Abstract
Ever since their existence on earth, humans have struggled to recognize and study their natural and social environment, and themselves within it. It took a long historical period for philosophy, natural science, and social science to emerge as categories of studies. However, their respective pace of development accelerated in the West during the Renaissance Period (the 14th–17th centuries). The pattern of such inquiry and development was the emergence of multiple sub-disciplines within each category of study. For example, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, etc. became robust disciplines in natural science while economics, politics, sociology, and anthropology, etc. were disciplines under social science. In the 20th Century, there was a new trend of development in natural and social sciences which further divided each discipline vertically into specific fields of studies or integrated multiple disciplines horizontally into broader studies. The emergence of cultural anthropology, social psychology, social statistics, etc., illustrates the former while the emergence and development of interdisciplinary studies in a broader scope represents the latter. Systems science and systems engineering are perfect examples of interdisciplinary study.
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Note: This is a term raised by German philosopher Karl Jaspers, which characterized the period of ancient history during about the 8th to 3rd centuries BC.
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How to measure performance of the social system was once a major obstacle in the establishment of social systems engineering, but much progress has been made in recent years to establish various types of indicators.
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Note: LGBT is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.
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Note: The first universities in Europe were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Paris (1150) and the University of Oxford (1167).
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Wang, H., Li, S. (2018). Overview. In: Introduction to Social Systems Engineering. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7040-2_1
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