I was listening to the new episode of From Alpha to Omega with Paul S. Adler (see post here and was thinking about how the stuff that Adler talks about relates to the shift from thinking in models to modules we’ve been talking about more and more. The way Sophie Elias Pinsonnault and Simon Tremblay-Pepin have been talking about modules (see blogpost in French here and our talk with by them in English here) seems quite static. It is one level below the models approach, but still very high in abstraction and scale on a societal level. They talk about them as parallel to societal subsystems (in a parallel to Luhmann’s social systems theory), like politics, law, the economy, education, etc., which are in turn made up of institutions, norms, etc..
So Adler talks about management systems and methods of workplace/firm organization that have already tackled certain problems which any form of democratic economic planning or socialist economy will also have to confront. But these don’t seem to neatly fit into the modules as Sophie and Simon have been talking about them, they are more concrete and likely would even be found/be applicable across different modules or societal subsystems (if one stays in the Luhmann frame).
So what I’m suggesting is that we don’t rush to define modules in a too static, exclusively high scale and abstract way, but that we use modules on different scales and on different levels from more abstract to more concrete. This way we can capture the things that Adler is talking about as well and can locate it in our general research (and “solutions”) space. We can then identify what kind of questions/problems they answer and where the scope of their answer ends.
This overall approach to mapping our knowledge might also be helpful as an interface for interacting with non-academic actors (think unions, parties, coops, etc.). When they have a specific question or problem we can look at what module on which level of abstraction comes closest to responding to their concerns and can then go on to adapt it to their specific situation (or we could give them leads).
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To boil it down: I think if we avoid having a too strict typology of modules and use them in a bit more varied (maybe for now messy and vague) way that might be more fruitful overall. I see a bit of danger of having a too strict framework attached to the modules approach - which is understandable when you want to counterpropose something to something that is quite dominant (the model approach). But we should be very careful about this tendency to overdefine things just to give them more discoursive authority, as it might end up restricting the overall fruitfulness of the new modules approach.