General Systems Theory

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.

...