Control And Theory

Control and theory

Contemporary ideas from systems theory have grown with diverse areas, exemplified by the work of biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, linguist Béla H. Bánáthy, ecological systems with Howard T. Odum, Eugene Odum and Fritjof Capra,organizational theory and management with individuals such as Peter Senge, interdisciplinary study with areas likeHuman Resource Development from the work of Richard A. Swanson, and insights from educators such as Debora Hammond and Alfonso Montuori. As a transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multiperspectival domain, the area brings together principles and concepts from ontology, philosophy of science, physics, computer science, biology, andengineering as well as geography, sociology, political science, psychotherapy (within family systems therapy) andeconomics among others. Systems theory thus serves as a bridge for interdisciplinary dialogue between autonomous areas of study as well as within the area of systems science itself.

In this respect, with the possibility of misinterpretations, von Bertalanffy[4] believed a general theory of systems "should be an important regulative device in science," to guard against superficial analogies that "are useless in science and harmful in their practical consequences." Others remain closer to the direct systems concepts developed by the original theorists. For example, Ilya Prigogine, of the Center for Complex Quantum Systems at the University of Texas, Austin, has studied emergent properties, suggesting that they offer analogues for living systems. The theories of autopoiesis of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana represent further developments in this field. Important names in contemporary systems science include Russell Ackoff, Béla H. Bánáthy, Anthony Stafford Beer, Peter Checkland, Robert L. Flood, Fritjof Capra,Michael C. Jackson, Edgar Morin and Werner Ulrich, among others.

With the modern foundations for a general theory of systems following the World War, Ervin Laszlo, in the preface for Bertalanffy's book Perspectives on General System Theory, maintains that the translation of "general system theory" from German into English has "wrought a certain amount of havoc".[5] The preface explains that the original concept of a general system theory, "Allgemeine Systemtheorie (or Lehre)", pointed out that "Theorie" (or "Lehre"), just as "Wissenschaft" (translated Scholarship), "has a much broader meaning in German than the closest English words ‘theory’ and ‘science'".[5] These ideas refer to an organized body of knowledge and "any systematically presented set of concepts, whether empirically, axiomatically, or philosophically" represented, while many associate "Lehre" with theory and science in the etymology of general systems, though it also does not translate from the German very well; its "closest equivalent" translates as "teaching", but "sounds dogmatic and off the mark".[5] The idea of a "general systems theory" might have lost many of its root meanings in the translation and many people[who?] started to believe that the systems theorists had articulated nothing but a pseudoscience, systems theory transfer into the name used by early investigators for the interdependence of relationships created in organizations by defining a new way of thinking about science and scientific paradigms.

A system in this frame of reference can contain regularly interacting or interrelating groups of activities. For example, in noting the influence in organizational psychology as the field evolved from "an individually oriented industrial psychology to a systems and developmentally oriented organizational psychology", some theorists recognize that organizations have complex social systems; separating the parts from the whole reduces the overall effectiveness

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