General System Theory?
Haven't heard much about it lately. It was all the rage in the '60s. Has it gone the way of the hula hoop? (Ok I have my decades combined.) Or is it so big that it's invisible? I am not an academic so I don't keep up with these things.
I think it ran into the edge of complexity, noisy data, etc.
The learning-org/FifthDiscipline crowd still talks a lot of SystemThinking, but I'm not sure whether they use it in a really analytical way, or in more of a fuzzy "remember it's messier than you think" gestalt kinda way...
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/FifthDiscipline
Posted by: Bill Seitz | Feb 11, 2004 at 07:57 AM
It's still used in business. It's good for relatively small problems that can be sensibly bounded but has trouble with large problems such as natural systems that are complex, indeterminate and unbounded. I wrote about some notable failures in attempts to apply it to natural systems.
Posted by: back40 | Feb 11, 2004 at 11:35 AM