[1] The RSI model is envisioned as three communication subsystems that function as starting points for interpreting or enacting social system change.
Then it discusses the attention, power, and need patterns of communication that that model identifies as points for generating social system change and continuity.
[5] A book chapter called Language and Strategy, written for The Rhetorical Dialogue: Contemporary Concepts and Cases, reflects Brown's initial investigations into the process by which human beings symbolically constitute reality, and, by extension, ideology.
Brown closes the chapter by outlining what he calls the "rhetorical reasoning" process by which human beings advocate for their particular ways of naming experience.
[5] Brown defines ideology as "any symbolic construction of the world in whose superordinate 'name' human beings can comprehensively order their experience and subsume their specific activities.
[5] Extending Roger Brown, the RSI model holds that human beings learn ideology from language tutors.
[1] For example, the U.S. social system often identifies attributes such as individualism, freedom, equality, success, and progress with American dream ideology.
Brown views each of these symbolic subsystems as a starting point for analyzing and initiating communication interventions to promote and impede ideological and, by extension, social system change.
"[2][3] In the RSI model, as human beings symbolically construct ideology, they create complex naming patterns to make sense of and interpret experience.
[2] The RSI model holds that complex naming patterns create expectancies about experience (e.g., that getting a good education will make life better).
But when lived experience fails to match the symbolically created expectancy (e.g., a person with a good education cannot find a job), the model suggests that human beings may become more attentive to anomalies in their naming pattern.
In the model, human beings communicatively promote or impede "attention switches" to compensate for anomalies so as to maintain meaning and order in their lives.
In both cases, the RSI model would say that human beings shifted attention to make sense of the anomaly in the "good education" template.
According to the RSI model, the conditions for an attention switch exist when there are two or more complex naming patterns that can make sense of experience and a systemic shift occurs from one template to another.
[5] In the Attention article, Brown demonstrates RSI model concepts by examining the symbolic creation of the scientific worldview.
He also applies the RSI model to identify attention switch cycles that generated social system shifts in U.S. black/white relationships from 1919 to 1965.
[1] In the RSI model, the attention subsystem is one starting point for the rhetorical analysis of or the intervention in social system change.
[3] Brown posits that relational names communicate what sociologist Niklas Luhmann calls "power codes" that shape relationship participants' choices and behaviors.
[3][15] For example, in the relational name "teacher/student," students typically choose to follow the teacher's direction, such as doing homework, because of social system expectancies associated with that relationship.
[3] Brown draws upon economist Kenneth Boulding's ideas about social organizers to suggest motives that human beings attribute to relationships—exchange, threat, and integry.
[5] To prevent a power shift and maintain the current social hierarchy, interveners communicatively foreground anomalies in the proposed template.
[3] In the Power article, Brown traces social hierarchy shifts in black/white relationships from the 1910s to the 1970s through the lens of the RSI model.
He also examines the power intervention strategies, tactics, and maneuvers of New York urban planner Robert Moses to demonstrate RSI model concepts.
"[2][3] In the RSI model, human beings have an innate need for a sense of order in self—to know who they are, their role in society, and who and what around them is important and meaningful.
[4] Brown draws upon social anthropologist Edmund Leach's idea of code-switching to explain how human beings create needs symbolically.
[5] According to the model, to promote a shift in needs, an intervener communicatively increases attention to how current needs are not being met or how needs expectancies are unfulfilled.
Then the intervener advocates an alternative interpretation of needs and shows how it makes better sense of experience in the attempt to increase others' openness to this needs proposal.
[1] Brown notes, though, that the linear nature of language often results in human beings acting as if one person or group is the primary intervener.
[1] He argues that the interconnected nature of the subsystems and the communication actions of multiple interveners mean that the outcome of any attempted system change evidences multi-causation.
[5] Overall, the RSI model is conceived of as a framework for analyzing and tracking the communication patterns that generate social system change and continuity.