General Systems Theory: An Introduction

It makes sense to start the journey by briefly but critically exploring General Systems Theory (GST). GST is important to understand as its introduction to social work in the 1960s, and its amalgamation with the ecological approach in the 1980s, contributed to social work's limited progress to seek a unifying conceptual framework to guide practice (Hudson, 1999).

In the field of child protection, GST is further important as it informed the development of a UNICEF working paper in 2010 in adapting a systems approach to child protection across countries and cultures. In addition, as mentioned in the previous post, the Munro Review in England is using a systems approach to assess and plan the child protection sector in England.

Further, ecosystems theory is significant to social work practice in the field as it underpins a major approach to the Framework for Assessment of Children and their Families that was introduced in the UK during 2000. The assessment framework is now part and parcel of current child protection social work front-line practice with children in need of protection and support.

Hudson (1999) provides a good critical summary of GST in context of the development of chaos theory. GST integrated the perspectives of findings from social theories from the 19th Century, human ecology, information theory and cybernetics. A system is defined as "a complex of components in mutual interaction".

Hudson outlines that although the concept of GST was introduced in 1937, and first published in 1945, it was not until the 1950s that it was popularised in psychology and subsequently introduced to social work. In the 1960s GST "attained a level of popularity in social work" and the the 1970s saw "a substantial growth in the applications of GST in the profession as numerous social work texts began to include that perspective".

However, by the late 1970s a more critical approach was taken by the adoption of GST in social work, especially in the education of social work. Hudson outlines complaints that GST is far to abstract to inform practice, had no techniques for disentangling the plethora of feedback loops which typically link systems and problems in ideological assumptions. For this reason he explains "unintended and negative consequences have been too commonly the result of programmes of planned systematic change" (Siporin, 1980).

The critiques will be considered in more detail in the next post so for now, I suppose, this can suffice as an introduction to systems theory.