Identification of normative sources for systems thinking: an inquiry into religious ground‐motives for systems thinking paradigms

Abstract

In celebration of C. West Churchman's work, this article investigates one of the most cherished endeavours of his thinking: to provide a normative meaning for the conduct of human affiars. Churchman has always emphasized ‘What‐Ought‐To‐Be’, at the expense of the ‘What‐Is’. To achieve this purpose, four Systems Thinking paradigms, namely Hard Systems Thinking, Soft Systems Thinking, Critical Systems Thinking, and Multimodal Systems Thinking, are investigated with regard to their foundations for normative guidance. This investigation is made by identifying their respective basic convictions in the form of so‐called ‘religious ground‐motives’, which are based on the assumption that all human thinking and acting starts with a credal conviction, be it Christian, Jew, Islamic, Buddhist, or other. As a result it is found that these systems thinking paradigms are either founded on an inherent contradiction or provide a normative foundation that lacks a social contract for their implementation, and therefore these paradigms do not provide a stable and satisfactory normative guidance for system design.Note: The key claim of this author is that, to be normative, an ethical theory must be grounded in a transcendental justification which is based on some religious faith. The opinions presented in this paper are strictly the author's, who does not claim that his beliefs have more merit or are more ethical than those of any competitive faiths. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

On using spheres of meaning to define and dignify the IS discipline

“…These questions must be addressed by philosophy because it is the 'integrative discipline' (Hart, 1984). For reasons that it is not appropriate to discuss here but are elaborated in Eriksson (2003Eriksson ( , 2009) and Dooyeweerd (1979), most philosophies have failed to address the issue of spheres of meaning because of the types of presuppositions on which they rest (Greek, scholastic, modern or postmodern).…”

Enabling a Kleinian integration of interpretivist and socio-critical IS research: the contribution of Dooyeweerd's philosophy

“…( Eriksson (2003) applies this similarly to hard, soft and (socio-)critical systems thinking.) The Kleinian "Trojan horse" is that these gulfs cannot be bridged by theoretical thought that is guided by the Humanistic Nature-Freedom ground-motive -which includes most philosophical turns since Kant.…”

“…Applications of Dooyeweerd in IS are growing (for example, de Raadt 1989;Bergvall-Kåreborn & Grahn 1996;Winfield, Basden & Cresswell 1996;Eriksson 2001;Bergvall-Kåreborn 2001;Basden 2002a;Eriksson 2003;Mirijamdotter & Bergvall-Kåreborn 2006;Basden & Wood-Harper 2006;Basden 2008a, Basden & Klein 2008. Most of these address specific IS issues or apply only one part of Dooyeweerd's thought, whereas this paper applies three major parts of Dooyeweerd's thought to a strategic issue, namely the Kleinian project of integration of ISR approaches.…”

“…This originates in the Nature-Freedom ground-motive but it sits uneasily astride the two poles because the norm of freedom itself becomes a constraint and the implied notion of warranted constraints has no meaning within this ground-motive. The polar tension in the sociocritical approach has been highlighted and discussed by Wilson (1997) and Eriksson (2003).…”

Information Systems Principles for Developing Secure Information Systems

“…The concepts of inquiry systems that Churchman (1971) introduced have been studied and implemented in many sciences, including public policy (McIntyre, 2003), environmental sciences (Richardson, Courtney, & Paradice, 2001), management systems, and behavioral and religious sciences (Eriksson, 2003). However, technology and information systems' disciplines have lately focused on mathematical calculations and formulas to develop new tools and applications to solve business problems; and it has involved the theoretical foundations of information and computation along with its applications in computer systems.…”