Commission on Human Rights Seemingly every week, a new question arises relative to the current worldwide ferment over human injustices. This book will be of interest to historians of science, system thinkers, scholars and practitioners in the social sciences, management, organization development and related fields, as well as the general reader interested in the history of ideas that have shaped critical developments in the second half of the twentieth century.ĭescription : "How much compensation ought to be paid to a woman who was raped 7,500 times? What would the members of the Commission want for their daughters if their daughters had been raped even once?" -Karen Parker, speaking before the U.N.
The Science of Synthesis documents a unique episode in the history of modern thought, one that remains relevant today. As one of many systems traditions, the general systems group was specifically interested in fostering collaboration and integration among different disciplinary perspectives, with an emphasis on nurturing more participatory and truly democratic forms of social organization. Seeking to transcend the reductionism and mechanism of classical science-which they saw as limited by its focus on the discrete, component parts of reality-the general systems community hoped to complement this analytic approach with a more holistic orientation. Both metaphor and framework, the systems concept as articulated by its earliest proponents highlights relationship and interconnectedness among the biological, ecological, social, psychological, and technological dimensions of our increasingly complex lives. In examining the life and work of the SGSR's five founding members-Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James Grier Miller, and Anatol Rapoport-Hammond traces the emergence of systems ideas across a broad range of disciplines in the mid-twentieth century. Publisher by : University Press of Coloradoĭescription : Debora Hammond's The Science of Synthesis explores the development of general systems theory and the individuals who gathered together around that idea to form the Society for General Systems Research.
The book introduces the power and poetry of theory by extensive use of original source material from the theorists writings.