Imparity, Service-Dominant Logic, and the Architecture of Enterprise: Jenkinson, CybSoc 2019
Channel: Cybernetics Society
Date: 2020-03-20

This lecture was given at the Cybernetics Society Annual Conference, 2019 by Angus Jenkinson FRPS. Cybernetics is a scientific and humane discipline as relevant to the operation of kindergartens or nursery schools as to the design of robots. It is crucial for good management of companies and governments.

Angus Jenkinson argues from a multidisciplinary base that the paradigm structure for enterprise operation is based on the metamorphosis of a recursive service form. The whole organisation and every part of it — if it is properly functional — is organize towards the development and co-creation of value for recipients, ultimately, customers and society. 

This can be well observed and understood using a phenomenology deriving from Goethe. Each part is a metamorphosis of the fundamental identity. However the frameworks for explaining and designing will also and especially draw on the marketing and business concept of service dominant logic (SDL) and the higher-order cybernetics known as ternary theory or ternary cybernetics. This explicitly builds-in the user's or chooser's value frame and preferences as a fundamental order of nature and is proved cybernetically. It shows that no social or living organisation or organism can be understood in its formation and maintenance without a third domain to be added to energy and Information, i.e. imparity. SDL was developed by Lusch and Vargo, ternary theory by J.D. Stewart. this is of immense significance for social, business, and political systems thinkers and leaders.It provides design and policy guidance.

He also shows how the functional identity of an enterprise (such as brand and culture) derives from and maintains such social structures and illustrates tools to manage this.

Jenkinson is a veteran business leader, consultant, and former research Professor of Integrated Marketing. He is a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society and two other marketing institutes. In the 1980s and 1990s Jenkinson was a leading designer and business leader in the development of the digital marketing world, including conceiving and specifying the world's first commercially available (cybernetic) database system: enabling an enterprise to properly manage its individual relationships with customers for service and value.