Deals with the contribution of a systems approach to a range of disciplines from philosophy and biology to social theory and management. This book is of interest to scholars in philosophy, biology, information systems, communications, social theory, management science and operational research as...

The number of citations is becoming an increasingly popular index for measuring the impact of a scholar's research or the quality of an academic department. One obvious question is: what are the factors that influence the number of citations that a paper receives? This study investigates the...

The economic crisis created major problems for a successful, hi-tech Chinese company – Tonsan. They already had in place a performance management system based around the balanced scorecard which worked successfully in times of growth and high demand. However, with the world downturn they...

Over the last forty years, new methods and methodologies have been developed to deal with wicked problems or "messes". They are structured and rigorous but non-mathematical. Prime examples are: soft systems methodology (SSM), cognitive mapping/SODA and the strategic choice approach (SCA)....

Operational researchers help managers decide what they ought to do and yet this is generally evaluated in terms of efficiency or effectiveness, not ethicality. However, the combination of the tremendous power of global corporations and the financial markets, and the problems the world faces in...

The systems approach, or systems thinking, has been intimately connected with the development of OR and management science initially through the work of founders such as Churchman and Ackoff and latterly through innovations such as soft systems. In this paper we have undertaken a review of the...

Many people invest regularly in sinking funds that track stock market indices. When stock markets themselves sink significantly, as in the current credit crunch, investors face a decision as to whether they should continue paying into a falling fund, or switch payment to a risk-free deposit...

The world faces major problems, not least climate change and the financial crisis, and business schools have been criticised for their failure to help address these issues and, in the case of the financial meltdown, for being causally implicated in it. In this paper we begin by describing the...

Grounded theory has emerged as a promising research approach for generating theory in emerging and relevant domains of IS research. In this paper we advance the use of grounded theory in one important and under-researched IS domain, business process management, which is characterized by an...