ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the foundation for the organizational value of General Systems Theory (GST). While GST has had significant impacts on fields such as physics, biology, environmental science, economics and healthcare, it has had no appreciable impact yet on organizational theory. Readers will be provided a summary of GST from some of the most respected authors in the field and will see both a convincing indictment of the “machine model” of organization and the benefits that GST can provide.
The authors I will review in this chapter are:
