ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes George Herbert Mead's theories of self and of the individual act and William T. Powers's cybernetic theory of purposive individual behaviour. It focuses on Mead's "principle of organization"—the role of significant symbols and taking the attitude of the other in coordinating the behaviours of two or more individuals. The chapter reviews Mead's argument in terms of Powers's cybernetic model and develops three ways by which two or more purposive actors can generate a sequence of collective action. It discusses the relationship between cooperation, competition, and conflict. The chapter explains how the cybernetic model of social behaviour can be extended to micro levels and units of analysis in the gathering, the event, and, the campaign. Powers's control systems theory argues that purposive action involves the comparison of perceptual signals to a reference signal, and the adjustment of behaviours to make perceptual signals correspond to that reference signal.
