Last semester, during Spring of 2009, I took an anthropology class called “Behavioral Systems” by Prof. William Reckmeyer. The main topic of the class is about systems theory and how it is related to human behavior. I learned a lot in the class and I still am aware of what I have learned. A system is a whole, which is composed of parts that are called subsystems (which can be a system of their own). Let’s use the United States’ country system for example. The United States is the whole system, and its subsystems are region (north America and south America), states (California, Arizona, etc) which has counties, which has cities, which has streets, and so forth. All those subsystems can be the whole system and have parts that can be subsystems as well. Even the smaller things can be a whole system as well, such as the nervous system. Knowing this makes you think of things at a bigger scale; “looking at the bigger picture”. So with the class I learned how to look at the bigger picture with a lot of my actions.
Systems theory has many parts in it. With the class, we talked about many concepts and it will take a lot to talk about all of them. So I also wrote about another major concept of the systems theory, which is the idea of “interconnectedness”, which I will talk about in my second blog as it requires more explanation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is one of the things I love about learning, when concepts transcend disciplines. Here we are, reading a book on organizational communication, in which systems theory is being explained through biology, and you are discussing it in terms of anthropology. Amazing. It seems to me that systems theory isn't merely a theory, but instead a paradigm through which we can view the world as a series of systems upon systems.
ReplyDeleteI too found that I could compare it to what I learned in a previous class although the book did I nice job of summing it up for me. I am a biology minor and many of my biology classes revolve around the same concept that systems theory applies. I won't use the human body as an example (as the book already did) but even if we look at the ecosystem of our planet we can see the interconnectedness of the environment and the species that inhabit it. If something were to poison the earth, this would effect the plants, which would effect our atmosphere and the species that live off of them... you get the idea. It's a basic way of saying that we all depend upon each micro system for survival.
ReplyDelete