Overview
- Focuses on the thinkers in the field and both gives a clear account of their lives and describes their major contributions in a way that allows the reader to see the overall shape of their ideas
- Includes a very wide coverage of the field of systems thinking, bringing together a number of sub-fields that are closely connected but which are usually treated separately
- Discusses thinkers of many different types - those who are widely recognised as the key shapes of the field, well-known figures less frequently considered as systems thinkers, major practitioners, and those who have played an important part within the field but are not well-known outside of it
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Table of contents (31 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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Early Cybernetics
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General Systems Theory
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System Dynamics
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Soft and Critical Systems
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Later Cybernetics
Keywords
About this book
Systems Thinkers presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker’s key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.
Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary, so that the thinkers selected come from a wide range of areas – biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others. A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader’s interest in systems writers, providing an appetising ‘taster’ for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves.
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Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Systems Thinkers
Authors: Magnus Ramage, Karen Shipp
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-525-3
Publisher: Springer London
eBook Packages: Computer Science, Computer Science (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag London 2009
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-84882-524-6Published: 18 September 2009
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84882-525-3Published: 29 September 2009
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 316
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations
Topics: Computer Appl. in Social and Behavioral Sciences, Computers and Society, Management of Computing and Information Systems, Computer Science, general