The Sciences of the Artificial [antikvár]

REFACEThe invitation to deliver the Karl Taylor Compton lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the spring of 1968 provided me with a welcome opportunity to make explicit and to develop at some length a thesis that has been central to much of my research, at first in organization theory, later in management science, and most recently in psychology.The thesis is that certain phenomena are "artificial" in a very specific sense: They are as they are only because of a system's being molded, by goals or purposes, to the environment in which it lives. If natural phenomena have an air of "necessity" about them in their subservience to natural law, artificial phenomena have an air of "contingency" in their malleability by environment.