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Management Cybernetics
Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of agency (philosophy), self-regulation applied by and to organizational settings, as seen through a cybernetics perspective. Beer developed the theory through a combination of practical applications and a series of influential books. The practical applications involved steel production, publishing and operations research in a large variety of different industries. Some consider that the full flowering of management cybernetics is represented in Beer's books. However, learning continues (see below). Research into operations As practiced by Beer, research into operations involved multidisciplinary teams seeking practical assistance for difficult managerial issues. It often involved the development of models borrowed from basic sciences and put into an isomorp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VSM Default Version English With Two Operational Systems
VSM may refer to: Organisations * Varanger Sami Museum, a museum in Varangerbotn, Norway * Veluwsche Stoomtrein Maatschappij, a Dutch heritage railway * Vickers, Sons & Maxim, a British armaments and ammunition manufacturer of the early 20th century * Villa Sainte-Marcelline, a private school in Westmount, Canada * VSM Group or Viking Sewing Machines, a Swedish company * Vysoká škola manažmentu or City University of Seattle in Slovakia, a private college Science and technology * Variance shadow map, a process by which shadows are added to 3D computer graphics * Vascular smooth muscle, a type of muscle found in blood vessels * Vector space model, an algebraic model for representing objects as vectors of identifiers * Vena saphena magna, a vein of the leg * Viable system model, a model of an autonomous system capable of producing itself * Vibrating-sample magnetometer, a scientific instrument Other uses * Value-stream mapping, a product management method * Vietnam Service Medal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Drucker
Peter Ferdinand Drucker (; ; November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in the development of management education, and invented the concepts known as management by objectives and self-control, and he has been described as "the champion of management as a serious discipline". Drucker's books and articles, both scholarly and popular, explored how humans are organized across the business, government, and nonprofit sectors of society.Why Drucker Now? , Drucker Institute. He is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice. His writings have predicted many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reproducibility
Reproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a statistical analysis of a data set should be achieved again with a high degree of reliability when the study is replicated. There are different kinds of replication but typically replication studies involve different researchers using the same methodology. Only after one or several such successful replications should a result be recognized as scientific knowledge. History The first to stress the importance of reproducibility in science was the Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle, in England in the 17th century. Boyle's air pump was designed to generate and study vacuum, which at the time was a very controversial concept. Indeed, distinguished philosophers such as René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes denied the very possibility of vacuum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann (; ; December 8, 1927 – November 11, 1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and systems theorist. Niklas Luhmann is one of the most influential German sociologists of the 20th century. His thinking was based on the philosophical tradition and at the same time the reception of a wide variety of concepts from modern science. From this foundation he developed a functionalist-oriented systems theory, which claims to be able to describe all social phenomena in a theoretically consistent language. Social systems are understood as communication contexts that have autonomy from the actors involved in them. On this basis, three types of social systems can be distinguished: interaction, organization and society. On his general theory he developed a social theory, which describes modern society as a global society that is characterized by an internal differentiation into various autonomously working ''functional areas'' such as politics, la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism. Life and career Varela was born in 1946 in Talcahuano in Chile, the son of Corina María Elena García Tapia and Raúl Andrés Varela Rodríguez. After completing secondary school at the Liceo Alemán del Verbo Divino in Santiago (1951–1963), like his mentor Humberto Maturana, Varela temporarily studied medicine at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Chile. He later obtained a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University. His thesis, defended in 1970 and supervised by Torsten Wiesel, was titled ''Insect Retinas: Information processing in the compound eye''. After ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Some name him a second-order cybernetics theoretician alongside the likes of Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld. Maturana, along with Francisco Varela and Ricardo B. Uribe, was known for creating the term "autopoiesis" about the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems, and concepts such as structural determinism and structural coupling. His work was influential in many fields, mainly the field of systems thinking and cybernetics. Overall, his work is concerned with the biology of cognition.Magnus Ramage, Karen Shipp (2012) ''Systems Thinkers'' Maturana (2002) insisted that autopoiesis exists only in the molecular domain, and he did not agree with the extension into sociology and other fields: The molecular domain is the only domain of entities that through their interactions give rise to an open ended dive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Autopoiesis
The term autopoiesis (), one of several current theories of life, refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts. The term was introduced in the 1972 publication '' Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living'' by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. The concept has since been applied to the fields of cognition, neurobiology, systems theory, architecture and sociology. Niklas Luhmann briefly introduced the concept of autopoiesis to organizational theory. Overview In their 1972 book ''Autopoiesis and Cognition'', Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela described how they invented the word autopoiesis. They explained that, They described the "space defined by an autopoietic system" as "self-contained", a space that "cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoieti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
General Systems Theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" when it expresses synergy or emergent behavior. Changing one component of a system may affect other components or the whole system. It may be possible to predict these changes in patterns of behavior. For systems that learn and adapt, the growth and the degree of adaptation depend upon how well the system is engaged with its environment and other contexts influencing its organization. Some systems support other systems, maintaining the other system to prevent failure. The goals of systems theory are to model a system's dynamics, constraints, conditions, and relations; and to elucidate principles (such as purpose, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Autonomous Agency Theory
Autonomous agency theory (AAT) is a viable system theory (VST) which models autonomous social complex adaptive systems. It can be used to model the relationship between an agency and its environment(s), and these may include other interactive agencies. The nature of that interaction is determined by both the agency's external and internal attributes and constraints. Internal attributes may include immanent dynamic "self" processes that drive agency change. History Stafford Beer coined the term ''viable systems'' in the 1950s, and developed it within his management cybernetics theories. He designed his viable system model as a diagnostic tool for organisational pathologies (conditions of social ill-health). This model involves a system concerned with operations and their direct management, and a meta-system that "observes" the system and controls it. Beer's work refers to Maturana's concept of autopoiesis, which explains why living systems actually live. However, Beer did not m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Systems Theory
Systems theory is the Transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" when it expresses synergy or emergent behavior. Changing one component of a system may affect other components or the whole system. It may be possible to predict these changes in patterns of behavior. For systems that learn and adapt, the growth and the degree of adaptation depend upon how well the system is engaged with its environment and other contexts influencing its organization. Some systems support other systems, maintaining the other system to prevent failure. The goals of systems theory are to model a system's dynamics, Theory of constraints, constraints, conditions, and relations; and to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops including birth transformation or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation. Some insects, jellyfish, fish, amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, cnidarians, echinoderms, and tunicates undergo metamorphosis, which is often accompanied by a change of nutrition source or behavior. Animals can be divided into species that undergo complete metamorphosis (" holometaboly"), incomplete metamorphosis (" hemimetaboly"), or no metamorphosis (" ametaboly"). Generally organisms with a larval stage undergo metamorphosis, and during metamorphosis the organism loses larval characteristics. Etymology The word ''metamorphosis'' derives from Ancient Greek , "transformation, transforming", from ('), "after" and ('), "form". Hormonal control In insects, growth and metamorphosis are controlled by hormones synthesized by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Goethean Science
Goethean science concerns the natural philosophy (German ''Naturphilosophie'' "philosophy of nature") of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Although primarily known as a literary figure, Goethe did research in morphology, anatomy, and optics. He also developed a phenomenological approach to natural history, an alternative to Enlightenment natural science, which is still debated today among scholars. His works in natural history include his 1790 '' Metamorphosis of Plants'' and his 1810 book '' Theory of Colors''. His work in colour, and his polemics against the Newtonian Optics had a mixed reception from the natural history establishment of the time — under half spoke against Goethe, while a third of natural scientists had favourable reviews of Goethe's colour theory. Background The rationalist scientific method, which had worked well with inert nature (Bacon's ''natura naturata''), was less successful in seeking to understand vital nature (''natura naturans''). At ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
