Global Endosymbiosis

Description

Matthew McCarthy:

"The concept raised here of ‘global endosymbiosis’ is quite straightforward; it is essentially the same as the idea of ‘embeddedness’, or ‘nestedness’, but aims to provide a slightly different connotation- namely, one which emphasizes the ‘living and dynamic relationship’ between different kinds of organizations.

The motivation to develop such a concept is similar to, or even a direct reflection of, an earlier string of ideas in this inquiry. When asking the question: ‘what is a social organization’? I had suggested (like many people) that a ‘social organization’ operates like an ‘organism’. I went on to suggest (others have not formally done this, I don’t think) that the concept of ‘endosymbiosis’ might be applied to a social context. The main motivation of the post was in outlining the various challenges in developing such a theory, of how ‘endosymbiosis’ as a concept may or may not be suitable when trying to describe or understand ‘social organizations’

As one might intuit, a social organism is an organism because it is a dynamic, living shared space in which agents are sensitive to and immersed in a ‘life-space’, a field in which state changes and interactions are entangled and meaningful. Each agent is sensitive and co-constitutive to the whole, and the parts and the whole are meaningfully and mysteriously entangled. The agents in a social system self-organize around this ‘whole’. Exactly how this happens and is maintained is a mystery, but the theory is developed to try and work towards better understanding that mystery."

(https://matthewthomasmccarthy.substack.com/p/global-or-complex-endosymbiosis)