Control – will Trump, will America, be in it or out of it?

Donald Trump, July 2024 (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons); Beniger’s The Control Revolution (publicity image)

The headlines tell us that the Republicans will soon control all four of the constitutional elements of governing the United States: The White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives (collectively, in the newspaper parlance of the election, the “trifecta”[1]), as well as the Supreme Court. Moreover, the President-to-be-again will personally control them all, or so we read.

The president appoints all the executive department heads and may choose to appoint them for reasons of competence, loyalty or both. After this election, the President-to-be-again enjoys majorities of both houses of the legislature, and many of their members owe their own electoral success to his coattails.

He appointed three of the nine Supreme Court justices in his previous term, and there’s good chance that two of the sitting justices will retire during the next term. If so, he will have personally named a majority of the Court and have shaped judicial actions for decades to come. The President-to-be-again will have rare control over most if not all the apparatuses of control, so we are told.

But control implies order, and this is a President-in-waiting with more surface similarities to the indulgent and irrepressible Dionysius in Greek mythology and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of drama, than qualities of the orderly and self-controlled Apollo.

These observations raise two questions:

• What does “control” entail?

• Is “control” only thing you need to govern (i.e., is it necessary and sufficient)?

Let’s think aloud about them – and this: control to what end? Let’s see how this concept affects how to govern states, yes, but also how to govern organisations, and oneself.

Control

The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives four definitions for control as a noun:

a)       “an act or instance of controlling” involving “power or authority to guide or manage”;

b)      “skill in the use of a tool, instrument, technique, or artistic medium”;

c)       “the regulation of economic activity especially by government directive”; and

d)      “the ability of a baseball pitcher to control the location of a pitch within the strike zone”.

While d) seems quite provincial for a dictionary in use now around the world, let’s combine b) and d) into something more general, say, the ability of a person to execute an action effectively. That’s self-control. In a) the “self” controls the other; in b) the other controls the self.

The sociologist James Beniger gives a nuanced meaning to control in his 1986 book titled The Control Revolution.[2] This revolution involved the movement away from the whims of autocrats and heralded the development of the administrative state. It fostered abilities across a society or system to keep things running towards its purpose. It enabled the industrial revolution and informed what we’ve come to call the information society.

“As a more general concept … control encompasses the entire range from absolute control to the weakest and most probabilistic form, that is, any purposive influence on behavior, however slight”. (p. 8, emphasis in the original). Exercising control requires both information processing and reciprocal communication between the controlling and the controlled, he says.

Think of it this way: Control, in any meaningful sense, involves both direction and feedback. It requires communication and adjustment. In its strong, “absolute” or close to it sense, the controller barks orders and demands compliance. But that won’t work all the time, and it won’t continue to work over time. Reciprocity is important.

Beniger directs us to the pioneering ideas of Norbert Wiener, in which two-way interaction between controller and controlled take place and shapes future actions.  Wiener called it cybernetics, “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal” (Wiener, 1961, p. 18). It demands that would-be controllers look at systems in the round – to understand and anticipate changes that are likely to occur and be ready to adjust. This is the combination of Merriam-Webster’s a), b), c), and d) – and then some.

Necessary and sufficient?

Control is necessary for governing – in the complexly interactive form that Beniger and Wiener articulate. But that doesn’t help us understand the ends for which we govern. In the world of corporate governance, we talk about two roles for those who govern: control, yes, but also service (Hillman & Dalziel, 2003). Service involves helping to make available the resources to achieve whatever purpose the organisation serves. Control involves looking over the shoulders of managers, monitoring inputs and outputs and the actions that connect them. Service involves helping them, freeing them to decide, to innovate and experiment. I have likened this dilemma to how a driver knows to use the accelerator and the brake, how hard, and how quickly, while also using the steering wheel to set the direction (Q: "Why do they have brakes on cars? A: "To make the car go faster," Nordberg, 2011, p. 7).

But it’s not that simple either. Sometimes the act of helping someone involves simultaneously showing them their weaknesses. Service itself is another form of control. It’s the brake and accelerator operating at the same time, through the same intervention.

In political systems – states and state-like multilateral organisations – it’s much the same, but with an added complication. Organisations usually have one overriding purpose. But the political theorist Robert Dahl says there’s a core dilemma in any pluralistic polity – a political system in which citizens value multiple and often competing goods. There is, inevitably, a tension between autonomy and control. Autonomy brings benefits in initiative and innovation, and, for individuals, not least the sense of having the freedom to act as one wishes. For polities, it means the ability to decide on their own future. Sovereignty. Control, meanwhile, keeps an autonomous polity from running amok.

But autonomy comes with a price. Autonomy, Dahl writes, may be used “to increase or perpetuate injustice rather than reduce it, to foster the narrow egoism of their members at the expense of concerns for a broader public good, and even to weaken or destroy democracy itself…. Crudely stated, this is the fundamental problem of pluralist democracy” (Dahl, 1982, p. 1).

The problem was also identified by one of great political theorists of the 19^th Century. In 1854, John Stuart Mill wrote to a friend to say he was “cogitating an essay” to point out what a society forbade when it shouldn’t and “what things it left alone that it ought to control” (Hamburger, 1999, p. 3). That cogitation led to a hallmark piece of political philosophy: On Liberty (Mill, 1859/1947).

What next?

What the American presidential election involved – this time as often – is a debate about the balance between autonomy and control. It’s a large and more complex version of the same debate in corporate governance. It’s the debate we have in conducting our own lives. It’s the cosmic struggle in Greek mythology between Apollo and Dionysius.

Will the self of the President-in-reinventing-himself exercise control over others? Will others regulate and thus control the Presidential self? Will the self of a self-centred president control himself?

Perhaps we will we see in Washington a new system of control, perhaps an exuberant liberty with a potentially (self-)destructive turn. Is there a chance these two forces of governance – autonomy and control, brake and accelerator – can be kept in balance? Let’s hope it won’t be another case of …

Beniger, J. R. (1986). The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dahl, R. A. (1982). Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hamburger, J. (1999). John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hillman, A. J., & Dalziel, T. (2003). Boards of directors and firm performance: Integrating agency and resource dependence perspectives. Academy of Management Review, 28(3), 383-396. doi:10.5465/amr.2003.10196729

Mill, J. S. (1859/1947). On Liberty. New York: Appleton Century Crofts Classics.

Nordberg, D. (2011). Corporate Governance: Principles and Issues. London: Sage.

Wiener, N. (1961). Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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[1] A trifecta is a term in betting – a winning bet on the first, second, and third horse in any given race. For the first race on my first day at a meeting, I looked at all the horses in the waiting circle and thought I saw something about the quality of the field. I rushed to place a bet, on first, second, and third. The betting window closed just as the guy in front of me handed over his cash. I missed out on winning a trifecta. Bad luck, like betting in general. It was also the last race meeting I would attend. I saw that I didn’t have control over the outcome and that system didn’t permit communication and reciprocity.

[2] Years ago, my son, studying engineering at the time, gave a copy of Beniger’s book as a present. I was intrigued by its argument.