ABSTRACT

Two primary concepts in the study of human organizations are hierarchy and control. Five kinds of communication control comprise a scheme to describe many aspects of human affairs that contribute to making a human activity system evident and visible. The five kinds of communication control are labeled meaning, availability, accessibility, retrievability and applicability. The ordering of elements that comprise an organization creates a hierarchy when structural or functional relationships among the elements become determined. Relationships among the elements of a system create an inherent order, or hierarchy, that may become apparent to us in our experience, study, and description of that system. The process of hierarchy termed state transformation is one where a basic substance can change the order of its organization when basic conditions change. Convergence of the constructs control and hierarchy are hardly novel in the systems sciences.