SYSTEMS THEORY , KNOWLEDGE , AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

It is not too much of an overstatement, I think, to suggest that systems theory has not lived up to the great promise it has long been supposed to hold for the social sciences. Considering the magnitude of the claims, of course, disappointment was probably inevitable. Systems theory has been hailed by some as a way of unifying the methodology of all sciences. Others have intimated that this approach would finally endow the social sciences with that natural-science-like rigor and precision those disciplines allegedly lack. And others-more modestly-have looked to systems theory as a way of combatting the fragmentation and specialization of the sciences. But systems theory has failed-at least so far-in its various attempts to bring all the disparate parts of inquiry under the sway of its organizing force. In fact, it is fairer to say that systems theory has itself succumbed to the diversity and complexity of modern scientific inquiry. Defining what we mean by systems theory or the systems approach is virtually impossible outside the context of a particular discipline, and we might almost say that there are as many versions of systems theory as there are would-be systems theorists. In trying to be all-encompassing, systems theory has become unsystematic; and in trying to become systematic, it has become narrowly specialized. On the one hand, the attempt to describe at a broad level the systemtheoretic approach to this or that inevitably ends up sounding like a Sears Roebuck catalog of vaguely connected concepts, models, and definitions. On the other hand, mathematical system theory1-the most rigorous and