An Organizational Cybernetics Framework for Designing a Viable Higher Education System
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An Organizational Cybernetics Framework for Designing a Viable Higher Education System Sahar Saeed Rezk 1
& Shahinaz Gamal
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract
The Viable System Model (VSM) is an Organizational Cybernetics framework mainly used to handle systems complexity. The fundamental role of the VSM is to steer the mechanisms of a complex system to achieve its purposes and maintain its viability. The purpose of this study is to use the VSM to attempt to develop a framework for a viable higher education system. The developed framework is based on the principles of Beer’s Organizational Cybernetics and then augmented with the phases of applying the VSM described by José Pérez Ríos. The proposed framework not only presents a thorough explanation of the principles of a viable higher education system but also gives the basis for a thorough redesign that can be used to help the top universities’ management to diagnose and maintain the viability of their systems. Keywords Organizational cybernetics . Viable system model . Higher education
Introduction Both the Cambridge English dictionary and the Merriam-Webster dictionary define higher education as the education at a college or a university where subjects are provided at an advanced level (Cambridge Online English Dictionary no date; Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary no date a). In accordance with UNESCO (2017), higher education is essential for societies due to its responsibility to create and disseminate knowledge and contribute to community development. The management process of a higher education system is complex owing to the bureaucracy problem and its related costs. Complexity can also be seen in the need to consider the circumstances of other related complex systems in the surrounding environment. In addition, an ineffectual policy, adopted in a higher education system, may negatively affect the society development in all other sectors. To overcome these problems and cope with the complexity of managing such a higher education complex system, a well-
* Sahar Saeed Rezk [email protected]
1
Department of Socio-Computing, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
Systemic Practice and Action Research
implemented design can be used, as a framework, to enable the managers of higher education institutions to deal with the difficulty of variety management and the problem of bureaucracy. This framework can be built based on the fundamental principles of Organizational Cybernetics (OC) and the Viable System Model (VSM). OC is a branch of Cybernetics that found its roots in Beer’s ideas (Ríos 2010). By developing the framework of the VSM, Beer’s OC became one of the most important methodologies that can be used to design viable systems in the context of complexity management (Gmür et al. 2010; Parra et al. 2017). The essential function of the VSM is to steer the complex system to realize its purposes and maintain its viability (Leonard and Beer 1994; Espejo 2003). The objective
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