ABSTRACT
A theory of communication is developed to explain optimization in the social collective: to explain how energy expenditure interacts with control operations to form an efficient information processing system that results in a stable, effective collective. The theory shows how two orders of social relations, flux and control, act on the biosocial energy of the collective’s members to create quantum-like, elementary units of information. Each unit of information contains a description of the collective’s endogenous organization. Constructing and distributing such descriptions throughout the collective on a moment-by-moment basis, the interaction between the two orders operates as a communication system that in-forms (gives shape to) the expenditure of energy and results in stable, effective collective action. Results from a longitudinal study of 57 social collectives offer empirical support for the theory. Only those configurations of flux and control that produced a path of least action — one which entailed the smallest amount of turbulence — resulted in a stable and thus effective social collective.
One has the vague feeling that information and meaning may prove to be something like a pair of canonically conjugate variables in quantum theory, they being subject to some joint restriction that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he insists on having much of the other.
(Shannon & Weaver, 1949, p. 117).