2007/08/10 09:10 Systems Applications in Business and Industry, Session 3, ISSS Tokyo 2007
This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the ISSS web site by David Ing.
Chaired by David Ing
Context as posted in the pre-conference description.
Teresa A. Daniel
Am a part of two worlds
- Academics rewarding by publishing
- Practitioners use knowledge
- Perception that academics are lagging, but not true
- Academics don't talk to practitioners, and vice versa
Paper focused on HRM domain
Academics thinking about the future, see themselves as big thinkers
- Worked for 20-plus years in academic research, read papers (unusual), writing papers, although not valued
- Academic researchers aren't talking to the practitioners
Collaborative gaps
Ideas with some promise:
- Co-production, where academics and practitioners working together
- Researchers are more pure
- Practitioners want results
- Win-win projects: where academics work on real world problems
- Cross-community events
- Overlapping communities coming together
[Comments]
Change in patent laws?
- Changing behaviours, more focus on innovation and collaboration
(David)
- Homo academicus
- Finland
- internal /external being in the world
- boundary object
Vulgarization of ideas
- Listening to a practitioner, with two accounting errors, and misparticipation
- Wrote a book on internal auditing, but it didn't sell
Jae Eon Yu
At a university only with practitioners
- Before doing Ph.D. at Lincoln, was a management consultant
When joined the system community, tried to find places where had ideas that could be applied
- Found Churchman
- Science of sciences
- Difference between factual science and ethical science
In this SIG, a lot of people discuss factual science, rather than ethical science
Understanding ethical management science using a rhizome metaphor: Deleuze and Guatteri
- Rhizome is an open system
- Philosophy has a logic beyond us
- Softer systems methodology, it's difficult to engage the real world
- Collecting data, but transcedental knowledge
- Have to use a new image in the world: movement and time
How to use the rhizome: Deleuze, evolving to a heterogeneous system:
- Machinic assembly: buildings, male/femail
- Enunciative assemblies: Legal requirement for emplooyment practices, norms,
Can understand machinic assembly, but not enunciative
Propose problematization as science as science
(Discussion)
Ethics of various societies, e.g. women not having rights
- Japanese and Korean women have women who tend to keep quiet
- Try to involve people together
Conversations, having people together
Potentially involving people who don't want to be involved
The walk and the talk: knowing what the score is
Checkland doesn't show clearly connection processes to link logic and culture, to lead a pluralist approach
Delueze?
- Through study with a Korean philosophy professor, French philosophers, e.g. Deleuze and Foucault
Elena Beauchamp-Akatova
Justifying the choice of an appropriate model for handling complexity
In the Netherlands, most projects have an applied nature
- Engineering background, doctorate in sociology
- Don't want to be linked to a specific applied research
Diversity: different functional groups
- Sometimes also different geographic locations
- Objectives, e.g. airline has to maintain level of safety versus increasing investment that will impact profitability
- Complexity from hard elements (technology) and soft (human factors); multiple goals; and different levels of social systems
- Looking for a synthesis of views
Multicriteria decision analysis:
- Making the strategy change
Tools, but want to change mental models
- Multicriteria decision analysis isn't complete, doesn't include the human and soft factors
- Ethical and aesthetics
Main question of dealing with diversity, look for holistic approach
- Diversity allows long-term sustainability, precludes system failure
- Need to recognize human action is heterogeneous
Rational versus meta-rational
- Decision as a process, with feedback
- Change of the basis of a good decision, not only multi-attribute utility
- Potential to bring in interests of minorities
Ethics
- Michael Norton yesterday was speaking of eco-towns, but recycling in UK is disappearing due to garbage being shipped to China
- Ethics a duty-based
[Discussion]
Looking at companies that want to continue to control
Churchman design of inquiring system
Weick, high reliability systems
- Self-assessment including at least 50% of employees, so that people can see the stake
