Systems Thinking and the Social Sciences

Abstract

Len Troncale (in this volume) has outlined some of the important developments taking place in the natural sciences and the relevance of systems thinking to those developments. The social sciences have lagged behind the physical and biological sciences. It is for this reason that the idea of applying systems ideas to the social sciences was first introduced. When people tried to manage social systems they came across a variety of problems which they were not able to tackle using the normal scientific method (Checkland, 1981). Complexity was one, the fact that the problems they were dealing with were real world problems was another and the ability of human beings to falsify predictions about themselves, the nature of human beings, was a third. I suppose there was a feeling that systems ideas in some way could help with these problems that managers of social systems came up against.