Preface -- Contents -- Part 1 The Theories and Why -- 1 The Emergence of Holistic Thinking -- The scholastic paradigm -- The Renaissance paradigm -- The mechanistic world and determinism -- The hegemony of determinism -- The age of relativity and quantum mechanics -- The systems age -- Review questions and problems -- 2 Basic Ideas of General Systems Theory -- GST and concepts defining systems properties -- Cybernetics and concepts defining systems processes -- General scientific and systemic concepts -- Widely-known laws, principles, theorems and hypotheses -- Some generic facts of systems behaviour -- Review questions and problems -- 3 A Selection of Systems Theories -- Boulding and the Hierarchy of Systems Complexity -- Miller and the General Living Systems Theory -- Beer and the Viable System Model -- Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis -- Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere -- Taylor and the Geopolitic Systems Model -- Klir and the General Systems Problem Solver -- Laszlo and the Natural Systems -- Cook and the Quantal System -- Checkland and the Systems Typology -- Jordan and the Systems Taxonomy -- Salk and the categories of nature -- Powers and the Control Theory -- Namilov and the organismic view of science -- Review questions and problems -- 4 Communication and Information Theory -- Basic concepts of communication theory -- Interrelations between time, place and channel -- Shannon's classical theory -- Basic concepts of information theory -- Information, exformation and entropy -- How to measure information -- Entropy and redundancy -- Channels, noise and coding -- Review questions and problems -- 5 Some Theories of Brain and Mind -- The need for consciousness -- A hierarchy of memory -- Brain models -- A model perspective -- Review questions and problems -- Part 2 The Applications and How -- 6 Artificial Intelligence and Life.

The Turing test -- Parallel processing and neural networks -- Expert systems -- Some other applications -- Artificial life -- Computer viruses -- Review questions and problems -- 7 Organizational Theory and Management Cybernetics -- The origin of modern trading corporations -- The development of organizational theory -- The non-avoidable hierarchy -- Organizational design -- Multiple perspectives of management cybernetics -- A systems approach in ten points -- Review questions and problems -- 8 Decision-Making and Decision Aids -- Some concepts and distinctions of the area -- Basic decision aids -- Managerial problems and needs -- Four generations of computer support -- C3I systems -- Some psychological aspects of decision-making -- The future of managerial decision support -- Review questions and problems -- 9 Informatics -- Electronic networks -- Fibre optics, communication and navigation satellites, cellular radio -- Internet -- Virtual reality -- Cyberspace and cyberpunk -- Review questions and problems -- 10 Some of the Systems Methodologies -- Large-scale, soft and intertwined problems -- Systems design -- Breakthrough thinking -- Systems analysis -- Systems engineering -- GLS simulation -- Method versus problem -- Review questions and problems -- 11 The Future of Systems Theory -- Science of today -- The world we live in -- The need for change -- Systems thinking as alternate and criticized paradigm -- Systems thinking and the academic environment -- How to write the instruction manual -- Review questions and problems -- References -- Name Index -- Subject Index.