Information-Bonded Systems 59 this is the extension of a new understanding of life to the social domain. This brings us to the notion of self-organizing tendencies of sociocultural systems. I have argued extensively in a previous work (Gharajedaghi, 1972) that to be self-organizing and to move toward a predefined order, a social system must possess a means of knowing -- an internal image of what it wants to be. I have also suggested that the same way that DNA is the source of this image for biological systems, culture (shared image) is the source of the blueprints for the desired future of the sociocultural systems. The image of this future provides default values for all decisions and stands at the center of the process of change. That is why, despite all kinds of obstructions, sociocultural systems seem to pursue a predefined order with tenacity. The persistence of default values explains why it is so difficult to induce change into sociocultural systems. To appreciate the operational meaning of this conception and the criti- cal role implicit cultural codes play in the process of change and dynamics of social systems, we ought to enrich our understanding of the essential characteristic of the information-bonded systems and the essential functions of shared image.