Environment
Marshall Scott Poole defines the environment in opposition to the system. He notes that "the environment is everything outside the system's boundary that is relevant to it" (52). The space between the environment and the system is demarcated by system boundaries.
Writing in the context of organizational communication, Poole defines four dimensions of an environment (52):
- Complexity, or "the number of elements in the environment and their interdependence"
- Unpredictability, or "the lack of information about what elements of the environment are and about how they will impact the organization"
- Dynamism, or "the degree of change in the environment"
- Hostility, or "the degree to which the environment is potentially harmful to the organization."
Inputs and outputs can cross boundaries to create interactions between system and environment. Although this concept seems useful for understanding how a system interacts with the larger world, I wonder whether it might be productive to bring a few idea's from Habermas' concept of the lifeworld. One might ask, what is different about "an environment" and "the lifeworld?" Can an environment be characterized by the kind of language, action, purpose, meaning, etc. that occur there alá Habermas' concept of the lifeworld? Does this give us any kind of insight that the environment does not? How can the researcher access the system's environment?
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