Rural Development, Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness Seminars - Create Change: Basic Issues, Theoretical Assumptions and Operation Designs for Soft Systems Intervention
Event Details
- Date:
- Wednesday, 26 February 2020
- Time:
- 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
- Room:
- S324
- UQ Location:
- Hartley Teakle Building (St Lucia)
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Dr Dominic Smith
- Phone:
- 52408
- Email:
- d.smith1@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Agriculture and Food Sciences
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Rural Development, Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness Seminars
Create Change: Basic Issues, Theoretical Assumptions and Operation Designs for Soft Systems Intervention
Yiyu Liu
(Center for Systems Science and Systems Management, Institute for Science, Technology and Society, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China)
Abstract: The issue of objectivity is one of the most urgent problems to be solved by “serious systems thinking and action”, which advocated by the founder of soft systems methodology(SSM), Peter Checkland. This issue has become increasingly prominent after the development of SSM for nearly 50 years. Although after analyzing the four conditions of serious systems thinking and action, Checkland emphasized the promotion of more objective system thinking and action with the 'recoverability' criterion, we still face the so-called 'crisis of objectivity'. The crisis of objectivity mainly roots from the internal conflict between the two ideological foundations of the SSM, that is, the ideal type method and the phenomenological sociological method are different in exploring the issue of objectivity, while SSM attempts to reconcile the differences with the concept model based on root definition, has led SSM followers and users to slip further towards excessive hermeneutics. The solution to the 'crisis of objectivity' of SSM lies in analyzing the complexity of human action and then moving more thoroughly towards Soft Systems Intervention(SSI), changing from interpretation-prediction isomorphism to action-prediction isomorphism.
I will argue that SSI is a new possible approach which is different from Checkland’s SSM approach and Midgley’s Systemic Intervention approach. SSI can include some theoretical assumptions, such as social constructivism, phenomenological sociology and manipulability theory of causality. SSI also can include some operation designs based on the assumptions above, such as intervention on specific conditions, adaptive collaboration learning, and inducing self-organization. Meanwhile, I will further explore the criterion of recoverability under threshold conditions, and attempt to construct a new threshold action approach to deal with the issue of objectivity.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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