Cybernetics and Management.

managing complex systems

First edition, first impression of the rare founding text of management cybernetics. Review copy with the publisher's slip laid in.

After leaving the British army, Stafford Beer (1926-2002) worked in the steel and publishing industries before becoming a management consultant in 1970. He was, from the 1950s on, 'a remorseless critic of the ways in which computers were being deployed in industry, essentially to replace existing paper systems. He felt that this did nothing to change existing organizational forms and that something more imaginative was required... rendering organizations adaptable, according to Beer, required reorganizing them to make possible specific patterns of information flow and transformation'. He argued that 'there exists in the world a class of "exceedingly complex systems," including the brain, the firm, and the economy, which are in principle unknowable. However much data we gather on them, we can never know them completely; they can always surprise us. Such systems can never be dominated by knowledge, and instead we have to learn somehow to cope with them. Cybernetics was thus a science of dealing with the unknown - an extremely odd sort of science' (Pickering, "The Science of the Unknowable", The American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2004).

First edition, first impression; 8vo; publisher's review slip loosely inserted, spotting to the edges of the text block and very occasionally to contents; original green cloth, titles to spine in silver on black ground, pale spots to cloth, lightly rubbed at the extremities, a very good copy in the rubbed jacket with toned spine panel and some wear, creasing, and small chips at the edges; 214pp.