APPLY SYSTEMS CONCEPTS

Apply Systems Concepts

Apply Systems Concepts

Systems Theory

Systems theory has had a significant effect on management science and understanding schools. First, let's look at “what is a system?” A system is a collection of part unified to accomplish an overall goal. If one part of the system is removed, the nature of the system is changed as well. For example, a pile of sand is not a system. If one removes a sand particle, you've still got a pile of sand. However, a functioning car is a system. Remove the carburetor and you've no longer got a working car. A system can be looked at as having inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes. Systems share feedback among each of these four aspects of the systems. (Cairns-Smith, 1982)

Let's look at a large school. Inputs would include resources such as raw materials, money, technologies and people. These inputs go through a process where they're planned, organized, motivated and controlled, ultimately to meet the school's goals. Outputs would be products or services to a market. Outcomes would be, e.g., enhanced quality of life or productivity for customers/clients, productivity. Feedback would be information from human resources carrying out the process, customers/clients using the products, etc. Feedback also comes from the larger environment of the school, e.g., influences from government, society, economics, and technologies. This overall system framework applies to any system, including subsystems (departments, programs, etc.) in the overall school.

Systems theory may seem quite basic. Yet, decades of management training and practices in the workplace have not followed this theory. Only recently, with tremendous changes facing schools and how they operate, have educators and school administrators come to face this new way of looking at things. This interpretation has brought about a significant change (or paradigm shift) in the way management studies and approaches schools.

The effect of systems theory in management is that writers, educators, consultants, etc. are helping school administrators to look at the school from a broader perspective. Systems theory has brought a new perspective for school administrators to interpret patterns and events in the workplace.

Defining systems

Systems Theory is based upon the analytic division of the natural world into environment and systems. This division constitutes the major foundational, axiomatic philosophical assumption of Systems Theory. On the one hand there is an infinitely complex 'environment', and on the other hand there are self-replicating systems. Systems are engaged in processing information. Systems also model the environment, and can respond adaptively to environmental changes.

A system might therefore include entities such as a single cell, a multicellular organism such as a human, or social schools of varying sizes from a corporation, to the UK National Health Service, to a whole nation. For any given analysis, the 'environment' is everything that is external to such a system under consideration. Systems are actually defined in terms of processes, but sometimes processes coincide closely with physical structures so that a cell's environment might (approximately) consist of everything outside the cell, including other systems such as other cells, the whole ...