General Systems Theory - My Father's (Richard Ferdinand Ericson)
passion was the Society for General Systems Research. The basic idea
being that the same rules apply to any systems, whether they be biological,
electrical/electronic, political, religious, physics or whatever. A
fascinating study (if you have a very good dictionary handy ;) GWU Prof,
teacher at Annapolis
Just like my Daddy did!! (lol - hardly - they lost me at trigonometry
;)
See his
GWU Professor
Emeritus profile
Marcel Douwe Dekker has put up a
Wikipedia article
about my Dad
and some more info under the General Systems heading at - http://www.uia.be/node/150?kap=4
Since 1956, the Society for General Systems Research has produced a yearbook,
General Systems, which collects together significant papers, often
originally published in journals of a wide variety of disciplines. This is
a very valuable source for the location of concepts and their definitions.
(A former director of the Society, Richard Ericson, has himself prepared two
tentative versions of a
"Selected glossary of terms with particular reference
to concepts associated with cybernetic management and information technology").
Oran Young has carried out a survey of the use of general systems concepts
(
General Systems, 1964, p.61-80, 239-253). In 1979 a further survey
of the movement was carried out for the Society (Cavallo, 1979). The many
books on general systems naturally also offer definitions of concepts. It
is appropriate to ask why general systems has not been able to respond as
effectively as might have been hoped to the challenges of the times. Attempts
have been made to render general systems relevant to the issues raised by
the global problematique (Ervin Laszlo, 1974 and R F Ericson 1979), but there
has been little follow-up.
Learn more at the
International
Society for the Systems Sciences
