Organizational empire-building

In every instance of organizational planning the same dynamics appear to be at work: a reflex action on the part of each major institution to attempt to expand its planning over the space of the whole system, because no system-wide integrating force is at work in that space. The absence of such a force acts against the inherent nature, structure, and organization of the social system. It is a destructive gap, which many institutions compete to fill. This almost subconsciously motivated attempt, that of a sector to expand over the whole space of the system in its own particular terms and in accordance with its own particular outlooks and traditions, compounds the problem by further fragmenting the wholeness of the system. For sectors cannot become systems, they can only dominate them; and when they do they warp them. This tendency is an ominous portent of the conflicts and dislocations that await society unless a system-wide integrative approach is worked out, and unless new institutions with legitimate system-wide jurisdiction for turning such an approach into policy and action are devised.

All organizations, even up to societal or global levels, may be said to be warped by the most powerful forces which dominate as much as they are able. But in the dynamics of freedom, counter-forces evolve either unilaterally or sectorally, or as alliances of power. It is just such a dialectic of history that has encouraged progress. Imposition by the state of a system-wide integrative approach to benefit society has been the ideology of dictatorships and collectivist utopians.