Conceptual Framework for Exploring New Age Globalization

A systems approach to understanding society at large and social orgaizations in particular was first proposed by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1960s.1 Bertalanffy suggested that complex social and organizational structures resemble natural and organic systems in some important ways—the so-called organismic analogy. Informed by this innovative idea, social scientists and economists like Talcott Parsons and Kenneth Boulding began to develop elaborate theories of social systems, with particular reference to the Western capitalist societies like the United States in the post–World War II and postcolonial climates of the 1950s and 1960s.2 The systems approach to explain interdependent subsystem dynamics of complex organizations and total societies became the rhetoric of the age and a popular technocratic tool in the hands of international development agencies in Europe and America in the emerging development decades: “We can change the world through systemic planning and interventions:” It did not quite work out that way. Political leaders, economic managers, and development planners across the world by now seem to at least partially if not fully understand the problem of unintended consequences of “planned” system interventions from inside or outside in a highly interdependent and interconnected world.