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

ORGANIZATIONAL DEPTH 3)

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"A system's organizational depth is measured by the degree of nesting of sub-ordering relations within its global ordering relation"(W.O. CHRISTENSEN & C.A. HOOKER, 2000, P. 136)

The best global examples of organizational depth can be found in J. MILLER's taxonomy of living systems, either bottom up from the cell level to the global supra-national system, or vice versa. Neither the down-level subsystems can survive if not integrated into a higher-level one, nor the higher-level system can maintain itself if it does not satisfactorily integrates its subsystem in a coherent manner.

Conversely, a crystal, while structurally organized, has no organizational depth, as its parts can generally be cleaved without being destroyed, not being functional in any way.

→ Complex (Supremacy of the); Priority of the simple

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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