Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

5 General Systems Theory

Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter

(Bogdanov 1922, quoted in Gorelik 1975a, p. 348)

5.1 Introduction

Bogdanov's three volume Tektology, published in Russia between 1912 and 1917, anticipated many of the themes that later became associated with general systems theory (GST). In particular, he emphasized that the subject matter of tektology, as the “universal science of organization,” was “organization” in general and that its ambition was to be “trans‐disciplinary,” i.e. relevant to all branches of knowledge. Although it is clear to Gorelik (1975b) that the “conceptual part” of GST is all present and correct in Tektology, Bogdanov's work had little influence on its further development. This was in part because it was suppressed by the Soviet authorities and in part because, despite the publication of a German edition of Tektology in 1928, it was largely ignored in the West until 1975, when Gorelik (1984) translated a substantial portion of the text into English. It is, therefore, to Ludwig von Bertalanffy that the credit goes for being the founding father of GST. In Section 3.2, von Bertalanffy's influential ...