Systems Theory

Systems theory or the systems approach is a way of looking at things as parts of an organized and complex whole rather than as a collection of isolated phenomena. The term systems theory was coined by Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in 1928 [Page 397]as an alternative to the assumptions (which can be traced back to Descartes) that a system could always be broken down into individual components that could be analyzed separately and then added back together in a linear fashion to describe the total entity. The latter type of thinking dominated scientific research at the time but Bertalanffy found it inadequate and proposed an alternative view in which a system was characterized by nonlinear interaction among components that were nonlinear so that the ...