Q.

Why do human societies appropriate/adopt external

models, from fields such as sciences, for its societal
organization?

Insight into human behaviour comes from many sources . The viewers presented here ae based
principally on scientific investigation , but it should also be recognised that literature , drama ,
history , philosophy and other non - scientific disciplines contribute significantly to our
understanding of ourselves . Social scientists study human behaviour from a variety of cultural ,
political , economic and psychological perspective , using both quantitative and qualitative
approaches . They look for consistent patterns of individual and social behaviour and for
scientific investigation may show people that their long held belief about certain aspect of
human behaviour are incorrect .

As a species , we are social beings who live out our lives in the company of other humans . We
organize ourselves into various kinds of social groupings , such as nomadic bands , villages ,
cities and countries , in which we work , trade , play , reproduce and interact in many ways ,
Unlike other species , we combine socialisation with deliberate changes in social behaviour and
organisation our time . Consequently , the patterns of human societies differ from place to place
and era to era and across cultures , making the social world a very complex and dynamic
environment .

It would be only a machine if the collective's ends could not only be strictly planned but
also executed in conformity with a program. In this respect certain contemporary societies with
a socialist form of economy tend perhaps toward an automatic mode of function-ing. But it
must be acknowledged that this tendency still encounters obstacles in facts, and not just in the
ill will of skeptical performers, which oblige the organizers to summon up their resources for
improvisation. It can even be asked whether any society whatsoever is capable of both clear
sightedness in determining its purposes and effiCiency in utilizing its means.

In any case the fact that one of the tasks of the entire social organization consists in its
informing itself as to its possible purposes - with the exception of archaic and so-called primitive
societies where purpose is furnished in rite and tradition just as the behavior of the animal
organism is provided by an innate model - seems to show clearly that, strictly speaking, it has no
intrinsic finality. In the case of society, regulation is a need in search of its organ and its norms of
exercise.

On the other hand, in the case of the organism the fact of need expresses the existence of a
regulatory apparatus. The need for food, energy, movement and rest requires, as a condition of
its appearance in the form of anxiety and the act of searching, the reference of the organism, in
a state of given fact, to an optimum state of functioning, determined in the form of a constant.
An organic regulation of a homeostasis assures first of all the return to the constant when,
because of

variations in its relation to the environment, the organism diverges from it. Just as need has as
its center the organism taken in its entirety, even though it manifests itself and is satisfied by
means of one apparatus, so its regulation expresses the integration of parts within the whole
though it operates by means of one nervous and endocrine system. This is the reason why,
strictly speaking, there is no distance between organs within the organism, no externality of
parts. The knowledge the anatomist gains from an organism is a kind of display in extensiveness.
But the organism itself does not live in the spatial mode by which it is perceived. The life of a
living being is, for each of its elements, the immediacy of the co-presence of all. The
phenomena of social organization are like a mimicry of vital organization in the sense that
Aristotle says that art imitates nature. Here to imitate does not mean to copy but to tend to re-
discover the sense of a production. Social organization is, above all, the invention of organs -
organs to look for and receive information, organs to calculate and even make decisions. In the
still rather summarily rational form that it takes in contemporary industrial societies,
normalization summons up planning which, in its turn, requires the establishment of statistics of
all kinds and their utilization through computers. Provided that it is possible to explain - other
than metaphorically - the functioning of a circuit of cortical neurons using the functioning of an
electronic analyzer in transistor form as a model, it is tempting, if not legitimate, today to
attribute some, perhaps the less intellectual functions for which the human brain is the organ,
to the computers in the technico-economic organizations they serve. As for the assimilation of
social information by means of statistics being analogous to the assimilation of vital information
by means

of sense receptors, to our knowledge it is older. It was Gabriel Tarde, who was in 1890 in Les lois
de l'imitation , was the first to attempt it. According to him statistics is the summation of
identical social elements. The spreading of its results tends to yield its contemporary "
intelligence " about the social fact in the process of being realized. We can imagine, then, a
statistical department and its role as a social sense organ although for the moment, says Tarde,
it is only a kind of embryonic eye. It must be noted that the analogy proposed by Tarde rests on
the conception that physiological psychology had at that time the function of a sense receptor,
like the eye or ear, according to which sensible qualities such as color or sound synthesize the
components of a stimulant into one specific unit which the physicist counts in a multiplicity of
vibrations. So that Tarde could write that " our senses, each one separately and from its special
point of view, makes our statistics of the external universe. "

Whereas the historical evolution of human societies has consisted in the fact that collectivities
less extensive than the species have multiplied and, as it were, spread their means of action in
spatial externality and their institutions in administrative externality, adding machines to
tools,stocks to reserves, archives to traditions. In society the solution to each new problem of
information and regulation is sought in, if not obtained by, the creation of organisms or
institutions .