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General Systems Theory

General systems theory (GST) is an approach to inquiry that originated in biology. It emerged as a
response to the perceived reductionism of analytical approaches to inquiry in science. GST seeks to provide
a language and method to study phenomena across all disciplines. GST's focus is on holism;
interconnectedness; understanding and articulating isomorphisms in all systems; and the application of
systems principles, such as open system, equifinality, emergence, and equilibrium, across levels and
disciplines. It has crosspollinated with information theory and cybernetics, incorporating such key concepts
as feedback and entropy, to become a cornerstone of holistic scientific approaches in the social sciences. It
has had a continuing influence in sociology, organizational theory, and family therapy.

Conceptual Overview
GST originated in the 1940s in the work of the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy who initially sought to find a
new approach to the study of life or living systems. More broadly, Von Bertalanffy envisioned GST as a way
to address the increasing complexity of the world's problems. He believed that the dominant form of inquiry
and way of thinking, reductionist analysis, was unable to address wholes, systems, and complexity. He
argued that reductionism abstracts a subject of inquiry from its environment, and that by studying parts of
a larger whole in isolation it is unable to account for systemic and emergent properties, and for the way
relationships and interactions form the organization of the living. Von Bertalanffy saw GST as a new way of
thinking that allows for the study of interconnections among systems, and accounts for the nature of open
systems in their environments. He introduced key concepts such as open and closed systems, stressing the
role and importance of context and environment; equifinality or the way systems can reach the same goal
through different paths; and isomorphisms or structural, behavioral, and developmental features that are
shared across systems.

GST presented itself as an interdisciplinary or generalist approach that went beyond the limitations of
disciplines and specializations. GST would be the common language uniting diverse disciplines with the key
concept of “system.” GST also pointed toward a new worldview, a systems view of the world, which
emphasizes such key concepts as every system's embeddedness in other, larger systems, and the dynamic,
ever-changing processes of self-organization, growth, and adaptation.

In its early years, GST engaged in a fruitful exchange with information theory and cybernetics, most
notably at the classic Macy conferences, integrating concepts such as negative and positive feedback,
entropy, and self-organization. GST was quickly applied in sociology and organization theory. In sociology,
the most important contribution was made by Talcott Parsons, whose work dominated the field in the 1950s
and 1960s. Parsons's structural functionalism proposed that every system needs to fulfill certain functional
imperatives. In organizational theory, Burns and Stalker, and Katz and Kahn made substantive contributions
based on GST, introducing the concept of the organization as an open system. The open system presented
an “organismic” alternative (reflecting von Bertalanffy's original concern with living systems) to more
“mechanistic” approaches originating with Fayol and Taylor, that treated individuals, groups, and
departments as machinelike closed systems.

Taylor's scientific management treated each individual worker as a closed system—performing his or her
duty, but having as little contact as possible with coworkers and the rest of the organization. In the same
way, departments were mostly isolated from each other. Traditional strategic planning is a classic example
of closed system thinking that focused largely on organizational goals. It assumed the environment was
“knowable.” Consequently, the environment was thought to have little or no impact on the evolution of the
organization's strategy.

Open systems tend to be far less stable than closed systems. The openness of the system with its ongoing

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exchanges with the environment leads to potential disequilibrium and the emergence of novelty. Open
systems are stabilized by flow, but their structural stability is only relative because this structure is
gradually, and sometimes quite rapidly, transformed by exchanges with the environment. The “organismic”
metaphor saw organizations as open systems with goals, existing in a continuous interaction with their
environment. Different environments require different organizational structures, and changing
environments require organismic rather than mechanistic structures. Organismic structures are more
flexible than mechanistic ones, which tend to be highly specialized and compartmentalized, with strict rules
and rigid hierarchy. Organismic structures required decentralization, greater interdependence, more
individual discretion, less formal tasks, and horizontal as well as vertical communication. The principle of
equifinality showed that there was more than “one right way” to structure organizations and achieve
organizational goals.

Attempts to organize the great diversity of “systems approaches” in management and organization theory
recognize that there is perhaps more diversity than unity under the systems umbrella. There is substantial
fragmentation and lack of communication between systems-based approaches, and there are often
fundamental epistemological differences. “Hard systems,” engineering-based approaches, are often
characterized by mathematical models, rational decision making, objectivity, and uncertainty reduction.
“Soft systems” approaches, typically informed by constructivist epistemologies, stress uncovering
assumptions and worldviews, thinking about thinking (metacognition), consensus building, and
participation.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

After its initial successes in the 1960s, GST was criticized very strongly in the 1970s, largely because of its
equilibrium orientation, considered to support the status quo and existing power relations. GST was also
associated with social engineering. Although GST had introduced the notion of the open system, with the
accompanying potential for disequilibrium, in social science much emphasis had been placed on the
importance of maintaining equilibrium in the face of turbulent environments. Politically this was seen as an
ideologically conservative support of the status quo, particularly in sociology. Systems-based functionalist
approaches, and in particular the work of the leading German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, a protégé of
Parsons, came in for criticism again in the 1980s, during the height of the postmodern debate, for being
instrumentalizing, totalizing, and coercive. Postmodern critiques of modernity often portrayed systems
approaches as the scientistic apotheosis of social engineering and technocracy. Against this trend, there
was among different groups, and particularly in Europe, an explicit cross-pollination of systems approaches
with the human sciences, a process that had been prefigured in the more philosophical works of von
Bertalanffy.

The work of such systems thinkers as Ackoff, Churchman, and Mitroff in the USA; Maruyama in Japan;
Checkland, Emery and Trist, and Jackson and Flood in Britain; Morin, Le Moigne, and de Rosnay in France;
and Bocchi, Ceruti, and Manghi in Italy continued to enrich the systems discourse with a variety of
approaches and perspectives. Churchman's “inquiring systems” focused explicitly on the inquirer's role and
became an important precursor of the self-reflective, “soft systems” approach, which was more aligned with
constructivist epistemologies. The work of the transdisciplinary maverick Gregory Bateson, who drew widely
from GST and cybernetics and was a key figure in the legendary Macy conferences, had a profound
influence in a variety of disciplines ranging from anthropology to cybernetics to ecology to family therapy.
In organization theory, Bateson's work was particularly influential in the development of the concept of
organizational learning.

In the 1990s, the term “systems thinking” made a comeback with Peter Senge's best-selling The Fifth
Discipline. Senge tellingly did not refer to GST in this work, drawing instead almost entirely on systems
dynamics with its use of feedback loops and circular causality. More recently, chaos and complexity theories
have become closely linked with the holistic strain of thought associated with GST under the generic label of
“new sciences.” This term refers to the application of findings and perspectives drawn from cybernetics,
quantum physics, evolutionary theory, and chaos and complexity theories. Senge's book coincided with the
rising popularity of the new sciences, in turn popularized in the management literature by Wheatley's
bestseller Leadership and the New Science. The popular works of Senge and Wheatley contributed to a
renewed interest in systemic approaches.

GST was originally envisioned as a new worldview, what Ervin László called “the systems view of the world”
in his work of the same name. It involved a different way of thinking, and a different way of organizing
knowledge. GST's vision and goal was therefore “transversal,” in the sense that it operated across

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disciplines, and proposed a different approach to and organization of knowledge. This goal of developing a
new worldview was largely lost in the initial applications of GST, which were grounded in a more
mechanistic, instrumental perspective, and seemed to promise the ability to control and predict more
accurately and efficiently.

GST has not proved to be the single unifying breakthrough approach that von Bertalanffy envisioned. In
some circles, GST is still viewed with suspicion as fundamentally scientistic. As a backlash against positivist
social science, a substantial strain of “human science” and postmodern thinking has come to reject any
attempt to apply perspectives and insights drawn from the natural sciences to the study of human beings,
and systems approaches have for many years been held up as the worst offenders. The more philosophical,
social constructionist management and organization theory discourse has also generally shied away from
referring to systems concepts. Even in the management and organizational writings that draw on the
popular new sciences, their diffuse origins, which can be traced back to quantum physics, evolutionary
theory, information theory, cybernetics, and chaos and complexity theories, often overlook the specific and
vital contribution of GST. While there is a definite movement toward antireductionistic, holistic approaches
in management and organization theory, there is arguably often a lack of historical and theoretical
coherence, and a tendency to reinvent the wheel.

One recurring theme in the more sophisticated discussions of complexity, whether in the sciences,
management, or social sciences in general, is that reductive/ analytic approaches to issues are unable to
account for, and give an adequate understanding of, complex, interconnected phenomena. Reductive
approaches isolate phenomena from their environment and operate with a disjunctive logic (either/or). This
kind of thinking can be found writ large in the organization of knowledge in universities, with departments
focusing studies in ever-greater specializations, with clear boundaries between one discipline or
subdiscipline and another, but little or no effort to connect the knowledge gathered in the different
departments, or to elaborate how the knowledge gained in different disciplines might be integrated in
practical applications in the world. Popular pseudo-holistic approaches that define themselves in opposition
to reductionism and reject “parts” in favor of “wholes,” “analysis” in favor of “synthesis,” and “control” in
favor of “emergence” almost inevitably end up being vague and ineffectual feel-good New Age nostrums
rather than serious efforts to address complexity, wholeness, and interconnectedness.

Edgar Morin and Mark Taylor have, in their reconciliation of the human and natural sciences, reemphasized
the foundational importance of GST in today's movement toward complexity, arguing that any theory of
complexity must also be a theory of systems. Morin has grounded a “method of complexity” in GST,
information theory, cybernetics, and such key concepts as self-organization and recursivity. Coupled with
the renewed interest in Bateson's epistemological sophistication, these developments point to the potential
for a GST-inspired approach that can inform management and organizational theory in a way that is
transdisciplinary, contextualizing, and relational, rather than scientistic and totalizing.

Alfonso Montuori

Further Readings
Bateson, G. (2002). Mind and nature. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Burns, T., & Stalker, G. M. (1994). The management of innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cavaleri, S., & Obloj, K. (1993). Management systems. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Checkland, P. (1999). Systems thinking, systems practice. New York: Wiley.

Jackson, M. (1991). Systems methodology for the management sciences. New York: Plenum.

László, E. (1996). The systems view of the world. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Morin, E. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the 21st century. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Morin, E. (2006). On complexity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York: Doubleday.

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Taylor, M. (2003). The moment of complexity: Emerging network culture. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General system theory: Foundations, developments, applications. New York:
Braziller.

Entry Citation:
Montuori, Alfonso. "General Systems Theory." International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies. 2007.
SAGE Publications. 1 Mar. 2009. <http://sage-ereference.com/organization/Article_n192.html>.

© SAGE Publications, Inc.

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