By Debora Hammond
Debora Hammond's The technology of Synthesis explores the improvement of normal platforms conception and the people who collected jointly round that concept to shape the Society for normal structures examine. In studying the existence and paintings of the SGSR's 5 founding participants - Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James Grier Miller, and Anatol Rapoport - Hammond strains the emergence of platforms principles throughout a huge diversity of disciplines within the mid-twentieth century. A metaphor and a framework, the platforms inspiration as articulated by way of its earliest proponents highlights dating and interconnectedness one of the organic, ecological, social, mental, and technological dimensions of our more and more advanced lives. trying to go beyond the reductionism and mechanism of classical technological know-how - which they observed as constrained through its specialise in the discrete, part components of truth - the overall structures group was hoping to enrich this analytic procedure with a extra holistic process. As one of the structures traditions, the final platforms team was once in particular attracted to fostering collaboration and integration among diversified disciplinary perspectives.
The technological know-how of Synthesis files a different episode within the heritage of contemporary idea, person who continues to be proper at the present time. This booklet might be of curiosity to historians of technological know-how, method theorists, and students in such fields as cybernetics and method dynamics.
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Additional info for The Science of Synthesis - Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory
Example text
West Churchman, who first introduced me to the general-systems community, was a longtime member and former president of the SGSR and has written extensively on the topic of systems thinking. His own professional evolution is typical of the intellectual richness of the tradition. He describes himself as an intellectual grandson of William James, having studied philosophy with a student of James’s by the name of E. A. Singer. During World War II, he was actively involved with the development of operations research, going on to spend much of his professional career teaching in the School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.
15 Most critics of systems theory, however, tend to treat the development of systems thinking as an integrated and coherent phenomenon and to downplay the considerable diversity in the perspectives and ideological orientations of different approaches to understanding systems. Far from being monolithic, the “systems movement” includes a tremendous variety of diverse and even contradictory strands of thought. Further, recent critiques fail to acknowledge the evolution of work within the systems tradition that has itself sought to address earlier critiques.
33 The SGSR also had some connections with such organizations as the RAND Corporation and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, which was modeled after RAND, although both of these organizations tended to involve a more limited focus on traditional systems analysis as well as more direct affiliations with government and industry. 2 reflects my attempt to categorize some of the developments within the very broad conceptual framework of systems thinking. The general-systems, cybernetics, and system-dynamics groups tended to incorporate more critical and ethical dimensions in their work.