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.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

COMMUNICATION (Line of) 1)4)

K. BOULDING stated that the lines of communication "& grow at a much slower rate than the total organization. Hence organizations eventually limit their growth by the sheer difficulty in getting communications from the surface" of the organization, where it is contact with its environment, into the decision-makers who are not in direct contact with the environment, but have to make decisions on base of increasingly less realistic images of the world" 1972, p.70-71).

Organizations, and also other kinds of social systems react to this problem in two different ways, none of them totally satisfying:

- increasing hierarchic centralization, which educes the general adaptability of the system.

- admitting more decentralization, which may produce in very large systems a tendency to fractioning and eventual disintegration.

The subject is also related, in more general terms, to the subject of interrelations between "Growth and Form" (d'ARCY W. THOMPSON – reed.1952).

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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