Critical Systems Thinking

Abstract

Critical management science began to emerge as a distinctive tendency in the 1970s. Inevitably, the first steps in its evolution consisted of radical attacks upon other forms of management science. Traditional management science, already under fire from the soft systems thinkers, came under further attack from Marxist-inclined scholars such as Hales (1974). The thrust of this assault, as Wood and Kelly (1978) summarized it, was that traditional management science or hard systems thinking accepted existing structures of inequality of wealth, status, power, and authority as given, and indeed helped to buttress the status quo. Wood and Kelly thought that any critical management science should consider the origins of values, the relations between organizations and society, the historical development of organizations, and the relationship between management science and developments within capitalism. During the 1980s, Rosenhead (1982), Rosenhead and Thunhurst (1982), and Tinker and Lowe (1984) sustained this critical barrage against the traditional approach. Tinker and Lowe, for example, accused traditional management thinkers of being dominated by a technocratic consciousness and of having created a one-dimensional discipline. They advocated a “two-dimensional” management science that recognized the social as well as the technocratic side of the discipline. They also saw the need to understand the dialectical interplay between the technocratic and social aspects. It is necessary to grasp the social and institutional pressures that allow technocratic thinking to dominate.KeywordsCritical SystemSystem ThinkingCritical AwarenessSystem MethodologySoft System MethodologyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.