Lars Thue
Complexity, Coordination and Contingency
Perspectives on the Governance of ICT

"The main problems we are facing in telecommunication are all related to complexity:
Complexity of technology;
Complexity of products and markets
Complexity of organisation,
Complexity of co-operation or competition;
Complexity of value creation."

This citation is taken from an article by Jan A. Audestad in the Norwegian research-journal "Telektronikk" No. 3/4 1998. Audestad, a professor of telematics, also writes that "This complexity is new, it did not exist a decade ago."

Even if there is a lot of fuzzy rhetoric connected to such statements, the concept of complexity might give some interesting perspective on the development of ICT. One research-tradition certainly is the non-linear theory, or chaos theory - like the social research on "complex adaptive systems" at the Santa Fe Institute. I think, however, that the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has worked out an understand-ing of complexity that might be more directly useful for our purpose. Simply put, the main aspect of complexity in Luhmann's system theory is the necessity of selection: When there is more than one way of relating a set of elements (of whatever sort), or if its impossible to relate all elements at the same time, we have complexity.

ICT creates an enormous amount of complexity, or "possible worlds", of potential technical artefacts, systems, processes and services. Only a few of them can be selected, or actua-lised. This process is always contingent, other options could have been selected.

The meaning of information society can also be related to complexity, to the "burden" of selection. (People like us, studying ICT, have to select between a huge number of possible paradigms, and the number of important research-papers, books and articles already written on the subject are so high that it isn't possible to make a "rational" selection for the reading list.)

At the moment, my main research interest is the history of telecom governance. I try to study the governance of the Norwegian telecom sector as a dynamic relation between increasing complexity on the one hand, and the changing, and contingent ways of reducing, or handling, this complex-ity on the other. In my opinon, the complexity of the telecom sector is not a new phenomenon.

The continuing societal differentiation has been one major way of handling complexity. But differentiation is not only an instrument for coping with complexity, differentiation creates new complexity, it demands more and more intricate coordination. The selection of coordination mechanisms, however, is also contingent. There is a great deal of functional equivalence between coordination by markets, hierarchies and networks. What has determined this selection process through the organizational and regulatory history of telecommuni-cations?

I am especially interested in the relation between increased complexity on the one hand, and the development of a neoliberal ideology on the other. What is the relation between ICT, increased complexity and the reduced, or transformed, state intervention both in the telecommuni-cations sector and the economy as a whole?