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The world in which classical positivistic science and technology obtained great success has vanished. However, the way of thinking promoted by that epoch still lingers in our social consciousness, sometimes as a burden. To conquer the short-comings of classical analytical science in the modern, ever more complex world, systems theory and its applications within systems science present an alternative to old paradigms. Systems theorists see common principles in the structure and operation of systems of all kinds and sizes. They promote an interdisciplinary science adapted for a universal application with a common language and area of concepts. This approach is seen as a means of not only overc...
Systems theorists see common principles in the structure and operation of systems of all kinds and sizes. They promote an interdisciplinary science adapted for a universal application with a common language and area of concepts. In order to solve problems, make recommendations and predict the future, they use theories, models and concepts from the vast area of general systems theory. This approach is chosen as a means to overcome the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of the specialist but also to find new approaches to problems created by earlier 'solution of problems.'This revised and updated second edition of General Systems Theory ? Ideas and Applications includes new systems theories and a new chapter on self-organization and evolution. The book summarizes most of the fields of systems theory and its application systems science in one volume. It provides a quick and readable reference guide for future learning containing both general theories and practical applications without the use of complicated mathematics.
Niklas Luhmann ranks as one of the most important sociologists and social theorists of the twentieth century. Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines. In Introduction to Systems Theory, Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann’s ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements. This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory – no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.
A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Reli...
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Systems Theory is a transdisciplinary field that involves complex combinations of different research fields with the purpose to explain the observed natural phenomena in the world around us. This field results in the appearance of the General System Theory. The aim of the present book is to present some of what is being done, in the 21st century, in different fields that comprise the Systems Theory. In the several chapters of this book developments of this theory are presented with the aim to solve different problems of systems. Different areas are covered, from biology and psychology to electronics, information sciences and management. The authors present their research in the study of the ...
This book presents the mathematical foundations of systems theory in a self-contained, comprehensive, detailed and mathematically rigorous way. It is devoted to the analysis of dynamical systems and combines features of a detailed introductory textbook with that of a reference source. The book contains many examples and figures illustrating the text which help to bring out the intuitive ideas behind the mathematical constructions.
This paper is one of a series in which the ideas of category theory are applied to problems of system theory. As with the three principal earlier papers, [1-3], the emphasis is on study of the realization problem, or the problem of associating with an input-output description of a system an internal description with something analogous to a state-space. In this paper, several sorts of machines will be discussed, which arrange themselves in the following hierarchy: Input process Machine Output process (Tree automaton) Machine ~ ~ State-behavior Machine I Adjoint Machine .(Sequential Machine) ., I Decomposable Machine (Linear System, Group Machine) Each member of the hierarchy includes members below it; examples are included in parentheaes, and each example is at its lowest possible point in the hierarchy. There are contrived examples of output process machines and IV state-behavior machines which are not adjoint machines [3], but as yet, no examples with the accepted stature of linear systems [4], group machines [5, 6], sequential machines [7, Ch. 2], and tree automata [7, Ch. 4].