3 Systems Theories and Complexity in Organizations
Why Did Systems Thinking Rise to Dominance in Organizations?
Systems thinking emerged from a century-long philosophical and scientific discussion about biology’s relation to physics, starting with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in his Critique of Judgement, published in 1790, addressed the question: What is an organism? (Keller, 2008, pp. 47–48) The discussion concerned how to arrive at a coherent and fundamental scientific theory of life. Furthermore, there was a similarly long-term debate about whether it would be possible to construct a machine that could reproduce itself. If the mechanical laws of nature determined human activity, then ...
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