In the theory of autopoietic systems (TAS), on the other hand, it is the autonomy of a system which plays a fundamental role and therefore the TAS represents a theory of self-organization in relation to a system and its environment and not primarily a theory of self-organization of states within a system. This, however, results in the logical problem of circularity as an immediate consequence o...

IN 1964 w BOYD RAYWARD explored “the possible applications of organization theory to the study of libraries.”’ During the intervening twenty years there has been no general review of organization theory and its application to research in librarianship. The purpose of this article is to provide such a review. It begins with a very brief overview of the development of organization theory, and the...

A bst ract Text generation programs need to be designed around a theory of text organization. This paper introduces Rhetorical Structure Theory, a theory of text structure in which each region of text has a central nuclear part and a number of satellites related to it. A natural text is analyzed as an example, the mechanisms of the theory are identified, and their formalization is discussed. In...