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performance of research
information theory, which originated in communications engineering, has important applications in many fields stretching from biology to the social sciences... organization theory comes out of economics, sociology, engineering, physiology, and management science... then there are a multiplicity of concepts, possibly associated with such interdisciplines, which themselves transcend normal disciplinary boundaries and perform an integrative function how is a practitioner of any one discipline to know in a particular case whether another discipline is better equipped to handle the problem than is his? it would be rare indeed if a representative of one of the many disciplines in some way related to the problem in question did not feel that his particular approach to that problem would be very fruitful, if not the most fruitful this tendency is also institutionalized: this almost subconsciously motivated attempt - that of a sector to expand over the whole space of the system in its own particular terms and in accordance with its own particular outlooks and traditions, compounds the problem by further fragmenting the wholeness of the system... for sectors cannot become systems, they can only dominate them; and when they do they warp them on the same point: ...few of the problems that arise can adequately be handled within any one discipline... such systems are not fundamentally mechanical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, economic, political, or ethical... these are merely different ways of looking at such systems... complete understanding of such systems requires an integration of these perspectives... integration does not mean a synthesis of results obtained by independently conducted undisciplinary studies, but rather results obtained from studies in the process of which disciplinary perspectives have been synthesized - the integration must come during, not after, the performance of the research the djed report - continued the djed report neu ark net / ark lite / ios |