Systemic Structure Behind Human Organizations From Civilizations to
Systemic Structure behind Human Organizations: From Civilizations to Individuals shows how the systemic yoyo model can be successfully employed to study human organizations at three different levels: civilizations, business enterprises, and individuals.
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Series Editor Robert L. Flood Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands
For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/5807
Yi Lin Bailey Forrest •
Systemic Structure Behind Human Organizations
From Civilizations to Individuals
123
Yi Lin Department of Mathematics Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania Slippery Rock PA 16057 USA e-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 1568-2846 ISBN 978-1-4614-2310-2 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-2311-9
Bailey Forrest Department of ECE Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA e-mail: [email protected]
e-ISBN 978-1-4614-2311-9
Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011943343 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
It was the year of 1979 when Yi Lin, the first author of this book, was a sophomore in college majoring in Mathematics. According to the requirement of the national Department of Education he took 23 credit hours for each of the semesters in the university so that he had a chance to experience quite a few professors of varied characters. Although still not clear about what the future held for him in that career path, the different teaching styles and personalities of the professors made him feel curious about what a successful mathematician really did in his or her career. To satisfy this curiosity, he spent the winter break of that year on Morris Kline’s wonderful book, ‘‘Mathematical Thoughts from Ancient to Modern Times,’’ (Oxford university Press, 1972). Through additional readings along similar lines in the following years, he realized among many other facts that natural science, in particular, physics was an ‘‘exact’’ science because of Newton’s laws of motion and that social science was not nearly as ‘‘exact’’ as natural science due to the absence of similar laws. As he was soon greatly influenced by the teaching of Shutang Wang, a general topologist, and inspired by a paper by George Klir, a well-known scholar in systems science, Yi Lin started his professional career in systems research hoping that one day he could have the luck to introduce the badly needed laws for social science or maybe such laws that could make both natural and social sciences exact at the
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