To compare two fields of science and finding common denominators

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I'm doing a thing on organization communication and am planning to apply the laws of physics to this field.
Do you have any input to offer here, as to which laws to apply, where/ what to focus on and so forth?

The teacher compared organization communication to quantum mechanics, which triggered me to dive into this.

 

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If I were you I'd steer well clear of mushy-headed attempts to force parallels between the behaviour of atomic scale wave-particles and human organisations. You will at best appear pseud and at worst will be a laughing stock. There is far too much woolly misuse of QM around as it is.

On your wider question about applying physics, it might help if you could - briefly - explain what you mean by "organisation communication". Possibly some of the concepts of statistics mechanics might offer insight into the ways in which individual behaviour becomes behaviour of a whole organisation. Or something. Or maybe not.

 

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Well, I don't really care how it "appears". I find it inspiring to attempt and it makes an otherwise quite boring subject more interesting.
Organisation communication means here pretty much what the words say, how oganisations started and how they communicate internally and externally and how their forms of communication have evolved/changed through the parameters of time, size and structure.

 

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Naturally one must consider the individual here, since orgnisations are built by them, consists of them and are run by them. So yes, psychology also applies to this subject. I wish I had a quantum physicist around to give insights to the similarities between human interaction on a larger level and the miniscule world of atoms.

Is there a certified quantum scientist here that wouldn't mind aswering some questions?

 

Stephen Hawking, are you here?

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The reason I replied is that I studied QM as part of my degree, though I am admittedly a chemist rather than a physicist. Thankfully, I have not been certified (yet!). I do not see any useful parallels between human interaction on a larger level and the minuscule world of atoms, even though you seem to assume there are. But maybe there are others who do. Good luck.

 

One can find similarities between any field of study ( according to the thesis: you find what you're looking for, or see what you want to see etc) but if they are useful or not is too early to say, first one has to find them.

 

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us that one can't accomplish the goal of perfect knowledge of momentum of a system and perfect knowledge of its position at the same time.

Engineers warn that you can have a quality solution, a cheap solution or a fast solution, but to require all three makes a manager look ridiculous.

Analogous to both, one might say an organizational memo can be either concisely educating yet potentially anxiety-generating (e.g. "Division A will soon be relocated to Texas") or well-detailed but potentially filled with irrelevancies that generate annoyance (e.g. detailed plan of the above with cost analysis of other options considered), but not both. I don't know if this is true, nor do I see how one might establish it is true with science as it's hard to generate anxiety about one's career status in a laboratory setting. Maybe you could do this by analogy by having a 20-question quiz with $5 for every correct answer and simulate the memo by a 1-pager that would allow a domain level expert to deduce the answers and the long-winded memo be simulated by lecture notes on the topic with answers to the questions worked out 95% as examples.

 

Can you give the teachers words verbatim?

 

Sure: " Organizational communication...bla, bla, bla...much like in quantum mechanics...bla, bla, bla."

 

I'm not sure how relevant the laws of physics are going to be to organizational dynamics.

The phrase 'organizational dynamics' suggests that you might want to look at engineering topics concerned with stability and control. You will find it very technical though, and it will be very hard to learn this material quickly, merely for the purpose of writing a single paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory

If your subject is communications within an organization, information theory might be relevant. This engineering subject concerns itself with mathematical analyses of information flows through channels that might be noisy or limited in capacity. Obviously communicating through a series of human beings might fit that description. It's technical though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

If you are more interested in what people do with the information they receive and with how they use it to make decisions, you might want to examine game theory and decision theory, and needless to say, microeconomics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

All in all though, I'd say that your best bet would be information science, broadly conceived. It's less technical and mathematical and probably more relevant, concerning itself with information in organizations, its sources, storage, sorting and searching, access, distribution and security. This is probably where I'd concentrate my attention if I were you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science

I agree with Exchemist (just this one time Exchemist, don't start worrying) and think that trying to make an analogy between quantum mechanics and business administration suggests crankery or over-speculative, mushy-headedness.

 

Shannon's ideas about "noisy communications channels" leap to mind, which isn't quantum mechanics exactly, but it definitely applies to quantized communications in the form of symbols, which are the best tools a finite mind has to communicate with, as limited as as those are.

Of course, Shannon's basic information theory does not take things like disinformation or useless information into account for the purpose of computing the throughput of a noisy communications channel, but my expectation would be that sending bad information (like lying about everything communicated) would the the Shannon equivalent of a complete channel disconnect, or replacing all of the information that was intended to be sent with an equivalent amount of random noise.

Murray Gel-Mann evidently made a lot of money selling the idea that the stock market behaved like QCD (quantum physics) to similarly gullible folks. Go for it.

Some of the details about Murray and the stock market are described in this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Simplexity-Simple-Things-Become-Complex/dp/1401309933

Which may be useful for finding ideas common to quantum physics in other things also.

 

Thanks for the input. Information theory , communication science and group psychology are already included as subjects within the concept of ogranizational communication. Game theory sounded exciting, and the Murray Gel- Mann book, will look into that. I have to use something as an outer point of reference that is applicable to the main subject, but perhaps you are right about qcd, it could be taking on too much, because I can't offer a plausible comparison to something I know absolutely nothing about to begin with ( other than what can be read in Science Illustrated).
Is there a way I can throw in World of Warcraft in the mix? I'm sure Blizzard would be thrilled.
Or should I just use the city as point of reference? But that is so boring, but they could find it useful ...maybe.
This rarely happens: I'm out of inspiration.

 

While in some sense Quantum Theory is the foundation for all physical interactions, the connection between that theory & organization communication is tenuous at best.

One needs to know zilch about Quantum Theory to understand and/or use a telephone, email, snail mail, telegraph, )r other forms of communication between human beings and/or computers.

 

Hi, well that wasn't the point with the comparison ( that people don't need to know quantum physics in order to communicate) , the point is to compare how human organisations form, develop, evolve, restructure and "die" with quantum physics, in order to possible discover similar patterns that in turn could lead to plausible predictions of humanitys next step in the evolution.
But in a sense we already know that, unless something drastical makes humanity change course, it is headed for self destruction. If we hurry we might escape to another planet and inbreed until we die from severe mutations.

 

In other words, I'm sticking with this idea for my paper. ...sigh, nothing better popped up, wish I had come up with something easier and more doable, but no, not me, must take the narrow path...

 

I think your implied comparison of organisations with living things (i.e. that evolve, grow, die and so forth) has a lot of mileage: far more, in my opinion than QM.

rpenner has mentioned the uncertainty principle. Are there any pairs of properties of organisations that cannot both be determined at the same time? Is there any wavelike behaviour of organisations that leads to constructive or destructive interference? Or is there any sense in which you can determine a property of an organisation by "operating" on some underlying, fundamental description of its state? And what would any of this have to do with communication? I struggle, I really do.

How do organisations communicate, anyway? I recall from my work the notion of multi-level communication between businesses: CEO to CEO, Buyer to Sales, Technical Dept to Technical Dept, and so on. But how would this relate to QM????

I think your teacher has given you a "hospital pass" here.

 

It's an evolving work, progressing slowly, much time to think needed.

Communication is organisation, someone said, probably several scientists in the field. There would be no organisation without communication. Even atoms communicate in their manner on how to organize themselves.
I think we misread eachother a little here about the definition, but you are right, I aim to compare organizations with living things. Are there any "dead" things at all really?
There is structure in the internal and external communications in organizations, based on the organizations culture for example, hierarchy and if we add group psychology to the mix even predetermined patterns. Allthough different organisation communicate in different ways, they all have some form of identity to uphold.
So step one is to connect various organisations that behave in a similar manner, in specific situations, have the same routines and from that emerging pattern compare the result with biological structures in nature, fungi for example.
The wave metaphore is interesting, because that would be natural to depict with a simple statistic curve and from that also find similar curves elsewhere.
Basically it's a chase for new metaphores.

 

I think I would put it the other way round: organisation is communication. It is perfectly possible for two human beings to communicate without any organisation being formed. But no human organisation can form without communication.

As to the living/non-living question, perhaps it is instructive to think of "organisation" in inanimate nature, for example, the formation of a crystalline solid. Those molecules with sufficiently little energy line up (order themselves) according to the electric charge distribution of the molecules that are already part of the solid surface. As they do so they become part of the organised solid. Do they "communicate", in order to do this? Well, I suppose that depends on how you view the interaction of electric charges. But it seems to me the main point is the loss of energy (Latent Heat of Fusion) needed to become part of the organisation.....an uncomfortable image for the managers of a human organisation, I should have thought.

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Yes, organisation is communication, I switched places..

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That was my point exactly, energy is life, exchanging energy is communication, the loss of energy goes somehwere, to the target of the communication. I checked out the crystalline process and there seem to be some interesting similarities that could well be used in a comparison.