The ‘totalitarian’ tendency of systems theory

I have written in a previous post that systems thinking makes me uneasy. It’s treating organizations as machines, and people as machine parts, which I criticize. This is why I’m searching for better ways of working. I find Henri Bortoft’s view very interesting. He writes that:

“Systems thinking is often presented as a revolution in thinking that overcomes the limitations of the Cartesian paradigm of analytical thinking that has been central to modern thought.”¹

“It seemed to me that, although the claim was made that systems thinking is holistic, and therefore non-reductionist, it is in fact much more reductionist in practice than many of the optimistic pronouncements about it would lead us to suppose.”²

“This opened the door to the possibility that systems thinking could be replaced by hermeneutic thinking in the context of human organisations. … What I wanted to do … was to find a way of talking about wholeness that would avoid the ‘totalitarian’ tendency of systems theory – as a result of which the whole is reified and separated from the parts which it then dominates.”³

Notes:
¹Henri Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously, p. 11.
²Ibid., p. 13.
³Ibid., p. 15.