40 Ethics and Systems Thinking
affairs over many decades past, in the search for knowledge about the nature of
‘human systems’. This has a particular relevance to this present context of an envi-
ronmental challenge that dictates the need to come to know and understand what
is claimed to be ‘the fundamental character of interactions between nature and
society’ (Kates et al, 2001). This is a challenge that accepts that the governance of
ecosystems as complex adaptive systems requires flexibility and cognitive capacities
for knowing and learning in response to ‘environmental feedback’ (Levin, 1998).
For all of these efforts, however, and for all of the apparent success of the sys-
tem’s focus in ecology, in environmental science and as a feature of the emerging
sustainability sciences (Kates et al, 2001) and systems biology (Kitano, 2002), the
systems idea and the styles of systems thinking that it promotes, has actually found
declining support within the social sciences. As one of its most astute observers
posits, systems thinking was in a less secure position within the social sciences at
the beginning of the 21st century, than it had occupied several decades earlier
(Jackson, 2000) at the time that the ‘dawn of the systems age’ had been acclaimed
by Ackoff (1974). This represented a significant change from the situation where
systems perspectives on, and systems approaches to the analysis of, social group-
ings had really been the dominant paradigm within sociology at least, and most
especially among those concerned with organizational management and develop-
ment.
While host of reasons can be cited for this situation – and Jackson (2000)
indeed articulates most of the major influences, from the novelty of changing para-
digmatic perspectives that range from functionalist through interpretivist and
emancipatory to postmodernist – a central distinction between ‘natural systems’
and their ‘social system’ analogues is the inherent reflexivity of human beings
(Westley et al, 2002) and our critical capacities for knowing, and for changing our
minds and the views that we hold of the world about us.
As it happens, Ackoff would have been more accurate to have claimed in the
mid-1970s that this was the dawning of a ‘new systems age’, or the emergence of a
‘second wave of systems thinking’, as Midgely (2000) describes it, which was being
characterized by a very significant change of mind about ‘systems’ themselves and
systemics, among, at least some, systemists. And this observation provides a useful
segue into the next section of this chapter where the focus changes from a consid-
eration of ‘systems in the world’ to the ‘systems of cognition’ through which we
come to know that world. In essence, in now changing the emphasis from know-
ing systems as it were, to knowing systems, we reflect what Checkland (1981)
referred to with his introduction of the soft systems methodology as ‘the shift in
systemicity from the world to ways of inquiry into that world’ which indeed rep-
resented the character of the dawning of the ‘new systems age’ to which he himself
has been such a dominant contributor.