Kybernetes: Volume 33 Issue 3/4

The science of the unknowable: Stafford Beer's cybernetic informatics

This paper explores the history of Stafford Beer's work in management cybernetics, from his early conception and simulation of an adaptive automatic factory and associated…

Sequences of failure in complex socio‐technical systems: Some implications of decision and control

This paper reviews the framework proposed by Stafford Beer in his seminal work, Decision and Control, first published in 1966, and argues that these ideas are centrally relevant…

The market economy unchecked: Another version of fundamentalism? A polemical tribute to Stafford Beer

A case is made that the market economy imposes constraints and makes demands that mirror the rigidity of fundamentalist religions and that this makes answering one fundamentalism…

Tigers at play: Stafford Beer's poetry

Considers Stafford Beer as a poet. Discusses Beer's interest in a wide variety of poetic forms. Gives some technical examples of how Beer employed Welsh and Sanskrit metre and…

City planning: “Dissolving” urban problems insights from an application of management cybernetics

Urban development in fast‐growing cities is one of the huge challenges of our time, and several projects of technical cooperation are dedicated to this issue. The aim of this…

The role of information and models in regulating complex commercial systems

The unsophisticated bartering systems of the past have been replaced with money and highly complex business systems. This has also required the need for management systems to…

A self‐organizing network for the systems community

The number of approaches, researchers and practitioners in Systems Thinking has been growing over the last decades and particularly in recent years. This wide and deep evolution…

Observing experiences with the VSM

This paper offers a senior manager's reflections on experiences with the viable system model (VSM) in different situations of its application. These reflections are based on…

Viability versus tribalism

The viability of an organisation can be compromised by the tribal behaviour of its members. If this is not understood, attempts to reform it will be met with resistance, since the…

Observations on the development of cybernetic ideas in Colombia: A tribute to Stafford Beer

This paper is an account of management and organisational interventions in multiple institutions and enterprises in Colombia during the past 10 years, mainly influenced by…

Heinz and Stafford: A tribute to Heinz von Foerster and Stafford Beer

In June 1996, Stafford Beer and Heinz von Foerster were invited to Colombia to contribute to a number of events, among others to a symposium about second‐order auditing organized…

The footprint of complexity: the embodiment of social systems

This paper deals with organisational complexity, seen from the perspective of its unfolding from global to local concerns. Historically, this unfolding has produced rigid social…

A Latino American Requiem for Stafford Beer

This tribute to Stafford Beer is written from the particular situation of a Latin American country. Within this context, we believe that it could be convenient to dissolve the…

Fighting for science

What deliverables did Stafford Beer envision when he developed his “science of effective organisation”? This paper answers this question as: the organisations that use the…

Implications for Beer's ontological system/metasystem dichotomy

Stafford Beer developed managerial cybernetics, but there were many facets of his work. Most of his work concerned epistemology, and little concerned ontology. Not all of the…

Erratum

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb005900. When citing the article, please…

Erratum

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb005989. When citing the article, please…

Erratum

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03684929410068299. When citing the…

Erratum

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03684929610149620. When citing the…

Ten pints of Beer: The rationale of Stafford Beer's cybernetic books (1959‐94)

Details a discussion with Stafford Beer about the rationale of his cybernetic books published in the twentieth century (1959‐94). Includes a dialogue concerning his contributed…

Erratum

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03684920110391779. When citing the…

Erratum

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03684920210417283. When citing the…

Special double issue: tribute to Stafford Beer

Foreword