Theology not Ecology

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

PERFORMANCE, EVALUATION AND THE NHS: A CASE STUDY IN CONCEPTUAL PERPLEXITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMPLEXITY

This paper adopts a comparative perspective towards the analysis of performance evaluation in the National Health Service. The NHS, it is argued, is best seen as an organization which is not unique but which ranks high on a number of dimensions: uncertainty about the relationship between inputs and outputs; heterogeneity of activities and aims; the ambiguity of the available information. These factors help to explain why performance evaluation in the NHS is both conceptually and organizationally problematic, and fragmented and professionalized in practice. By looking at the same factors in other organizations, it may be possible to start constructing a framework for examining the problems of performance evaluation in different settings.