GENERAL SYSTEM(S) THEORY CITED IN ARTICLES

To obtain an overview of the awareness of system thinking, we utilized the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge[SM] database (http://isiknowledge.com). All databases for peer reviewed journal articles (Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index), all languages and all document types were consulted to retrieve the data.[1]

We searched for the topic 'general systems theory'–including both singular and plural spellings of system (the dollar sign denotes one character or no characters; quotation marks included)–and for how often it was cited during the past decades. Figure 1 shows the result.

The number of articles mentioning GST was never high. The first peak was reached in 1973, the year after Bertalanffy died. A slow decrease followed until around 1990. Then, in 1991, the number of references increased again, and it has apparently reached a stable plateau since then. What was the reason for this considerable increase after 1990? Before 1991 there was only one year yielding more results than in 1991. Why did the term become fashionable again? When we investigated the works that appeared in 1991 and that in one way or another referred to GST, we found no single event that explains the jump. Articles from different areas, ranging from computer sciences to sociology, referred to GST.

DETAILED ACCOUNTS OF GST USE IN ARTICLES FROM 1995 TO 2006

In the period from 1995 to 2006, the topic 'general systems theory' appeared in 161 articles. Those articles constitute the source for our further investigation. Although many more articles dealt with system concepts and system thinking, we omit them because they are not directly linked to GST. Excluded from further investigations were applications (engineering, management) of GST, as they are of little relevance for the scientific and philosophical development.

The areas in which GST is still used are wideranging, numerous and diverse: the ethics of animal experiments (Locker, 2004); investigations of marriage (Gottman et al., 2002); interpretations of macrohistory (Inayatullah, 1999); designing legal regulations (Baer, 1997); investigations on military command (Skyttner, 2005); complementary and alternative medicine (Rangel, 2005); education (Gulyaev and Stonyer, 2002); new methods of neuroimaging (Stephan, 2004); and health care and nursing. These, however, are not of interest based on our investigation criteria.

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Lane and Jackson (1995) assigned the various systems approaches to eight sections: GST, organizations as systems, hard systems thinking, cybernetics, system dynamics, soft systems thinking, emancipatory systems thinking and critical systems thinking. Their classification provides a useful, although subjective, overview that views GST as a discipline among others, reflecting Bertalanffy's GST in the narrower sense–which he described as "a discipline concerned with the general properties and laws of 'systems'. A system is defined as a complex of components in interaction, or by some similar proposition" (Bertalanffy, 1967, p. 69).

The criterion for further investigating an article was if it brought something new to GST (or at least to more than one discipline), or if contradictions to the original GST program of Bertalanffy were found. The further structure of our paper results from the issues mentioned in the selected articles.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 842