Talk:Decentralisation

From Academic Kids

There are much more specific names for more technical kinds of decentralisation, and when the ordinary person hears it, it's in the management or political context. Therefore, this article covers the political focus heavily and tries to finish with the point that there is usually a balance or limit where centralisation versus decentralisation applies.

This is tough, but worth hashing out. The political case is the hardest case as it involves decentralising assessment of risks of bodily harm, so that's why it gets such attention here.

An article on dialectical materialism could include the links to Darwin and Freud instead, I thought that the article on natural selection, and one on Freud's id, ego, superego theory should all refer to each other for the major influence that these views had on 19th century thought.

I'm not trying to advance Marx by crediting him with the theory of political decentralization, that's as much due to Smith's "invisible hand" and Ricardo's theories on labour, but the balance between Marx and Engels is actually the clearest statement of the *balance* between de/centralisation, and the way the state did and didn't act in arbitrary ways (that classicals had taken for granted), that the 19th century produced. Marx later become a real decentralizer in all ways, post 1872, and washed his hands of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" somehow being able to control bourgeois professionals (whose social capital and ability to deceive he considered himself to have under-estimated after the Paris Commune showed that bankers and lawyers and such could still reverse a workers' revolution by being sneaky ;-)).

This isn't true.....

In the more social sciences, however, decentralisation is not presumed to be quite so amenable to mathematical models. Throughout the 20th century, in parallel with the mathematical models, heuristics describing desirable means of political and of social decentralisation have relied more on dialectic methods or informal analysis. The modern study of this, and the origins of studies of decentralisation processes in sociology and in the political economy of socialism, dialectial materialism, is often traced to the two authors of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels. Their views on this subject, along with Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and Sigmund Freud's theory of id, ego, superego, were part of a very broad 19th century European movement opposed to both rationalism and the morality arising from the centralised systems of religious fundamentalism.

Much of 20th century sociological thinking is based on Michel's Iron law of oligarchy, which is at its heart is a mathmatical model of how organizations work.

• Hmm... I think that depends on the country... some would say Weber and his thinking about bureaucracy and specialization defined it... but I grant the central importance of that thesis for this topic of decentralisation, and should drastically weaken the claim as stated. It's probably wrong way 'round... the 19th century thought was more dialectic and informal and challenged rationalist models, and the 20th century thought froze it into Weber's and Michel's respective models... which, now that I think about it, I learned about in object oriented analysis class, making the assertion totally wrong... hmm... shall you rewrite this, or shall I? What's wrong with it is the claims of what was driving what... not the statements of what was going on... 24
• OK, the whole question of Weber's bureaucracy and Michel's oligarchy is irrelevant to this article... it reads far better jumping from Marx to Engels directly, since the only value that paragraph added was reference to centralized religious fundamentalism... which is a very tiny and maybe misleading part of Marx's analysis in this context. Sociology as such is more interesting here for studies of community/village *size* not structure, and that's mentioned near the end... finally, the Marx/Darwin/Freud thing definitely belongs in dialectical materialism, not here.
• I'd be happy if a real sociologist commented on Weber and Michel here, but I'm not qualified to do it. What I know about them comes from technology circles...

umm... on the part: "total decentralization...anarchism" -this is wrong. Total decentralization is the antithesis of anarchism via the hyperextension of Foucault's panoptician. (esp. through media technologies such as the Internet and cell phones (see Marshall McLuhan) ) -- Kevin Baas

on engels, 2 more points. I agree that we should have a npov. (duh!) which means, ofcourse, that we should present objections and so forth, but when those objections miss the point, we should also show that, so as not to confuse people.

1. from the article, it appears that engels misses the point. Esp. in contrast to the first part, where it describes decentralization in the foucaltian sense of subliminal and automatic social power relations.
2. "in critical times" ... "division and dissent" -> this assumes that the right decision would otherwise be made. How can one justify this? This assumes that whoever is in power has "divine knowledge". Isn't it more dangerous, in critical times, to leave the decision in the hands of a few, or one? Especially in that those few or one have partial information, and must rely completely on their own self-discipline. (which is not something manufactured, but constructed by the discipline of society, which is in this case absent.) Is it less dangerous if few people decide or many? Which is more likely to produce the "right" decision? Which has more information, and more power to process that information? In any case, I think this argument should be presented along with engels'. It is a point of contention; it's a popular debate, and shouldn't be presented as "accepted valid reasoning", esp. if a "NPOV" is desired.

One additional point: it was brought up that there are different types of or aspects to decentralization. maybe this should be clarified; these separate territories discussed? Might we take into account, at this point, the general phenomena of the overlapping of different territories in a signifier? i.e. that different territories have encoded these signifiers differently; that semiotics is fragmented? might we accept this as a general principle? Esp. insofar that we are inclined to ask for a "NPOV", which implies the conflict of different territories? -Kevin Baas

The definition of decentralization in this section is quite different from the one that i am familiar with. Refer to page of mine for details. I see this as a major flaw. Most crucially, the definition that exists here is a mix between a modernist and a pre-modernist approach, when the term itself is a post-modern term. -Kevin Baas