Systemic Business Community

SABI 2007, Session 3, August 10, 2007

In the third session of the SIG on Systems Applications in Business and Industry at Tokyo 2007, three papers are scheduled:

• Teresa A. Daniel “Worlds Apart: a Focus on the “Great Divide” Within the HRM Scholar- Practitioner Community”, on the JournalsISSS Proceedings as Abstract and PDF versions, and on the CDROM as paper #104;
• Jae Eon Yu, “Exploring Ethical Management From Systemic Perspectives”, on the JournalsISSS Proceedings as Abstract and PDF versions; and on the CDROM as paper #60; and
• Elena Beauchamp-Akatova, “Counter-Intuitive Managerial Interventions in Complex Systems”, on the JournalsISSS Proceedings as Abstract and PDF versions, and on the CDROM as paper #22.

Surfing over to JournalsISSS Proceedings, you can find the abstracts and papers. Attendees to the face-to-face SABI sessions are requested to take a look at the abstracts, if not the papers in their entireties. The SABI conversations are usually understandable from the layman’s level, but if you’re interested in a richer discussion, pre-reading helps us get to a deeper level, more rapidly.

In my role a SIG chair, I’ve clustered this diverse group of papers together, possibly described in a theme of “systemic knowing and business governance”.

• Teri Daniel centers on the “great divide” within the HRM community, but really speaks to a more general issue of the lack of knowledge transfer between communities of scholars and communities of practitioners. She has some initial suggestions on “bridging the gap”, that aim to bring the communities together. In our discussion session, perhaps we’ll discuss some additional ideas on “productive friction” and alternative designs for inquiring systems. (Jae Eon Yu should help with this discussion, based on his writings related to Churchman’s work).
• Jae Eon Yu examines initiative associated with “ethical management” in a Korean industrial firm. Blending a foundation in Churchman’s systems approach with Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology, he describes a series of steps / activities / events and evaluates the resulting outcome. I expect that during the conversation, Jae Eon Yu will provide the audience with some background into Churchman’s “metasystems approach” and Delezian Ethics (i.e. good and bad). Linking this paper to Teri Daniel’s may raise questions about “good and bad” in terms of subjectivity and community boundaries.
• Elena Beauchamp-Akatova explores managerial decision-making, tracing styles historically since the 1960s. She proposes moving from the idea of (bounded) mono-rational to the meta-rational via Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM). This could including “bridging the gap(s)” that Teri Daniel wrote about. In addition, the ethics for minorities described by Jae Eon Yu may emerge in the discussion.

I’ve attempted to synthesize a theme across the three papers, but it’s not the only way of seeing them. You may want to suggest an alternative spin, or more on this trajectory, please do so as comments, below.

daviding August 1st, 2007

Posted In: ISSS

Tags: elena-beauchamp, Elena-Beauchamp-Akatova, ISSS, jae-eon-yu, sabi, teresa-daniel, teri-daniel, tokyo-2007