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General Systems Theory

👥 Sociology By CampusDown Wiki Editorial Team Last updated
Quick answer: general systems theory holds that very different things, from organisms to people, families, organizations and societies, can be explained by common principles as systems, wholes made of interacting parts. Proposed by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, its core idea is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Contents
  1. 1. What is general systems theory?
  2. 2. Core concepts
  3. 3. How systems operate: input, throughput, output
  4. 4. Applications
  5. 5. Criticism
  6. 6. References

What is general systems theory?

General systems theory was proposed from the 1940s by Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. He argued that mechanistic analysis, which breaks organisms into parts, cannot explain life; one must study how parts are organized and interact. He went further, seeking general principles of systems common to physics, biology and the social sciences.

In 1954 he founded the Society for General Systems Research with economist Kenneth Boulding and others, and Boulding (1956) arranged systems in nine levels of complexity from static frameworks to social organizations. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics (1948), the science of feedback and control, developed alongside it.

Core concepts

  • Systems and subsystems: a system is a set of interrelated elements; smaller systems within it are subsystems, and the larger system containing it is a suprasystem. Spousal and sibling subsystems within a family, and the community around it, are examples.
  • Boundary: the line separating a system from its environment; how permeable it is determines how much information and resources flow across.
  • Open and closed systems: open systems exchange energy, information and matter with the environment; closed systems do not. Bertalanffy treated organisms and social systems as open.
  • Entropy and negentropy: closed systems run down toward disorder, while open systems can take in energy to maintain or increase order.
  • Homeostasis (steady state): the tendency to maintain balance despite environmental change; Bertalanffy called this dynamic balance in open systems a steady state.
  • Equifinality: the same end state can be reached from different starting points and paths. Reaching different outcomes from the same start is multifinality.
  • Feedback: outputs return as inputs. Negative feedback damps change and maintains balance; positive feedback amplifies change.

How systems operate: input, throughput, output

A system takes in resources and information from its environment (input), processes them (throughput), releases results (output) and takes in the environment's response (feedback). This frame is a basic model for analyzing organizations, policies and social programs.

Applications

  • Sociology: Talcott Parsons (1951) described society as a social system whose subsystems divide functions to maintain equilibrium.
  • Management: Katz and Kahn (1966) analyzed organizations as open systems in constant exchange with their environment.
  • Social work: it grounded the view of individuals as part of interacting family, group and community systems, later developed into ecological systems theory and the life model.
  • Family therapy: it underlies theories such as Bowen family systems theory, which treats the family as an emotional system.
  • Politics: David Easton described the political system as converting demands and support into policy outputs, and checks and balances can be read as a system maintaining equilibrium.
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Criticism

  • Its concepts are so abstract and broad that they yield few specific predictions or guides for intervention.
  • Its emphasis on equilibrium handles conflict, power and rapid change poorly and can justify the status quo.
  • Transferring biological concepts directly to society has been called an overstretched analogy.

References

  1. Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  2. von Bertalanffy, L. (1950). An outline of general system theory. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1(2), 134–165.
  3. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
  4. Boulding, K. E. (1956). General systems theory: The skeleton of science. Management Science, 2(3), 197–208.
  5. Katz, D., & Kahn, R. L. (1966). The Social Psychology of Organizations. New York: Wiley.
  6. von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller.

Reports and materials that use this theory (Korean)

There are no materials dedicated to this theory yet, but you can search related reports in the CampusDown library (Korean).

Find more reports · Search '일반체계이론' on CampusDown →
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This article was last updated on October 15, 2026. It is based on widely recognized original works and textbooks; when citing it in a paper, please check the original sources listed in the references.