“It was variety-increasing for both the individual and the organization rather than variety-decreasing in the bureaucratic mode.”

—  Eric Trist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 9

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It was variety-increasing for both the individual and the organization rather than variety-decreasing in the bureaucrat…" by Eric Trist?
Eric Trist photo
Eric Trist 29
British scientist 1909–1993

Related quotes

Herbert Spencer photo

“Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

The Man versus the State (1884), The Coming Slavery
Context: Influences of various kinds conspire to increase corporate action and decrease individual action. And the change is being on all sides aided by schemers, each of whom thinks only of his pet plan and not at all of the general reorganization which his plan, joined with others such, are working out. It is said that the French Revolution devoured its own children. Here, an analogous catastrophe seems not unlikely. The numerous socialistic changes made by Act of Parliament, joined with the numerous others presently to be made, will by-and-by be all merged in State-socialism—swallowed in the vast wave which they have little by little raised.
"But why is this change described as 'the coming slavery'?," is a question which many will still ask. The reply is simple. All socialism involves slavery.

Jacob Bronowski photo

“Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

As quoted in The God Particle (1993) by Leon Lederman – ISBN 978–0–618–71168–0
Context: The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations between Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.

“Variety can destroy variety.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 3: Regulation and control, p. 207

“"information" is not a substance or concrete entity but rather a relationship between sets or ensembles of structured variety.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 47.

“[Constraint] is a relation between two sets, and occurs when the variety that exists under one condition is less than the variety that exists under another.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 2: Variety, p. 127

Francis Heylighen photo

“W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

" Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html" at Principia Cybernetica Web, 1999-2003
Principia Cybernetica Web, 1999-2003

Boris Sidis photo
Vātsyāyana photo
Aphra Behn photo

“Variety is the soul of pleasure.”

The Rover, Part II, Act I (1681).

Related topics