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Mon, 2007-07-30 23:33 — ifsr

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Wed, 2009-12-30 20:18 — ifsr

2009-12-30 Biographies of 30 system thinkers published

I'm delighted to announce that our book "Systems Thinkers", by Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp of The Open University (UK), has recently been published by Springer.

The book (the product of more than seven years of research) presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker’s key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.

Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary, so that the thinkers selected come from a wide range of areas – biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others. Some are core innovators in systems ideas; some have been primarily practitioners who also advanced and popularised systems ideas; others are well-known figures who drew heavily upon systems thinking although it was not their primary discipline. A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader’s interest in systems writers, providing an appetising ‘taster’ for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves.

The thirty thinkers covered in the book are: Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, W. Ross Ashby, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Geoffrey Vickers, Howard Odum, Jay Forrester, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, C. West Churchman, Russell Ackoff, Peter Checkland, Werner Ulrich, Michael Jackson, Heinz von Foerster, Stafford Beer, Humberto Maturana, Niklas Luhmann, Paul Watzlawick, Ilya Prigogine, Stuart Kauffman, James Lovelock, Kurt Lewin, Eric Trist, Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, Mary Catherine Bateson.

List price of the book (paperback) is GBP 39.99 / EUR 69.95 / USD 89.95, though Amazon UK have it for less (GBP 33.99 at time of writing). ISBN 978-1-84882-524-6, 316 pp.

See it on Google Books: http://bit.ly/lJnNx, or at the publisher's website: http://bit.ly/JWu9m.

Magnus Ramage