Openness is an essential factor underlying a system's viability, continuity, and its ability to change. - Walter F. Buckley

In Deutsch's view, to say that a social system is in equilibrium implies that: 1) it will return to a particular state when disturbed; 2) the disturbance is coming from outside the system; 3) the greater the disturbance the greater the force with which the system will return to its original state; 4) the speed of the system's reaction to disturbance is somehow less relevant — a sort of friction, or blemish having no place in the "ideal" equilibrium; 5) no catastrophe can happen within the system.

# A viewpoint that gets at the heart of sociology because it sees the sociocultural system in terms of information and communication nets;

[The equilibrium model describes systems] which, in moving to an equilibrium point, typically lose organization, and then tend to hold that minimum level within relatively narrow conditions of disturbance.