Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach

community. The major new theoretical ideas of the book under review are in the last part, called Creative Holism. According to the author, it is concerned with how to maximize the benefit of the different holistic approaches by using them creatively in combination. This book is a culmination of the evolution of the author’s ideas on Critical Systems Practice (CSP), developing since 1997. It is the first comprehensive attempt to lay out the full picture of its theoretical foundations and how it can be applied. Jackson provides a very good justification for the treatment of methods not as parts of the existing methodologies but rather as parts of four generic systems methodologies: functionalist, interpretive, emancipatory and postmodern. He presents a new formulation on the process of Critical Systems Practice that is an extension of earlier ideas on Total Systems Intervention (TSI), apparently developed in response to certain criticisms of TSI (see Flood and Jackson’s book 2 for the first version of TSI 3 ). The current state of pluralism in Systems Thinking has several competing interpretations on issues such as the philosophical foundations for pluralism, treatment of paradigm incommensurability and whether pluralism is a paradigm on its own. Jackson’s book clearly states his viewpoint on the above issues with respect to Critical Systems Practice but is not very detailed on direct evaluations along those lines of other suggested pluralist approaches. It is too early to compare Critical Systems Practice with Multimethodology, 7 Midgley’s ideas on pluralism in the process of systemic intervention 8 or PANDA 9 as methodologies advocating using parts of different methodologies from different paradigms in the same problem situation. Only practice may show the advantages of particular methodologies from the above list and hence this question is beyond the purpose of this review. However, the comprehensive presentation on CSP by Jackson in his latest book is a significant theoretical contribution even if it is viewed only as a factor opening the possibilities for such comparative studies by researchers and practitioners. The layout of the content of the book is logical, streamlined and uniform. That makes the book understandable not only by practitioners but also by novices to the systems field such as students entering various masters or doctoral programs in Management and Systems Thinking. Judging from the fact that the number of significant systems books in the world, published since 1997 is less than five and none of them were introductory, such readers seem to be in a desperate need for a contemporary overview text. There is