„Matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information.“

— Paul Davies

Source: The Matter Myth: Towards 21st-century Science (1991), Ch. 1: 'The Death of Materialism', p. 9

Last update Jan. 13, 2021.

Paul Davies photo

Paul Davies12

British physicist 1946

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„[There has been] a widening of the field covered by the concept of “information”, both its theory and its practice. Information transfer has been put on a par with the transfer of matter and energy, as one of the primary natural processes.’“

— Brian Campbell Vickery British information theorist 1918 - 2009

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 7: Introduction.

„With the changes in technological complexity, especially in information technology, the leadership task has changed. Leadership in a networked organization is a fundamentally different thing from leadership in a traditional hierarchy.“

— Edgar H. Schein Psychologist 1928

Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985, p. 12-13

Nicolas Bratza photo

„The United Kingdom's contribution to the European Convention on Human Rights has been immense. British parliamentarians and lawyers played a key role in its conception and its drafting.“

— Nicolas Bratza British judge 1945

"Britain should be defending European justice, not attacking it", The Independent, Tuesday 24 January 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nicolas-bratza-britain-should-be-defending-european-justice-not-attacking-it-6293689.html

Wanda Orlikowski photo

„Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations.“

— Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 389

Effort, Understanding

„To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all of its life. Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters.“

— C. West Churchman American philosopher and systems scientist 1913 - 2004

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 10; cited in Daniel J. Power (2004) Decision Support Systems: Frequently Asked Questions, p. 23

Knowledge, Life

Carl Sagan photo

„There is a very stunning range of studies… of interstellar organic matter… the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. …complex organic materials are everywhere.“

— Carl Sagan American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator 1934 - 1996

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

„Complex human learning is a concept involving communication between the participant in the learning process, who commonly occupy the roles of learner and teacher.“

— Gordon Pask British psychologist 1928 - 1996

Pask (1976) "Conversational techniques in the study and practice of education", In: British Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 46, p. 24.

Teachers, Learning, Communication

„This paper introduces a concept of organizational ecology. This refers to the organizational field created by a number of organizations, whose interrelations compose a system at the level of the field as a whole. The overall field becomes the object of inquiry, not the single organization as related to its organization-set. The emergence of organizational ecology from earlier organization theory is traced and illustrated from empirical studies. Its relevance to the task of institution-building, in a world in which the environment has become exceedingly complex and more interdependent, is argued.“

— Eric Trist British scientist 1909 - 1993

Eric Trist, "A concept of organizational ecology." Australian journal of management 2.2 (1977): 161-175. p. 161; abstract

„General systems theory is a set of related definitions, assumptions, and propositions which deal with reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy. General systems behavior is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones.
Even more basic to this presentation than the concept of "system" are the concepts of "space," "time," "matter," "energy," and "information," because the living systems which I shall discuss exist in space and are made of matter and energy organized by information.“

— James Grier Miller biologist 1916 - 2002

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 51; Opening paragraph

Time, Reality, Behavior

„# General system theory in the narrower sense (G. S. T.), trying to derive from a general definition of “system” as complex of interacting components, concepts characteristic of organized wholes such as interaction, sum, mechanization, centralization, competition, finality, etc., and to apply them to concrete phenomena.
While systems theory in the broad sense has the character of a basic science, it has its correlate in applied science, sometimes subsumed under the general name of Systems Science.“

— Ludwig von Bertalanffy austrian biologist and philosopher 1901 - 1972

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 90-91

„The concept of "variety" [is] inseparable from that of "information."“

— W. Ross Ashby British psychiatrist 1903 - 1972

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part 2: Variety, p. 140

Corrado Maria Daclon photo

„The military front in its traditional meaning has disappeared and has been replaced by something structurally different. As a result of a set of variables such as globalisation, information technology, international finance, etc., we have now moved from a geopolitics based on space to a geopolitics based on flows.“

— Corrado Maria Daclon Italian journalist and scientist 1963

From Geopolitics of Environment, A Wider Approach to the Global Challenges, La Comunità Internazionale, no. 4, (2007)

Paulo Coelho photo

„No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.“

— Paulo Coelho, book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 158.

Personality, History, World

„If we now reintroduce the conception of the complex organization as an open system subject to criteria of rationality, we are in a position to speculate about some dynamic properties of organizations.“

— James D. Thompson American sociologist 1920 - 1973

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. 11

Henry Adams photo

„From that time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less reducible to a central control. With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusiveness as though it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on it a single will. Modern science, like modern art, tends, in practice, to drop the dogma of organic unity. Some of the mediaeval habit of mind survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily evidence of increasing and extending complexity. The fault, then, was not in man, if he no longer looked at science or art as an organic whole or as the expression of unity. Unity turned itself into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction.“

— Henry Adams journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838 - 1918

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Parting, Time, Science, Universe

Hans Frank photo

„You can't indict a government and its organizations as criminal. The conception of the Reich government is a hundred years old. The general staff is several hundreds of years old. The case of the SS is another matter, because it was started with the party and by the party. But it's quite impossible to indict or convict an organization as criminal if it has in its membership millions of innocent people.“

— Hans Frank German war criminal 1900 - 1946

To Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Alison Bechdel photo

„I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy“

— Alison Bechdel American cartoonist, author 1960

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

„Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences.“

— Tom R. Burns American sociologist 1937

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Parting, Change, Science, Hope

„The concept of "niche," initially borrowed by biologists from early social science, plays a central role in ecological theory… The niche… consists of all those combinations of resource levels at which the population can survive and reproduce itself.“

— Michael T. Hannan US-American sociologist of Stanford University 1943

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 946

George Klir photo

„The emergence of computer technology in World War II and its rapidly growing power in the second half of this century made it possible to deal with increasingly complex problems, some of which began to resemble the notion of organized complexity. Initially, it was the common belief of many scientists that the level of complexity we can handle is basically a matter of the level of computational power at our disposal. Later, in the early 1960s, this naive belief was replaced with a more realistic outlook.“

— George Klir American computer scientist 1932 - 2016

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 2.

Problem, World, War

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