BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

CONVERGENCE 1)2)4)

The move toward a predefined result or goal.

Seeking convergence is very important in the management of concrete systems and specially in planning activities with a great number of intermediate stages, as for instance investment programs, construction of industrial complexes, development programs of any kind, research programs, etc… As shown by St. BEER, the successive interactions between the elements and/or subsystems can generally be modelized by a flow graph representing the "ramified system" (1966, Ch.9).

Convergence can be spontaneous, or not, as complex systems easily show chaotic behavior. A graph network flowing through the time dimension can be made less stochastic, but then only under the condition of the presence of an efficient control tending to diminish indeterminacy through the introduction of feedbacked information.

Failures to do so may become quite costly. BEER gives the following example: "It could thus happen, by a concatenation of… circumstances, that a two weeks delay encountered within the construction program itself might result (let us say) in a six-month postponement of the final completion. This outcome would be thanks to the ramification of the system concerned: it begins to act as an amplifier of delays" (p.192).

E. LASZLO equates convergence with the formation of catalytic hypercycles: "The outcome of convergence is a higher-level system that selectively disregards many details of the dynamics of its subsystems and imposes an internal constraint that forces the subsystems into a collective mode of functioning" (1987, p.34).

K. KRIPPENDORFF indicates the following social meaning for convergence: "The convergence model of communication postulates that as people communicate with each other they become more similar in knowledge and in attitudes and thus converge to form a homogeneous distribution" (1986, p.18). It should possibly be better to merely speak of a "more homogeneous distribution". Moreover, convergence can be obtained only through a well organized conversation.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]


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