Systems Analysis

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 7,900 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Checkland, Peter, and John Poulter. “Preamble.” In Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and Its Use for Practitioner, Teachers, and Students, xvii–xxiii. Chichester: Wiley, 2006. PDF.

   1,900 words
2. Checkland, Peter, and John Poulter. “A Skeleton Account of SSM.” In Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and Its Use for Practitioner, Teachers, and Students, 3–22. Chichester: Wiley, 2006. PDF.

   6,000 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 7,700 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–69. PDF.

   7,700 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 12,800 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Checkland, Peter, and John Poulter. “A Fleshed-out Account of SSM.” In Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and Its Use for Practitioner, Teachers, and Students, 23–63. Chichester: Wiley, 2006. PDF.

   12,800 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 6,700 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Ulrich, Werner. “A Brief Introduction to Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH).” ECOSENSUS Project Website, 2005. PDF.

   6,700 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 15,000 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, `Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420. PDF.

   15,000 words
   Reading tips

   This is the longest and hardest reading of the semester, but it is more manageable than it looks. The last six pages (414–420) are endnotes, which you can skip. The long middle section is a readable history of a museum. Susan Leigh Star was a sociologist who spent much of her career in information schools, and James Griesemer is a philosopher of biology. This paper introduced the idea of the boundary object, and it has become one of the most cited papers in information science.

   The first few pages (387–393) are the hardest because the authors are arguing with Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and borrowing their vocabulary. For Latour and Callon, translation (or interessement) is the work of recasting other people’s interests so that they serve yours. An obligatory passage point is the place that everyone’s work has to pass through. A social world is roughly a community with its own work, its own commitments and its own audience. Star and Griesemer’s objection is drawn in the two figures on p. 390: Latour and Callon tell the story from one translator’s point of view, when in fact many social worlds are translating at once. You don’t need to know Latour’s work to follow this. Two things in these pages matter for everything that follows: the claim on p. 388 that “consensus is not necessary for cooperation,” and the definition of a boundary object on p. 393, as “plastic enough to adapt to local needs … yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.”

   Pages 393–404 tell the history of the museum as a series of “visions”: the director’s, the patron’s, the amateur collectors’, the trappers’ and the university’s. Read this part quickly. What matters is how differently each group sees the same specimens, the same maps and the same state of California.

   Read the analysis (404–414) slowly. Pay attention to the four types of boundary object on pp. 410–411, and to the sentence on p. 413 listing the other ways conflicting concerns get settled: “imperialist imposition of representations, coercion, silencing and fragmentation.”

   While you read, keep the merger in mind. SDIS is also a place where several social worlds have to cooperate without agreeing. What objects does it have that mean something different in each division? Are they working as boundary objects, or is one world’s meaning being imposed on the other? Also notice that the authors admit their account is told mostly from the director’s and the patron’s point of view (pp. 390, 396). Ask what that costs them.

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 10,800 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Checkland, Peter, and John Poulter. “SSM in Action in the Field of Information Systems.” In Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and Its Use for Practitioner, Teachers, and Students, 111–45. Chichester: Wiley, 2006. PDF.

   10,800 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 12,600 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Checkland, Peter, and John Poulter. “SSM in Action in Management Situations.” In Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and Its Use for Practitioner, Teachers, and Students, 67–109. Chichester: Wiley, 2006. PDF.

   12,600 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 6,500 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Jackson, Michael C. “Critique of Soft Systems Methodology.” In Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity: Responsible Leadership for a Complex World, 431–42. Hoboken, NJ, USA Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2019. PDF.

   6,500 words

Total amount of required reading for this meeting: 1,300 words

📖 To read before this meeting:

1. Checkland, Peter, and John Poulter. “SSM as a Whole - Some Reminders.” In Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology and Its Use for Practitioner, Teachers, and Students, 167–70. Chichester: Wiley, 2006. PDF.

   1,300 words