Friday, 18 March 2011: 17:00
Vicky Pekka-Economou, Ph.D.
,
Business, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
Georgios Aggelis
,
Department of Business Administration, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
Kyriaki Papoulia, MA
,
Department of Business Administration, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
Recently European businesses undergo an economic recession and face major economic problems and greater challenges. Beer’s work on viability and variety engineering has shown that managers must consider complexity as the diachronic root of these problems. The necessity of a complexity-oriented theoretical framework is indisputable. In this paper the framework based on Cybernetic principles is developed. Following Pask’s Conversation Theory an attempt is made to shift from the conventional language of business administration to the cybernetic language which can represent the most diverse types of system. This theoretical and conceptual shift will be grounded on some fundamental concepts and methods of Cybernetics and will thus present the opportunity to test hypotheses relevant to management and as Bateson said “to test hypotheses against knowledge derived by deduction from the fundamentals of science or philosophy”.
The four classes of purposeful systems are selected in order to represent the functions of strategic management such as strategy formulation, decision making, control and goal-directedness. First and foremost, this representation provides us with the opportunity to apply cybernetic methods and techniques [VSM, design ultrastable systems] so as to ensure viability and development of a business as its principal purpose. Furthermore, it leads us to the quest of different types of strategies which will be steered by control mechanisms and that will make allowances for the nature of the businesses. Finally, in this paper the applicability of the strategy of the “Learning Organization” is put to the test, a process advisable in the long run, especially concerning businesses with significant amounts of knowledge.
For the purposes of this test systemic methodologies have also been used, such us Viable System Model, Design & Control Systemic Methodology, Urlich’s Boundary Judgement Instrument and Systemic Archetypes Modeling via an innovative software tool, which was developed specifically for the need of the implementation of the systemic and cybernetic approach.
