Metacyclic dimension
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Metacyclic dimension is a term discribing issues that are not related to any real-world phenomenon. The term comes from the idea of meta level descriptions: The reality is on the real level. Describing the reality is on the first meta level. Description methods or the organising of descriptions are on the second meta level. Description of the description methods are on the third meta level, and so on. There can be an increasing number of description levels with increasingly abstract descriptions. However, an important feature of all descriptions is that they can always be brought back to the real level so that a logical path can be seen between the description and the reality.
Metacyclic dimension is a dimension that does not follow this logic. It contains issues and descriptions that may sound reasonable. But when you try to follow the path down the hierarchical meta levels, you must conclude that the link to reality actually does not exist. The word "cyclic" came from the notion that you may actually end up into the same level you started from. However, issues in the metacyclic level may simply be so fuzzy that no clear link to anything can be found, if seeked.
The usefulness of the concept is to realise that not all descriptions have any useful connection to reality. Many of such useless descriptions in this sense are such that focus on the doing of something in an organisation without paying attention to why the thing is done. In open assessment, any work that is not aiming at some improved descriptions of reality is considered irrelevant. If someone pretends that this work should be done for an open assessment, he is actually talking about a work that is located in the metacyclic dimension.
