BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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SOCIAL SYSTEMS MODELING 2)4)

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According to P.M. ALLEN, "we find three basic issues that must be addressed in modeling social systems:

"A social system is firmly embedded in an environment with which it exchanges matter and energy, and it also has an internal complexity. Both these realities can, at certain moments, modify the average behavior of the system.

"The evolution of such a system is an interplay between the average behavior and rationality of its actors, and the fluctuations, deviations and perturbations around this average caused by the environment and by individuals within the system. Such an evolution involves both determinism and chance. The former is associated with the variables contained in the reduced description, and the latter with perturbations that probe the stability of the system continually, but which are not contained in the reduced description.

"The evolution is described by a branching tree of possibilities in a space of increasing dimensions representing the qualities which are associated with the system. The branches are merely self-consistent or stable expressions of the organization and interactions of the elements. The structure becomes unstable and changes when it cannot cope with either internal of external fluctuations. (1982, p.35-37).

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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