ABSTRACT
From the late nineteenth century onwards, science itself underwent a profound transformation. The natural and physical sciences abandoned Newtonian physics and its view of a deterministic universe in favour of a quantum view of science which saw reality as unpredictable and often incomprehensible (Heisenberg, 1989). The new physics began to replace the normative mechanistic model as a metaphor to understand human interaction. A view of social activity as a dynamic system began to emerge, as well as the idea of systems as emergent processes rather than planned structures. Early general systems theory (for example, Pareto, 1935) developed and came to prominence from the 1940s (for example, Bertanlanffy, 1950, 1968), providing new organising metaphors for human enquiry.
