Dual control is not simply important to effective health policy and fiscal control, it is essential. Top down, authoritative controls need to be matched with horizontal, knowledge-based networks. To be effective, dual control needs to be operationalized. Its details need to be embedded into available technologies and social processes. This booklet considers fundamental political and social conditions necessary for achieving this.

Early attempts to establish scientific groundings for management are universally understood to have failed. Nonetheless, throughout the Twentieth Century, progress was made in defining elements of a scientific approach. Though not fully assimilated into the management literature and practice, elements of these approaches are found in what are known as quality techniques, lean production, and six sigma. Dual Control outlines the history of this effort while considering information processing models that reflect quality/lean methods. The object is to maintain control of organizational resources while conquering the competitive and environmental ravages of variation in process along networks of providers. Dual Control considers a paradox faced by all organizations: How to protect the assets and prerogatives of the organization while encouraging openness and immersion in social networks that include competing factors. This work documents the early efforts of the author to define and understand the concept of knowledge fluidity within an organization and its various social and commercial networks. It serves as a text in the introduction of dual control into the management curriculum.

Based on a review of written material published by thirteen rehabilitation counseling organizations, the study finds that the sector has few unmet information processing needs with regard to political and policymaking activities, both critical success factors. The study then posits that there are significant benefits to be gained by rehabilitation counseling networks through the conversion of process-oriented knowledge from tacit and explicit, document-based forms to automated, expressive characterizations that can be shared with rehabilitation counselors, clients, and others using computers and electronic networks. The study also clarifies concepts supporting the requirements for cognitive legitimacy as operationalized by fluidity, i.e., the ready transfer of knowledge to and from information systems. It supports prior work in the sociopolitical legitimacy of information technology as operationalized by immersion, defined as the willingness to use computerized technologies to resolve information processing challenges. The work includes a nomological net of information system requirements that provides guidelines for improved systems legitimacy for social networks in all sectors.