ABSTRACT
The joke about the Martian who lands on Earth in a bed of mushrooms and says, "Take me to your leader”, reflects a fact well-known to many Earthlings and, apparently, to Martians as well: in every social system there are those who wield disproportionate control over the resources of that system. By making the availability of these resources contingent on behaviors they re quire, under conditions and in manners they also specify, they exert considerable influence over be haviors and conditions in the system. In a com plex society such as ours, much of the control is filtered through subsidiary systems in direct line from their source. A complex society such as ours also contains professional systems. These generally function in circumscribed areas neces sary for the functioning of the larger social sys tem. Accordingly, the larger system will allocate resources, and use its powers in other ways (for example, state grants of monopoly through li cences) in support of these subsystems. It will thereby enmesh much of the subsystem in its contingencies. It will set requirements for the maintenance of social support. The subsystem will set related requirements for its professionals. To the extent that this is the case, professional behaviors may be said to be a function of a func tion, that is, to be ultimately explainable by re sort to the larger social contingencies. At differ ent times, the requirements noted may vary in the degree of their explicitness, in the time peri
ods in which the requirements are to be met, in the immediacy of evaluation, and so on.
