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On the principle of disorder in civilization: A socio-physical analysis of fashion change

Efforts to understand irregular or disorderly social phenomena have prompted social scientists to borrow concepts such as entropy and chaos from colleagues in the physical sciences. These concepts have shown some promise in diverse areas ranging from treating individuals with dysfunctional lifestyles (Novey and Novey 1987) to improvements in forecasting and intervening in various types of societal crises (Loye and Eisler 1987). The present paper has the more modest objective of adapting the concepts of entropy and chaos to the analysis of fashion change. Entropy is typically represented as AS in the formula AG = AH-TAS where AG is useful work, AH is total energy, and Τ is temperature. That is, entropy is the energy that is not available for useful work, or the disorder in a system. According to the second law of thermodynamics, disorder in a system increases over time, since there are more disordered states than ordered ones. The physicist Stephen Hawking (1988) used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle in a box to explain this phenomenon. If the puzzle pieces have been put together to form a complete picture and the box is shaken, the picture becomes distorted. Additional shakes lead to greater disorder or randomness, not reappearance of the picture. As noted by Gleick (1987), agreement on what is meant by chaos is still emerging. The term is the subject of a number of different but related definitions. To illustrate this point, Gleick gave several quotations, including Hao Bai-Lin's definition of chaos as 'a kind of order without periodicity' and James Crutchfield's statement that chaos is 'dynamics with positive, but finite, metric entropy' (1987: 306). As Loye and Eisler (1987) indicate, this perspective includes consideration of how order gives way to chaos and also how order emerges from chaos. Loye and Eisler, as well as Lesser and Lusch (1988), point out the important distinction between closed systems and open living systems. Living systems may import energy and shift energy allocations from one subsystem to another.