Systems Research and Behavioral Science articles from November 2001

Systems Research and Behavioral Science archives from November 2001

Editorial.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
November 1, 2001... There are a number of obvious links between the first four papers in this issue. The first two deal with the topic of autopoiesis with the second, specifically, revisiting the argument about whether social systems can be regarded as...

Autopoiesis, agency and accident: criteria for the attribution of life. (Research Paper).
November 1, 2001... INTRODUCTION The object of this account is to suggest objective criteria for the attribution of life to an entity observed. If living is a property that may be sensibly attributed to an entity by an observer then the term `life' must have...

Are organizations autopoietic? A call for new debate. (Research Paper).
November 1, 2001... INTRODUCTION Discussion and debate over the application of autopoiesis to social systems has been enthusiastic since Maturana and Varela's (1980) theory was translated from Spanish into English in the early 1980s. In this paper, the issue...

An axiological systems theory: some basic hypotheses. (Research Paper).
November 1, 2001... INTRODUCTION Theories on society have played a relevant role in social research. Much present knowledge about societies has been accumulated thanks to these more or less empirically verified sets of ideas, not always organized into systems...

Adaptation to creation: progress of of organizational learning and increasing complexity of learning systems. (Research Paper).
November 1, 2001... Concepts of organizational learning (OL) and learning organization have been dominating management literature, thinking and action in the 1990s, mainly popularized by Peter M. Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning...

Product, process and methodology systematization to handle structural and computational complexity in product realization. (Research Paper).
November 1, 2001... INTRODUCTION The product environment in modern manufacturing is very complex. It consists of many components of products, processes, and services (Fleischer and Liker, 1997), including information technology (IT) services (hardware and...

Systems theory and the spirit of feminism: grounds for a connection (a). (Research Paper).
November 1, 2001... The relevance of a general systems theory approach for feminist analysis, feminisms, is multiple. So too is the compatibility of many feminist ideas with a general systems theory approach. Yet this common ground and venue for fruitful...

On Turing's carnal error: some guidelines for a contextual inquiry into the embodied mind. (Research Paper).(Alan Turing)
November 1, 2001... INTRODUCTION A common conception, both among scholars and lay people of the Western world, is that the human mind is `body-free' and indifferent to the physical realm in which it is instantiated. As argued by Lakoff and Johnson (1999),...

Emergent properties: a fundamental postulate of classical systems theory in schematic representation. (Notes and Insights).
November 1, 2001... INTRODUCTION If by the characteristic organization of a system we mean that which defines it as `this particular case of that kind of a system', then the most fundamental postulate of classical systems theory might be that the...

Flexibility metaphors. (Notes and Insights).
November 1, 2001... Management of organizational change involves creating and enhancing flexibility at various levels. Flexibility is a multidimensional concept; it means different things to different people in different contexts. It might connote adaptiveness to...

The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. (Book Selection).(Review)
November 1, 2001... The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. By George Soros. Published by Public Affairs, New York, 1998, 245 pp., ISBN 1 891620 27 4, $26.00. INTRODUCTION George Soros is a well-known economist. He is well known first as...

Books to review.
November 1, 2001... Guided Evolution of Society. By Bela H. Banathy. Published by Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 2000, 415 pp., ISBN 0 306 46382 2, $95. Accountability in Social Research: Issues and Debates. By Norma R. A. Romm. Published by...