Book Selection
- PDF / 93,576 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 595 x 842 pts (A4) Page_size
- 41 Downloads / 166 Views
#2000 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/00 $15.00 www.stockton-press.co.uk/jors
Book Selection Edited by J Crocker P Checkland: Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-year retrospective P Checkland and J Scholes: Soft Systems Methodology in Action: Including a 30 year retrospective P van Hentenryck: The OPL Optimization Programming Language WS Whyte: Networked Futures: Trends for communication system development
Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-year retrospective P Checkland John Wiley & Sons, 1999. 66 xiv 330 pp. £18.99. ISBN: 0 471 98606 2 Systems Thinking, Systems Practice has been republished with an additional thirty-year retrospective and a paper on systems thinking and management that was originally written as one of a number of essays in honour of Sir Geoffrey Vickers.1 Most readers of JORS will have heard of Professor Checkland's unique contribution to organisational problem articulation and resolution: the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). However, many people have only read about his work through the secondary literature, particularly in information systems. This book review inevitably is a further addition to that secondary literature but its intention is to encourage readers to study the republished original. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice STSP is the ®rst of several books on the soft methodology. When it was originally published in 1981, STSP was a milestone. It marked the completion of over one hundred studies by postgraduate students in the Department of System at Lancaster University and practitioner members of the Department's commercial consultancy. Although today discussion of SSM may be considered a regular part of any systems-related course, when the book was ®rst published, the soft methodology was not so widely accepted. Therefore, STSP provides not only an explanation of the methodology but also a justi®cation for it. In STSP, Checkland is concerned to show that systems thinking contributes to our understanding of social situations. Systems thinking, therefore, should be built upon the existing body of public knowledge and should adopt the rational norms of scienti®c enquiry. Since any serious contribution to knowledge must be a development from that which has gone before, he takes us back into the history of science. Beginning with Greek science, he touches lightly
647 648 649 650
on medieval science, and then forcefully identi®es the major events leading to the scienti®c revolution that created the Western cultural invention known as `the scienti®c method'. He identi®es not only the origins but also the characteristics of the scienti®c method, namely: reductionism, repeatability, and the possibility of refutation. He argues that these characteristics are, at the same time, both strengths and weaknesses. Checkland identi®es weaknesses in the scienti®c method when it is applied to management problems. He believes that `management science' is inadequate when it remains within a hard-science paradigm. From the `hard' perspect
Data Loading...
