Systems Theory

M.L. Rhodes, in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012

Abstract
Systems theory in housing has had a long and varied history. From the early applications of
systems theory to town planning, to more recent forays into complex adaptive systems
approaches, theories of housing have built extensively upon basic ideas in systems theory. The
key features of systems theory such as elements, attributes, interactions, boundaries, and
outcomes appear in various guises in a range of housing theories including: town/urban planning,
housing economics, housing welfare, and housing network theory. Recent developments in
complex systems theory are beginning to make their way into exploratory analyses of housing
governance; however, there is little evidence that complex systems ideas have influenced
housing theory to any significant extent as yet.
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Social Work Theory
Barbra Teater, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second
Edition), 2015
Systems Theories
Systems theories are based on the belief that individuals do not operate in isolation, but rather
grow and develop in interaction with their physical and social environment. Systems theories
derive from general systems theory, which explores the parts of a system that interconnect and
interact to make a complete whole (Teater, 2014). Within social work, systems can constitute
individuals, couples, families, communities, organizations, society, and the world. Systems
theories hold that each system should be viewed as consisting of several elements that make the
system a functional whole, and each system should be viewed in relation to the other systems
that can cause a change or reaction within the main system. For example, when working with
clients, social workers should consider the bio-psycho-social aspects of the client by looking at
physical and psychological functioning, social relationships, and community or societal
structures that impact on the client.
The life model (Gitterman and Germain, 2008) of social work practice was greatly influenced by
system theories as well as the person-in-environment perspective (Karls and Wandrei, 1994),
both of which examine how social work is a unique discipline, in that it focuses on the point
where individuals interact with their environment. Such systems theories aim to move social
work practice away from focusing solely on the individual, such as with development
theories, psychodynamic theories, and behavioral theories, and instead focus holistically on the
individual within her/his environment (often referred to as human behavior in the social
environment). Consideration of the environment includes the physical space, the social context,
and the individual's culture and history. The aim of systems theories is to create homeostasis, or
a favorable person–environment fit, in that the individual interacts and responds to her/his
environment where interactions and change are contributing to positive growth and development
and social functioning.
Family systems theory adapted the main concepts of general systems theory in understanding
and working with families. The family is viewed as a system with each family member playing a
critical part. Family systems theory holds that a change in one part of the family system will
create a change in other parts of the family system, yet this is often variable depending on the
boundaries of the family, the patterns, messages and rules of the family, and the family's
responsiveness to change (Sharf, 2012).
Systems theories are useful to social work practice as they provide a theoretical basis for
assessing a client holistically by examining all the systems within her/his environment. Such
theories are primarily used in assessment and intervention stages of social work practice where
the social worker assesses the client holistically by considering psychological, biological, and
social functioning, as well as assessing the interaction of other systems within the client's
environment, particularly those that could be contributing to the presenting problem. Based on
the assessment, underpinned by systems theory, the social worker determines which system
needs the intervention. Although the client may be an individual, the social worker may deem the
family system, community system, or even political systems as the focus for intervention.
Interventions most commonly used in social work practice include couple and family therapy,
family systems therapy, community development, and community practice.
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Motivational Development, Systems Theory of
M.E. Schneider, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001
Systems theory provides a powerful method for the description of homeostatic systems, that is,
systems in which feedback-controlled regulation processes occur. Since human goal-directed
behavior is regulated by such processes, systems theory is also very useful for psychological
research. One of the most elaborated psychological models based on systems theory is the Zurich
Model of Social Motivation by Bischof. This model postulates the existence of three basic
motives or needs: the needs for security, arousal, and autonomy. Each of these is treated in a
specific homeostatic subsystem, which is represented as a negative feedback loop. The model
assumes that the attempt to maintain the appropriate amount of security, arousal, and autonomy
for the respective need results in specific regulations of the distance to social partners.
Furthermore, it is postulated that those three needs, and thus the way of distance regulation, take
a specific developmental course. These assumptions are supported by several studies in which
the distance regulation behavior of the participants was observed and simulated by means of a
parameter estimation.
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Motivational Development, Systems Theory of
Marianne E. Schneider, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
(Second Edition), 2015
Abstract
Systems theory provides a powerful method for the description of homeostatic systems, that is,
systems in which feedback-controlled regulation processes occur. Since human goal-directed
behavior is regulated by such processes, systems theory is also very useful for psychological
research. One of the most elaborated psychological models based on systems theory is the Zurich
Model of Social Motivation by Bischof. This model postulates the existence of three basic
motives or needs: the needs for security, arousal, and autonomy. Each of these is treated in a
specific homeostatic subsystem, which is represented as a negative feedback loop. The model
assumes that the attempt to maintain the appropriate amount of security, arousal, and autonomy
for the respective need results in specific regulations of the distance to social partners.
Furthermore, it is postulated that those three needs, and thus the way of distance regulation, take
a specific developmental course. These assumptions are supported by several studies in which
the distance regulation behavior of the participants was observed and simulated by means of a
parameter estimation.
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Personality Development: Systems Theories
Katarína Millová, Marek Blatný, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral
Sciences (Second Edition), 2015
Abstract
Developmental systems theories are an important part of modern research of human
development. These theories see individuals as a part of a developmental system. The system is
composed of the individual and also of the environment. The theories emphasize the holistic
principle in research and reject any form of reductionism. Developmental systems theories
include dynamic systems theory, developmental contextualism, person–context interaction
theory, and holistic, developmental, systems-oriented perspective. Unlike the dynamical systems
theory, which is a mathematical construct, the dynamic systems theory of Esther Thelen and
Linda Smith is primarily nonmathematical and comprises qualitative theoretical propositions in
behavioral biology and is the broadest and most encompassing of all development theories.
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Organizational Behavior Management
Timothy D. Ludwig, in Clinical and Organizational Applications of Applied Behavior Analysis,
2015
Behavioral Systems Analysis
System theory, with references as far back as 1931 (Baridon & Loomis, 1931), is interested in
problems related to relationships, structure, and interdependence of organizational and human
functions (Hall & Fagen, 1956; Katz & Kahn, 1966; Miller, 1971; Weiss, 1971). As behavior
analysis began to consider human performer's behavior in the context of a system, Harshbarger
and Maley (1974) and Malott (1974) began referring to this brand of systems theory as
behavioral systems analysis (BSA). Ludwig and Houmanfar (2010) emphasized in their
introduction to BSA in special issues of the Journal of Organizational Behavior
Management that “systems are adaptive entities that survive by meeting environmental demands
(consumers, competition, economy, governmental policies, etc.) through the development and
maintenance of subsystems ultimately designed to manage behavior. Thus, organizations are
behavioral systems that encompass complex patterns of behavioral interactions among its
members and the environment” (p. 85). BSA seeks to understand these complex response
patterns in the context of critical aspects of the organizational system. Through this process, we
can better manipulate the relationships between the organization and behavioral contingencies.
To emphasize this parsimony, Brethower (1972, 1982, 2001) and Brethower and Dams
(1999) developed a systems model called the total performance system (TPS) which represented
a “map” of an organization defining how it received inputs, added value by processing these
inputs to outputs, and how those outputs were received by the next system (e.g., another
individual, business function, or, ultimately, consumers). The TPS interactions are regulated by
feedback from the processing system as well as feedback from the receiving system. A similar
systems model was created by Rummler (Rummler, 2004, 2001; Rummler & Branche, 1995)
who described three levels within organizations where systemic relationships exist: an
organizational level that incorporates the company goals or strategy; a process level such as
workflow or information flow across functional departments that make up the organization; and
a job/performer level focusing on the behavior of individual employees and managers.
The organizational level of performance emphasizes the organization's relationship with outside
environments, internal structure, and distribution of resources. As a first step in assessing a
behavior analysis service clinic, we would outline the inputs to the system that may include
referring agencies, insurance companies, BCBA providers, behavior analytic researchers,
curriculum providers, and the like. Next, environmental influences such as government
regulations would be considered along with other entities that compete for resources such as
other behavior analysis clinics, psychology service providers, and the medical community. The
largest consideration is focused on the receiving system of clients, families, and communities
that the clinic serves. We must assure that our contingency management schemes focus on
delivering quality products and services to our customers/clients (Rummler & Branche, 1995).
Any other contingencies in the organization would be nonvalue adding.
The processing system focuses on the internal design and structure of the organization that
contribute to the throughput of the organization (Rummler & Branche, 1995). We seek to
understand how departments interact to complete work and identify where these interactions may
be flawed, thereby producing metacontingencies that create the context for suboptimal
performance.
Let us consider our behavior analysis service provider whose performance appraisals set the
stage for low performance and untimely turnover. We would diagnose the problem by first
asking what components of the larger system might impact the context within which they behave
(do their job). The behavior analysis service provider is attempting to serve their direct client,
say a 5-year-old girl with autism by applying evidence-based behavioral tactics to build
communication skills. Note that the employee's behavior is interlocked with her client because
her behavior sets the contingencies for the client and the client's behaviors then dictate the
employee's future behaviors. If the job were this well designed then the clinic would not have a
problem with its service-level employees.
Instead, consider the demands on the behavior of this service-level employee made by the greater
system. What do insurance companies require as they audit the services and outcomes of the
clinic? These create contingencies for managers who must meet these requirements. The
managers behave by building reporting processes to prove that required services were delivered.
These reporting processes create contingencies for the service-level employees to engage in a set
of behaviors that add content to these reports. We could ask the same set of questions (and we
do) that track government regulations through the compliance contingencies on the managers
that result in other types of rigid contingencies on the service provider who must also engage in a
set of behaviors in this context. Referring agencies, BCBA supervision requirements, and other
external system entities all come with their own sets of contingencies that are filtered down,
adding to the complexity of the service provider's job.
Internal factors also create metacontingencies that have wide ranging impacts. Businesses
attempt to make a profit and not-for-profit organizations must create resources to survive,
especially in the context of competitors who are trying to pull clients and their best employees.
Financial contingencies shape manager behaviors as they interlock with their service-level
employees, thereby requiring the production of client billable hours and procedures. Financial
considerations will dictate how much training or modern curricula will be available to
employees. Other internal functions such as human resources (HR), information technology (IT),
records, and physical plans interlock with these employees. One has to ask (and we do), “do
these added contingencies add value by increasing the quality of the service provider's behaviors
in their delivery of behavior analysis to the girl with autism?”
By the time we get to the performer, our service provider, you can see all of the systemic
contingencies dictating her behavior. As you would a client, you can do an assessment of the
behaviors with which the service provider engages. I think you will find that the system was
perfectly designed to produce the low quality performance that was discussed in the performance
appraisal.
Conducting behavioral observations on the service provider and timing engagement in different
activities would reveal that their time is bifurcated across many different tasks, each with
different contingent behaviors and schedules. Behaviors occur within time, and time is limited.
In the case of our pretend service provider, we may find that, as her shift progressed she would
fall behind in her different reporting responsibilities created by the system's metacontingencies.
This process would be particularly true if the client or the client's family or representative wanted
to speak with her about the client's progress or challenges—another contingency that may not be
reinforced by the system and thereby not considered in the client production schedules.
So our service provider's behavior is negatively reinforced by the growing backlog of reporting
to spend more time on this reporting to get it done. This, in turn, punishes the behavior of
spending time with the client. Less time with the client translates into lower client outcomes that
show up on the report. Alternatively, if our service provider spends more time with the client
then her time to fill out all the reporting forms is truncated.
However, if the supervisor were managing without a behavioral approach, then he would only
look at the limited outcomes, the artifacts of behavior, in an attempt to manage performance. In
the end both would be frustrated.
Instead, Diener, McGee, and Miguel (2009) argue that the analysis of the organization outside
the basic three-term contingency of antecedents, behaviors, and consequences helps to better
identify the variables that can significantly impact individual and organizational performance.
Thus, BSA is the first step in developing multilevel solutions that may include OBM
interventions, but also process design, automation, changes in policy, changes in resource
deployment, strategy development and/or realignment, development of incentive systems,
organizational restructuring, and managing the manager initiatives, to name a few (McGee,
2007). As we consider the systemic changes needed to better manage the service provider, we
would also begin to look closely at the proximal contingencies of our service provider to
determine the best performer-level interventions to shape more desirable behaviors.
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The System Perspective on Human Factors in Aviation
Thomas B. Sheridan, in Human Factors in Aviation (Second Edition), 2010
What Is Systems Theory, and What Is Its History?
Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field of science concerned with the nature of complex
systems, be they physical or natural or purely mathematical.
Although one can trace its roots to philosophers and economists of the early 19th century and
even back to Plato, many systems theoretical developments were motivated by World War II
(and the technological development of that period: servomechanisms for targeting guns and
bombs, radar, sonar, electronic communication). Just after the war, psychologists and
physiologists became aware of some of the early theories and saw use for them in characterizing
human behavior, and especially humans interacting with machines. For example, control theory
was applied to human sensory-motor behavior. Norbert Wiener gave us Cybernetics:
Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine (1948), an early systems perspective
on humans as machines and human-machine systems. His Human Use of Human Beings (1955)
introduced the ethical component. His last book, God and Golem Incorporated (1964), which
won a Pulitzer Prize, centered on his strong foreboding about the pitfalls of putting too much
trust in computers: They do what they are told, not necessarily what is intended or what is best.
Claude Shannon (1949) published his first paper on information theory in 1948, and together
with Warren Weaver (1959) offered a more popular explanation of the theory of information,
making the point that information as he interprets it is devoid of meaning and has only to do with
how improbable some event is in terms of receiver (e.g., human) expectation, that is, how
surprised that receiver is. After Shannon, there was a rush to measure experimentally how many
bits could be transmitted by speaking, playing the piano, or other activities. Miller’s
(1956) Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two modeled the information content of
immediate memory of simple physical light and sound stimuli. (Miller’s famous paper is perhaps
the most misquoted one in human factors by people falsely asserting that humans can only
remember seven items. The caveat is that those items must lie on a single sensory continuum,
such as pitches of sound, intensities of light, and so on.) Colin Cherry (1957) gave us an
important book On Human Communication using a systems point of view.
The theory of signal detection, developed out of necessity to characterize the capability of radar
and sonar to detect and distinguish from noise enemy aircraft and submarines was seen by
psychologists as an alternative approach to psychophysics (Green & Swets, 1966). They showed
how absolute thresholds are not absolute: they can be modified by the trade-off between relative
costs for false positives and missed signals. Signal detection theory has become a mainstay of
modeling human sensing and perception.
Ludwig Bertalanffy (1950, 1968) was probably the first to call for a general theory of
systems. G. J. Klir (1969) reinforced these ideas. Walter Cannon (1932) had already articulated
ideas of homeostasis (feedback, self-regulation) in his important physiological systems book The
Wisdom of the Body. C. West Churchman (1968) provided another popular book on how to think
with a systems perspective. J. G. Miller (1978) wrote a well-known book on living systems,
whereas Odum (1994) more recently characterized the ecological systems perspective. Sage and
Rouse (1999) offer a management perspective on systems thinking.
Karl Deutsch (1963), a political scientist, wrote The Nerves of Government, from a system point
of view. Jay Forester’s Industrial Dynamics (1961) proposed modeling industrial enterprise
using simple system models with variables connected by integrators and coefficients. The Club
of Rome extended Forester’s models to modeling nations and global systems in terms of
population, energy, pollution, and so on (Meadows et al, 1972).
Stemming from efforts by the physicist (Philip Morse Morse & Kimball, 1951) to apply
mathematical thinking to strategic and tactical decision making during World War II, the field
of operations research (OR) was born and continues to this day as an active system modeling
discipline within industry government and academe. OR specializes in applications of linear and
dynamic programming, queuing theory, game theory, graph theory, decision analysis, and
simulation in which one is trying to model a real system and find a best solution in terms of
variables that can be controlled, given assumed values of those that cannot be controlled.
The Human Factors Society started publishing its journal Human Factors in 1959, and aviation
was has already a key topic. J. C. R. Licklider (1961) was given the premier spot as the first
author in the first issue of Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the first engineering society to establish a special
journal on the systems approach to human factors. His article “Man-Computer Symbiosis” has
become a classic, predicting many aspects of human-computer interaction that have come to pass
decades later. That journal has evolved into Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.
Today, systems models are used by engineers for analysis, design, and evaluation for all sorts of
physical systems: from electrical and electronic circuits to highway and rail transportation
systems: aeronautical and space systems; biological systems at the cell and organic level;
hospital systems; business systems; and military command and control systems.
Systems models are almost always normative, meaning that they say how the
system should behave if it were to follow the model. They suggest mathematical mechanisms
that necessarily are simplifications of the real world and deal with only a restricted set of
variables. It is always instructive to discover how the real world differs from any system model,
which then provides a basis for improving the model.
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Sport and the Brain: The Science of Preparing, Enduring and
Winning, Part A
Martin I. Jones, Mark R. Wilson, in Progress in Brain Research, 2017
Developmental systems theory is not a single theory but rather a metatheory or set of theoretical
and empirical perspectives on the development and evolution of organisms (Robert et al., 2001).
Developmental systems theorists eschew the reductionist tendency to split facets of development
into opposing dualisms (e.g., nature vs nurture, stability vs instability, experiencing an adverse
life event vs not experiencing a negative life event). In place of these dualisms lies an integrated
model of human development that emphasize the integration of developmental systems to
understand how people develop (Lerner and Schmid, 2013).
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World Systems Theory
Daniel Chirot, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second
Edition), 2015
Abstract
World systems theory (WST) was created by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s, though
earlier Marxist theories first proposed similar ideas. WST claims that rich core capitalist societies
succeed by exploiting poorer peripheral ones. In between are semiperipheral societies, a
precarious global middle class. The periphery therefore can only advance through
global revolution that will end the world capitalist system. WST's holistic approach that studies
societies in the context of the entire world rather than in isolation is valuable. If freed of its
Marxist extremism and questionable economic assumptions that have marginalized it, this
approach can help us better understand the nature of social change.
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Systems Theories and a Priori Aspects of Perception
Alexander Laszlo, Stanley Krippner, in Advances in Psychology, 1998
Systems and Environments
In systems theory the term “environment” is defined as the set of all objects a change in whose
attributes effects the system as well as those objects whose attributes are changed by the
behavior of the system Hall & Fagen, (1956.). According to Ackoff (1981), the environment of
every social system contains three levels of purpose: “the purpose of the system, of its parts, and
of the system of which it is a part, the suprasystem” (p. 23).
This brings up the question, how systems thinkers formulate their perception of social reality in
terms of what is a system, and what is an environment. Observers in the context of systems
science have a clear conception of their mission as an integral part of the social system with
which they work. In performing a systems analysis of a problem or situation, they start from the
problem, not from a preconceived model. Once the manifestation of the problem has been
identified and described, they can proceed inward to the sub-systems and outward to the
environment.
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