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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2025
Exploitation is a pattern of transactions that emerges from the synergistic, dynamic relationships between the exploiters and the exploited. These interactions are autonomous as every person, as a component of a social system, has their own motivations and needs which will drive them towards perceived opportunities to meet those needs. Other individuals or groups that have synergistic needs and motivations will endeavour to attract them to join. Exploitation may therefore refer to patterns of complex behaviour that emerge from local interactions between system components over time (Manson, 2001). These interactions for the most part follow linear pathways or sequences as part of a process. Such pathways may be simple (in that they have a very small number of stages in them for attainment of a goal or completion of a process) or complicated (with many stages or steps towards attainment of a goal or completion of a process).
Linear interactions can be characterised as those that are expected in a familiar process or sequence and even unplanned interactions and events along that pathway are visible and comprehensible (Perrow, 1999). For example, a regular journey to the workplace may encounter an unexpected event when a burst water main has flooded a road, requiring a diversion along a different route. Both the journey (the process of getting to work) and the cause of the interruption to the journey is a familiar one – it is visible and comprehensible and the effect of the burst water main has a clear series of effects which can be mitigated and finally resolved. Once resolved, things will usually get back to normal pretty quickly.
Complex interactions are those that occur in unfamiliar sequences and are either not visible or not immediately comprehensible (Perrow, 1999). For example, the journey to work has been delayed as traffic slows, then stops, backing up for miles then suddenly and inexplicably starts moving again.
Proximity and indirect information, as sociologist Charles Perrow explains, are two other sources of complex interactions.
The much more common interactions, the kind we intuitively try to construct because of their simplicity and comprehensibility, I will call linear interactions. Linear interactions overwhelmingly predominate in all systems. But even the most linear of systems will have at least one source of complex interactions, the environment, since it impinges upon many parts or units of the system. (Perrow, 1999, p 75)
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