SATM 1.2 The Systems Tradition

The systems approach, or holistic thinking, has a very long history. It was no until the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, with the publication of Wiener's work on cybernetics (1948) and von Bertalanffy's on "general system theory" (1950,1968), that it bagan to take on the form of a discipline. The approach was popular and immediately successful, and system thinking from the 1950s to the 1970s was far and away the most important influence on the management sciences and a number of other fields.

The same could be said of the other key ideas in the systems dictionary - concepts such as element, relationship, boundary, input, transformation, output, environment, feedback, attribute, purpose, open system, homeostasis, emergence, communication, control, identity and hierarchy. Some systems people (those of the general system persuasion) put more emphasis on learning about the nature of real-world systems, while others concentrated on developing methodologies, based on systems ideas and principles, to intervene in and change system.

Systems thinking at the beginning of the 1970s, was still dominated by the positivism and functionalism characteristic of the traditional version of the scientific method. This traditional type of systems thinking gave birth to strands of work such as "organizations as systems", general system theory, contingency theory, operational research, systems analysis, systems engineering and management cybernetics.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s "soft systems thinking" and "organizational cybernetics" came to fore, and in the late 1980s "critical systems thinking" was born. These new tendencies in systems thinking found themselves at war not only with the traditional approach nut also with each other, for they were often opposed on fundamental matters concerning the nature and purpose of the discipline. They rested upon different philosophical/sociological assumptions. In essence, they were based on different paradigms. Systems thinking has entered a period of "Kuhnian crisis."

In soft systems methodology, systems are seen as the mental constructs of observers rather than as entities with an objective existence in the world; systemicity is transferred "from the world to the process of inquiry into the world" (checkland, 1983, OR and the systems movement: mappings and conflicts, J. Opl. Res. Soc. 34:661.)

Senge (1990, The fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Random House, London.) developed from system dynamics, become the basis for much work on "learning organizations." Maturana and Varela's work on autopoietic or self-producing systems (see Mingers, 1995, Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis. Plenum, NY.) impacted on sociology (through Luhmann's comprehensive systems theory of society), law and family therapy. Soft systems thinking continued to develop and to gain ground, particularly in the field of information systems. Critical systems thinking called for the "radical" paradigms (in Burrell and Morgan's 1979, Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. Heinemann, London. terms) to be opened up in systems thinking and attempted to reconstruct systems thinking upon pluralist foundations. Many people discovered or rediscovered a version of the systems approach through the popularization of chaos and complexity theory.

(Jackson, 2000, Systems Approaches to Management, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, NY.)