THE MENTAL MAELSTROM
In the early fifties, at almost precisely the same time that biologists were breaking the genetic code, communications theorists and engineers at the Bell Labs, computer specialists ni IBM, physicists at Britain’s Post Office Laboratory, and specialists at Le Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in I-ranee, also began a period of intense and exciting work.
Drawing on “operations research” conducted during World War II, but advancing far beyond it, this work gave birth to the automation revolution and a whole new phylum or species of technology that underpins Third Wave production In factory and office. Along with the hardware, however, i-.ime a new way of thinking. For a key product of the automation revolution was the “systems approach.”
Whereas Cartesian thinkers emphasized the analysis of components, often at the expense of context, systems thinkers stressed what Simon Ramo, an early advocate of systems theory, called a “total, rather than a fragmentary, look flt problems.” Emphasizing the feedback relationships among •ubsystems and the larger wholes formed by these units, systems thinking has had a pervasive cultural impact since the nml-1950’s when it first began to seep out of the laboratories. Its language and concepts have been employed by social HI i entists andpsychologists, by philosophers and foreign policy analysts, by logicians and linguists, by engineers and administrators.
But the advocates of systems theory are not the only ones In the past decade or two who have urged a more integrative wny of looking at problems.
The revolt against narrow overspecialization also received a IK>ost from the environmental campaigns of the 1970’s, as « »logists increasingly discovered the “web” of nature, the in-i(nclatedness of species, and the wholeness of ecosystems. “Non-environmentalists tend to want to separate things into • “inponents and to solve one thine at a time,” wrote Barry I »|H-7 in Environmental Action. By contrast, “Environmen-i iM MS tend to see things quite differently… Theirinstinct IN In balance the whole, not to solve a single part.” The eco-il approach and the systems approach overlapped and Mi.nrtl the same thrust toward synthesis and the integration ni Knowledge.
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