Goals and Scholars: Principles of Organizational and Social Systems (part 1)

This article is about understanding system thinking and system theories. It presents both theoretical and pragmatic dimensions from prominent scholars, and perhaps some solutions to help immigrant populations achieve their dreams of integration and citizenship. In this work, I am seeking (a) to analyze and understand the ongoing changes in the laws of the United States and the impact they will have on immigrants, (b) to study the participation/collaboration of immigrants in organizations throughout the United States, (c) to evaluate multiple organizational and social systems, including citizenship assistance programs, government policies, and academic papers, as well as (d) to seek to learn the possibilities of creating an immigrant virtual center for citizenship study and professional development/improvement, and (f) to understand the thinking behind theories of organization and social systems from prominent scholars, and the way their theories have affected organizational development. This study will also analyze and place much of emphasis on principles of knowledge management.

It is apparent that system thinking has revolutionized and influenced changes in terms of organizational and social systems, and the way they should operate. Because of my interests in multiple dimensions of system thinking and theories, I examined Barbara Pasamonik in her study, “The Paradoxes of Tolerance”, analyzes the paradoxes of political correctness and the faith in the positive value of tolerance. This is defined as social virtue and a political phenomenon that allows the coexistence of people in a peaceful manner, regardless of their views or cultural differences. Pasamonik (2004) said that even if we are not tolerant, we may behave as such if we are merely indifferent or pragmatic, but she acknowledges that some people question if tolerance is right or wrong, and the answer depends on the individual case (p.206).

Considering the importance of this topic, I do not want to assume that the audience knows the scholars I intend to analyze. For this matter, I begin by comparing them and by presenting a brief introduction of each one of them before moving forward with this work.

Who Are These Scholars?

Peter Senge:  Was born in 1947 and graduated with a degree in engineering from Stanford, and continuing on for a Masters in Social Systems Modeling at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and consequently went for his Ph.D. in Management. Currently, he is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He is founding chair of the “Society for Organizational Learning,” and his current areas of special interest focus on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations in order to boost the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals. Senge (1990) sees organizations as places where people can expand their capacity to create the results they seek, where new ideas are encouraged, collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together (p.3).

Ludwig Von Bertalanffy: A native of Austria, Ludwig von Bertalanffy was born in a small village near Vienna in September of 1901. In 1918 he started his studies with history of art and philosophy at the University of Innsbruck and then at the University of Vienna. He finished his Ph.D. with a thesis on the German physicist and philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner in 1926, and published his first book on theoretical biology two years later (Modern Theories of Development). As one of the most important theoretical biologists of the first half of this century, Von Bertalanffy developed the “Open Systems,” and the “General System Theory,” and was one of the founding fathers and vice-president of the “Society for General System Theory”. Bertalanffy began formulating “Systems Theory” in the early 1920's but did not publish his ideas until after the Second World War. He worked in Vienna, Austria, many areas in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada as a scholar, and published over 200 articles on theoretical biology and “General System” in different journals and countries. During 1937 and 1938, as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago, United States of America, he gave his first lecture about the “General System Theory” as a methodology that is valid for all sciences.

Stafford Beer:  He was British scholar who was born in 1926 and died in 2002. He studied Philosophy at London University. He is a provocative, creative, and outstanding thinker in the field of management. While serving in the British Army, Beer became involved in operations research during the Second World War, and he was quick to identify the advantages it could bring to business. In the mid 1970s, he renounced material possessions and moved to mid-Wales, where he lived in an almost austere style, developing strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980s he established a second home on the west side of downtown Toronto and lived part of the year in both residences. Beer kept active with work in his field and in 1994 he published “Beyond Dispute: The Invention of “Team Syntegrity”, a formal model, built on the idea of systems for non-hierarchical problem solving. Also, in “The Heart of Enterprise” Beer makes it clear that every enterprise is a system, and that they must be viable. He believes that we need laws that govern the capacity of any enterprise to maintain independent existence and  “The Heart of Enterprise” provides many examples and Beer provides many useful analytical frameworks for understanding and managing an enterprise, be it public or private.

Howard T. Odum: He was born in 1924 and died in 2002. He was an American ecologist and a scholar who played an important role in the development of the field of biogeochemistry by creating the idea of embodied energy as a unifying principle of energy flow through living systems. He defined it as a measure of energy used in the past and thus is different from a measure of energy now. Odum earned his B.S. in Zoology at the University of North Carolina and stopped his education for three years where he joined the U.S. Armed Forces. He later went to Yale where he earned his Ph.D. in Zoology. With his brother Eugene, he started the first English-language textbook on systems ecology, Fundamentals of Ecology, which was published in 1953 and had a major influence. Odum’s knowledge of the field led him to write 15 books and over 300 papers.

Kenneth Boulding: He was born in Liverpool, England in 1910 and died in 1993. As an undergraduate student at Oxford University, he published his first paper in 1932. In America he spend some time at Harvard and to Chicago where he wrote several papers on Capita theory. In 1937 when he came back from Scotland, he wrote the two-volume textbook, Economic Analysis - the epitome of the Neoclassical- Keynesian Synthesis. He wrote, "I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize – not, I suppose, at once, but in the course of the next ten years – the way the world thinks about economic problems" (http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/essays/keynes/keynesrev.htm). He insisted on bringing in more aspects of economic behavior into economic life. Boulding was also a poet, ethicist, and social philosopher, and as his practical efforts demonstrate, a scholar of social conflict, war, and peace.