Thursday, April 14, 2016
Assembly B (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
The European Parliament (EP) is the only EU institution having had a continuous and unbroken existence from the ECSC through the development of the EEC to the present EU. Also it is the paradigmatic exemplar of organizational development of an international parliamentary institution (IPI) having today co-decisional authority with the executive of a regional integration and security organization. The ability of the EP to adapt and grow within an ever-changing institutional ecology of the ECSC/EEC/EU represents a process of epigenetic development by a “complex system”. The “complex-systems” approach motivates a framework for evaluating the growth and decline of organizations and other social systems, answering what leads some of them to respond adequately to demands imposed upon them by their environment, and others not. Such a framework synthesizes a functional taxonomy of how organizations maintain homeostasis in order to survive with an epigenetic taxonomy of how organizations develop and adapt in order to grow. It emphasizes the capacity of complex systems to set their own goals through progressive interaction with their environment and through learning in response to this. This “autopoiesis” is the foundation of autonomous motive as opposed to remaining a co-ordinating centre for actions of its own component organizational elements. Consequently the development of the EP reveals the utility of complexity-based approaches for political analysis in general and, in particular, organizational development and evolutionary learning: this, in addition to the light it sheds on IPI development and roles in general and in particular.
