Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking

Rating:
Summary: A Plea for Interdepartmental Thinking
Review: This book, the results of 25 years of interdisciplinary teching at Stanford is well written for an engineering or business audience or university faculty; good examples and charts. It argues a worthy cause that every serious pactical issues must be considered from several levels, e.g., psychological, sociological and ecological. His model derives clearly from Kenneth Boulding's typology of systems published 40 years ago. It appears that he has not taken notice of developments since then, though his bibliography is full of more recent writing. He does not recognize the incredible changes brought about in system thinking or epistemology since 1965. He ignores the "metafluctuation" of which Erich Jantsch writes in 1980, which presents a new paradigm of process thinking that appears in the work of Prigogine, Kauffman, Maturana, various writers on second cybernetics, and many others. He seems to be ignorant in the contemporary work in choice or action theory.

So, maybe useful for discussion in a university currcular development, but of little value in achieving the author's long time goal of multidiscipninary research and policy discourse.