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Is it Safe to Talk About Systems Again Yet?

Self Organ-ising Processes for Complex Living Systems and the Dynamics of Human Inquiry

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Abstract

The following article makes a case for the social sciences to renew their interest in systems, drawing on ideas circulating in organisational and community psychology, industry, engineering, biology and ecology, the new physics, management, evaluation, religion and spirituality, policy-making, human services professions, and service-user and community movements. It charts a different kind of systemic thinking in striking contrast to traditional mechanistic social systems theory. Sociology’s current resiling from systems theory is explained as a legacy of its loyal service in the ‘battlefield’ of the post WW2 critique of authoritarian structural-functionalist positivist systems and the hard-won interpretive turn to issues of process, diversity, conflict, change and a critical and ‘qualitative’ epistemology. A new transdisciplinary mental architecture of self-organising processes for complex living systems is offered which integrates understandings of both ‘structural systems’ and the ‘processual systemic’ in individual psychology, organisational sociology, and in action research as its epistemology.

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Notes

  1. The paper is based on the Bob White memorial lecture, published by the University of Tasmania and originally delivered at the Australian Sociology Association’s 2005 national conference in Hobart Australia. Permission kindly granted for its revised further publication. Research for this paper was substantially completed between 2003 and 2005 while a Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University. The author was Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology at the time the lecture was delivered.

  2. Degendered for readability, although masculine gendering of original.

  3. I note in particular, apart from critical or descriptive commentary of structural-functionalism, an absence of the systems word in a selection of contemporary sociology texts. I searched a range of well-used sociological texts including from Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner’s 2005 Sage flagship Handbook of Sociology, to Allan Kellehear's accessible 1990 Australian introductory primer Every Student’s Guide to Sociology: A Quick and Plain-speaking Introduction Nelson, to a 2003 third edition of another popular Australian text Sociology – Australian Connections, edited by Ray Jureidini and Marilyn Poole for Allen & Unwin in which Grazyna Zajdow’s sturdy discussion of ‘Parsons and Structural functionalism’ (pp83-101) notes the vestigial (e.g. Australian Institute for Family Studies) or revivalist (e.g. Bryan Turner and others) versions, but not the newer living systems-type theory; to a 2005 text by David Cheal from Canada introducing students to Dimensions of Sociological Theory for Palgrave Macmillan. European sociology also teaches Niklas Luhman and America finds Jeffrey Alexander’s neo-functionalism influential, but again these differ critically from the systemic complexity formulations, some of which abandon the central language of ‘system’ altogether for fear of being mistaken for these (e.g. Ralph Stacey, Patricia Shaw and Douglas Griffin in their 2005 twelve book Complexity and Emergence series).

  4. Derek Lackaff, personal communication, email 18/11/04.

  5. I use the word ‘organ-ise’ to call attention to the dynamic process inherent in the idea of structure, or to use Gidden’s term, structuration. That is, to speak only of ‘organisation’ risks seeing this differential order as a static given rather than a constantly-‘threatened’ constantly-to-be-‘achieved’ state, as something more-or-less continuously to be ‘taken’, if it is then to appear ‘a given’, and so on.

  6. See Wadsworth (2006) for detail of the insights underpinning this paper—conjoining the three disciplinary systems of the epistemological (action research), the individual personal (the MBTI® using Peter Tuft Richardson’s framework of the 4-letter codes), and of living systems per se.

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Acknowledgements

Permission to reproduce the front cover of David Silverman’s 1970 book The Theory of Organisations was kindly provided by the publisher Harcourt Education (incorporating Heinemann Educational Books) without charge. Gareth Morgan’s book Images of Organization front cover (design by Ravi Balasuriya) copyright 1997 held by Sage Publications, is reprinted by kind permission of Sage Publications Inc., also without charge.

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  1. Education, Change & Social Equity Cluster, Youth Research Centre, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Yoland Wadsworth

  2. 21 Brighton Street, Richmond, VIC, 3121, Australia

    Yoland Wadsworth

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Correspondence to Yoland Wadsworth.

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Wadsworth, Y. Is it Safe to Talk About Systems Again Yet?. Syst Pract Act Res 21, 153–170 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-007-9084-2

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