas on nature and their use for creating cultural artifacts through design.
Thus, what seems peripheral to Systems Engineering, i.e., social relationships, and what seems
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peripheral to Sociology, i.e., technological infrastructure, now becomes central to the enterprise
of both, because we realize that Sociology and other Sciences as well as Engineering Design all
use Schemas to understand the phenomena that they study. Furthermore, Science and Engineering
combine to explore how nature is used to create artificial products with emergent properties that
exemplify the projected schemas in a pure form. Basically, all design uses schemas as the
building blocks for their structuring of artifacts, and this is based on the fact that spacetime (as an
‘a priori’ projection) is not a plenum as Kant thought, but is separated into various kinds of
projections that nest with each other to cover all experience. We express this by saying that the
spacetime projection is not a smooth plenum, but is striated with nested scopes of templates of
pre-understanding.
Now suddenly Social Schemas Science and Engineering become something central to our
concern because the projection of spacetime underlies all categorical projections. Social Schemas
Science is a projection of a singular that is the basis for all other idealistic projections including
both Kantian (thing-like) and Aristotelian (linguistic topical) categories. In our tradition the
concept of Schemas has always existed although it has been in the background and not focused on
explicitly. Now it has suddenly come to the fore as a central conceptual structure necessary to
produce a vantage point from which the new discipline of Social Systems Engineering can view
its phenomena. H. Dreyfus says that in a paradigm shift, or episteme shift, which is a shift in how
we look at the world, there are some concepts that were central that become peripheral and others
that were peripheral that become central. By positing Social Systems Engineering as a topic we
are drawing from the periphery of two disciplines and making that central to our concerns in this
new discipline, and this is facilitated by the concept of the schema because it gives us a higher
level of abstraction than the system. This applies to both the technological infrastruture and the
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Just as we can use Systems Theory to understand Social Systems, we can use other schemas to
understand social phenomena. And just as we use Systems Theory to understand Systems
Engineering and its design of technological infrastructures, we can use other schemas to further
our understanding of the design of artifacts and its context. Schemas can be used to bridge
between these two disciplines, which ordinarily would have little to say to each other because,
generally, we design in a vacuum without considering context and view while the unintended
consequences that result from the social ‘fall out’ from technological changes in society are dealt
with separately. When we begin to look at social relationships and their facilitation and
augmentation by the technological infrastructure (as in social networks) then suddenly the two
disciplines (Engineering and Sociology) cannot ignore each other anymore. Schemas Theory, as
the next higher level of abstraction beyond Systems Theory, can serve as a bridge between these
two disciplines.
There is another important point that must be made in the context of the study of Schemas
Theory. In Schemas Theory all the various schemas are well defined within our tradition except
for that which I call the Meta-system. “Meta” in the context of Schemas Theory means: the
schema beyond the System Schema, but before the Domain Schema. We may also refer to ‘meta-
systems’ as “Open-Scapes” because the word ‘scape’ captures much of the meaning of this
Schema (although it is imperfect because it must always have a co-term like landscape, seascape,
mindscape, etc.). For our purposes we will just refer to schemas within the meta-system as Scapes
even though that is not a proper term normally. In our tradition we have a blindspot for meta-
systems as a schema. We tend not to see them because they blend into the background even
though they define the context, situation, circumstance, etc. that refer to various environments,
ecosystems, media, etc. All the manifestations of the meta-system are conceptually fragmented
from each other unlike the other schemas in our hierarchy. This is probably why we have such
problems designing our systems so that they will be environmentally and contextually
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appropriate. It is also important to note that Systems and Meta-systems are inverse duals and that
they lie at the center of the scale of schematic scopes. And while we can define things structurally
(i.e., using patterns) to prove things formally and to explain things systematically, we can only
indicate things in a meta-system. This means that Social Systems are more like Meta-systems
rather than Systems. We can think of Social Systems as Systems, i.e., with boundary, but we are
better served if we think of them in terms of environments and ecologies with fuzzy horizons.
The relationship between Systems and Meta-systems is like Russian dolls. The dolls are the
Systems and the spaces between the dolls are the Meta-systems. The social fabric is more like the
field of the Meta-system than the hard determinate boundaries of the system, even though social
structures can be seen as systems. On the other hand, engineering artifacts are more like systems
than meta-systems, even though meta-systems are a needed perspective such as in testing
environments, or operational environments. So, we see from this that Social Systems Engineering
has another dimension to it that relates systems and meta-systems to both the social fabric and the
engineered technological artifacts. Each can be seen in terms of both schemas although there is an
intrinsic emphasis on meta-system fields that is related to social systems that characterize them as
fuzzy and soft sciences with indeterminate horizons, while on the other hand, technological
infrastructures and products are more easily seen as systems with determinate boundaries.
This indicates the paradigm change that we are looking for. Systems Engineering is increasingly
more responsive to social factors in the production of its products and social phenomena is best
approached as a meta-system. We see that the term Social Systems Engineering encapsulates the
duality between systems and meta-systemic scapes. We want to augment social relations with
representations of what is essentially a soft and fuzzy phenomena. We have more kinds of
relationships than “friends”. Social relationships are amazingly complex. And if we oversimplify
the phenomena of social relations then there are going to be unintended consequences that will
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adversely affect these relationships through our reification and oversimplification. Technological
systems always impose determinate relationships on the phenomena that they model. But the
social fabric is inherently indeterminate and context sensitive and dependent on circumstances.
So, there is a fundamental challenge in bringing these two different types of phenomena together
To increase the complexity of the situation, we find that when we delve into General Schemas
Theory there are partial thresholds that are a mixture of systems and meta-systems of various
degrees that we will refer to as the Special Systems. They exist between the System and Meta-
system (Open-Scape) schemas. These Special Systems only become visible when we have a very
specific idea about the difference between the System and the Meta-system. We can think of the
System as Emergent and as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, i.e., like a gestalt. The
inverse dual of the System is the Meta-system, which is de-Emergent and is a whole less than the
sum of its parts, i.e., a de-emergent field. Systems can be represented as Turing Machines but
Meta-systems are like Universal Turing Machines, i.e., operating systems that run other Turing
machines. Systems take the Gödel Statements into account within their whole, while Meta-
systems exclude them. The Gödel Statements cannot be proved to be inside or outside the system.
If we consider them inside we get emergent properties, while if we consider them outside we get
de-emergence. The system as a gestalt has forms as figures on its background that are
circumscribed by a determinate boundary. The meta-system is the Open-Scape panorama that can
be seen from a specific spot in the landscape to the horizon in all directions. Thus, a meta-system
has a determinate boundary on the inside and an indeterminate boundary on the outside, while a
system has a determinate boundary on the outside and an indeterminate boundary on the inside.
That is why the two schemas can interleave in their mutual nesting like Russian dolls.
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Once we understand that Systems and Meta-systems are inverse duals in this way, then we can
consider the third possibility that there may be systems that are exactly equal their sum, neither
with excess or lack. Three such Special Systems exist. They are called Dissipative Ordering, as
and Varella (except that they are disunified instead of unified), and Reflexive Social, as defined
by John O’Malley and Barry Sandywell in their ‘Reflexive Sociology’. The Autopoietic Special
System is like the perfect number whose divisors add up exactly to the whole number (6, 28 etc.).
The Autopoietic Special System when seen as two Dissipative Ordering Special Systems can also
be likened to the Amicable numbers, which are two numbers whose divisors add up to each other.
This interlocking of mutual production is like two Dissipative Structures that are mutually
ordering each other. The Reflexive System is like the Sociable numbers, which are a ring of
numbers that, in sequence, add up to each other in a cycle. These numbers were discovered in
1904. All other numbers are excessive or lacking when we add up their divisors. These special
numbers together are called Aliquot numbers. This is the simplest mathematical representation of
them. There are more complex analogies for them in mathematics like the Hypercomplex
numbers or non-orientable surfaces, but we will suffice with this simple mathematical analogy as
a basis for understanding what they are like. What we want to concentrate on here are the
The key is that these Special Systems have some form of ultra-efficacy, which we see in the
Internet with its speed and low cost of communication. The Reflexive Social Special System is a
definition of the Social Level of emergence that is beyond that of Life at the Autopoietic level
and Consciousness at the Dissipative Ordering level. Life, Consciousness, and the Social are the
three most important emergent levels that we have to deal with in our lives and that makes our
lives worth living. In terms of Hypercomplex Algebras these Special Systems can be seen as
concatenations of facing mirrors, where the dissipative ordering is two facing mirrors, the
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autopoietic symbiotic is three facing mirrors and the reflexive social is four facing mirrors.
Beyond that, mirrors must either be spaced apart or warped to interact. The special properties of
these systems come from the fact that they are regular concatenations of mirrors in reflexive
structures and somehow we need to take this reflexive nature of social networks into account in
our design of them. That reflexive nature comes from the fact that we can consider at least four
levels of meta-cognition in our social relationships before we begin to lose track. We can consider
‘what he thinks of what she things about what he thinking that she is thinking’, etc. This inherent
reflexive structure is one of the key things that make us human and it is hard to represent this in
determinate representations such as we see in the software and hardware that connect social
networks.
Schemas Theory brings us a theoretical approach that is inherently social. In fact, we can see that
the Reflexive Social System represents a model of the social while the Dissipative Ordering gives
us a model of the designing and building activities that we employ to order our environment by
building things such as the internet, the web, and ultimately Web 2.0 sites that have social
networking built into them. So, we can see that social schemas engineering can represent its
social aspect in one special system and its engineering part in another special system, which both
flank the autopoietic, self-producing, special system that represents the viable living human being
who both designs engineering products and interacts socially with others. The autopoietic
symbiotic special system is a conjunction of two dissipative ordering structures that are mutually
ordering each other. This mutual ordering can be seen as an image of the exchange of givens,
data, information, knowledge, wisdom, insights, and realizations internally, which then spill out
as practices in terms of desiring, absorbing, avoiding, and disseminating within the reflexive
social field. At the pattern level this entails flux, structure, value, and sign as types of projected
discontinuities. Part of this can be seen in the theory of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus in
which they define desiring machines as the opposite of the socius while they play down the
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bodily integrity of the individual as an organism. They develop the idea of the rhizome, i.e., the
non-hierarchical network and the body without organs as the nexus of desiring machines. We
augment this theory by thinking of what they call machines as practices (following Foucault)
while adding avoiding, absorbing, and disseminating practices to the mixture so that we can
understand the basic dynamic at the level of pattern in the social network, which is engaged in
When we apply social networking to Systems Engineering design teams who are producing the
requirements for a social network technological infrastructure, then we can see the essential
reflexivity of Social Systems Engineering: the team uses the product that they have designed and
implemented. The team is a social network that is augmented and facilitated by the technological
infrastructure that it designs and produces by using a version of that infrastructure to support the
whole development process. This essential reflexivity in which the social network of the team is
designing and producing social networking systems shows that Social Systems Engineering can
be a completely reflexive structure and that the production of such systems (that are then used
beyond the team) is a dissipative ordering of the online environment that represents the social
relationships of those beyond the team. When we look at it this way we can see social networking
as self-producing while we facilitate and augment the spontaneously forming social networks
between people that occur within organizational structures and teams. Because social networks
are part of our social being they are reflected into the artifacts that we produce, and until recently
this has been an ignored part of our social existence that has not been facilitated and augmented
by the technological infrastructure. Yet, that is changing. Social Systems Engineering focuses on
this interface between Systems Engineering technological artifacts and the social spheres of our
lives as they are expressed and represented online and in other ways such as in markets and
games. Having a theoretical foundation that can be tested makes this new field more accessible
and easier to explore because we can focus on the relationship between the System and Meta-
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system and then on the Special Systems as a framework for considering the phenomena that we
are studying and this is where Social Sciences and Technology interface.
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