ABSTRACT

Scientists from many different fields of study independently derived common principles about systems that are usually referred to as general systems analysis (GSA), which can be applied for analysis with the social fabric matrix (SFM) (see Hayden 2006: 51-60, 94-106). The institutionalist Gunnar Myrdal used the term “circular and cumulative causation” (CCC) to describe principles he derived for the analysis of socioeconomic systems (1944: 1065-70; 1974: 719-32; 1978: 774-5). His findings regarding systems were consistent with GSA discovered in other fields such as physics, biology, and anthropology. The purpose here is to present a SFM in order to use the empirical content of a realworld socioeconomic system to derive conceptual conclusions about CCC/GSA concerns, and to comment on a current controversy regarding rule emergence. The SFM, digraph, and cellular description are completed for part of the Nebraska State system used to distribute state funds among local K-12 public schools. The Nebraska study combines the problem orientation of instrumentalism and the systems analysis of CCC/GSA. (The SFM elements from the complete study are available at the interactive SFM website https://cba.unl.edu/ academics/economics/sfm/.) The SFM approach to scientific analysis and policy evaluation allows for the knowledge base about values, social beliefs, institutions, attitudes, technology, and the ecological system to be assembled in such a manner to articulate the transactional relationships among the real-world components of those concepts in order to discover the system network and processes that define and guide the components. “The focus of the SFM is to provide a means to assist in the integration of diverse fields of scientific knowledge, utilize diverse kinds of information in order to describe a system, . . . evaluate policies and programs, and create social indicators for future monitoring” (Hayden 2006: 73). Myrdal emphasized that the coefficients of interrelations among the various parts and conditions of systems “usually are unknown, or our knowledge of this is utterly imprecise,” because of a “tremendous area of ignorance” and the adoption of concepts “that are not adequate to local reality” (1974: 730-1). The SFM provides an approach to reverse all three of those concerns.