Although the history of thought reveals a number of holistic thinkers — Aristotle, Marx, Husserl among them — it was only in the 1950s that any version of holistic thinking became institutionalized. The kind of holistic thinking which then came to the fore, and was the concern of a newly created organization, was that which makes explicit use of the concept of ‘system’, and today it is ‘systems...

To successfully perform systems engineering and/ or designing IT architecture roles, the systems engineers and IT architects need a systems view or a high capacity for engineering system thinking (CEST). This paper discusses the essence of this capacity, presents principles for developing a tool for assessing the CEST and presents a tool developed for use in selecting engineers for jobs that re...

Cop This paper is the first to introduce critical systems thinking into a new emerging research strand: the design of organizational space. The study revealed two things. First, critical systems thinking provides a thorough framework to understand the possibilities to connect organization and building; both in a conceptual understanding of the mutual relations andwith regard to the practical im...

Many small businesses suffer from inadequate management skills which can lead to poor business performance and unsustainable businesses. Research to date has focused on traditional skills such as communication, time management and people skills, yet critically many business managers have no systems thinking skills. This paper presents a framework targeted at delivering systems thinking skills t...

The term systemic failure is one used with increasing frequency particularly by journalists and politicians to account for things going wrong in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. But what does it actually mean from a systems thinking perspective, and how might effective strategic thinking in management practice reduce incidences of systemic failure? From a systems thinking in practic...

System dynamics, systems thinking, and soft operations research (soft OR) all aspire to understanding and improvement of systems. In all, the first step interprets the real world into a description used in following stages. In system dynamics, description leads to equations of a model, simulation to understand dynamic behavior, evaluation of alternative policies, education and choice of a bette...

Projects, situated in the crossroads of the cognitive sciences, the neurosciences, the computing and robotics currently concern the creation of autonomous artificial beings capable of thinking. This article presents a model of comparison of the human thinking with a numerical thinking that relies on four hierarchies: the classification of information systems, the cognitive pyramid, the linguist...

The phrase 'social theory and philosophy for information systems' invites an examination of following terms: social, theory, philosophy , information, systems, information systems, philosophy for information systems, and social theory for information systems. I shall refrain (no doubt to the relief of the reader) from providing the definition and scholarly treatment that each and every one of t...