16.2 Systems Theory: Your Group is Like a Pond

The study of small groups was a hot topic of research among sociologists in the 1950s, but the prevailing model for how groups work did not come from a sociologist; it started with a biologist named Ludwig Von Bertalanffy. After studying different kinds of biological systems, he started to notice some similarities: cells behave like organs, organs behave like trees, trees behave like weather systems, weather systems behave like ponds. There were some common features among all these systems in the natural world, and his General Systems Theory attempted to pinpoint those features. From there, social scientists noted that the same patterns apply to human systems as well: families, institutions, governments, small groups. What are the similarities?

All of these systems are composed of parts that are interconnected and interdependent. The human body, for instance, is composed of subsystems such as the nervous, circulatory, and musculoskeletal systems, all of which work closely together. If you’re going to give a speech, your body might respond by producing more adrenalin (endocrine system), which makes your heart (circulatory system) beat faster and your breathing increase (respiratory system). The interconnection factor means that a change in any part of the system can produce effects in other systems, the extreme version of which is called the butterfly effect: even a small change (a butterfly flaps its wings in Toledo) can create a series of consequences with potential huge results (a hurricane forms in Cuba).

What does this mean for groups? Let’s take the example of a hypothetical group of students who like playing quidditch (the game derived from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books) and want to see it adopted as an official sport at their college.

The group starts with eleven members, but one of them, Anjuli, finds out that her brother is in the hospital and decides she has to give up quidditch to take care of him. Anjuli was working with a school administrator on the paperwork to gain official status, but she’s too preoccupied with her brother’s condition to remember to tell anyone else how to do that job when she leaves. Grant takes over talking to the administrator, but he can’t figure out the forms and paperwork and misses a deadline, and in the process annoys that administrator, resulting in a delay of at least a year. Luckily, Grant is dating Nola, who is pretty good with social media and revamps their Instagram account, generating more publicity for the team. But Nola is the jealous type, and she doesn’t like the way Penny, the treasurer, looks at Grant, which leads to a spat that makes Penny decide it’s not worth the hassle for a sport that might fizzle out in a few years anyway, so Penny announces that she’s quitting this fad sport, which makes three other players think she has a point there, so they join a lacrosse team instead, and on and on. Blame Anjuli’s brother, the butterfly in this system.

Another principle of systems theory is that systems must adapt to their environment in order to survive. In the case of the quidditch team, one environment to which they must adapt is the college administration; if Grant had figured out how to complete their forms or who to talk to, the team would be in better shape. But the team also exists within other environments, such as the Harry Potter fandom world, and Penny’s opinion that anything Harry Potter-related is falling out of fashion could spell trouble. Meanwhile, they didn’t notice that other quidditch teams were forming alliances with rugby, dodgeball, and tag players, creating the new sport of Quadball. Now the team might have to join that movement if it wants to survive.

A third feature that systems share is a boundary of some kind: a “membrane” that separates people inside the boundary from people outside of it. In group terms, this relates to the very basic question, “are you in the group or not?” Some groups have official enrollment lists (perhaps with membership dues), others don’t, but even with formal boundaries it’s sometimes difficult to tell who’s in and who’s not. Nola was never actually a member of the quidditch team; she was just hanging around and helping her boyfriend, Grant, but she might have had more influence than other people who were official members from the start.

This points to another feature of boundaries, permeability: some boundaries are hard to pass through and others aren’t. Your body has different kinds of membranes. Some are “permeable” (easy to cross), including the membranes inside your lungs that allow oxygen into your bloodstream. Others are “impermeable” (hard to cross), such as the blood-brain barrier, which protects certain drugs from reaching your brain, or the lining of your stomach, which keeps digestive acids from leaking into other organs. In group terms, this permeability is an analogy for groups that are easy to join and leave vs. other groups that are hard to get into and nearly impossible to leave (such as crime organizations or cults).

Once again, though, formal membership is not the only factor: there can be informal ingroups within an organization — the inner circle of people who get involved with everything and feel a strong sense of belonging — and outgroups who might feel excluded or less committed even if they’ve officially belonged for years. On the quidditch team, the three who left after Penny’s announcement were feeling “on the outside” already, and wondered if the lacrosse team might welcome them more warmly. Two of them suspected that their outgroup status was because they are African American, and the inner circle focused more of their attention on each other because they are all white. Some boundaries are fairly invisible, and the people enforcing them might be unaware of what they are doing.

Finally, systems theory stresses the principle of homeostasis: the tendency of all systems to stay balanced within certain parameters. When your body gets too cold, you’ll shiver to produce warmth; if you get too hot, you’ll sweat to try to cool yourself down. On a group level, this might translate to things like the balance between work and play; if a group is used to a certain amount of productivity, then overwork will make members yearn for a little down time and recreation, but if they spend too much time in “vacation mode,” they’ll feel the urge to get back to work.

Homeostasis is a basic survival mechanism, but it also means that systems are resistant to change, and conscious efforts to change dysfunctional norms won’t progress easily. This is why social movements can be frustratingly slow: attempts to address dysfunctional cultures with police departments, for example, push up against the natural tendency for systems to stay the same, and even if you replace every member of the police force, the problems might persist. In the case of the quidditch team, after Penny and the three others left, the remaining members made more efforts to be inclusive to new members, but those efforts felt a little forced and eventually the current members reverted to hanging around with the people they were most comfortable with and subconsciously ignoring newcomers.