THEORY AND PRACTICE IN SYSTEMS RESEARCH.

The symbiotic relationship between 'science' and 'technology' suggests a model for the relationship between general systems theories and the application of systems ideas in real-world problem solving. G. Vickers has drawn attention to the fact that the professions which manage real-world human activity systems - management, planning, policy-making - lack the kind of theoretical support from the social sciences which the engineering professions derive from the natural sciences. In this context, one obvious source of theoretical support is General System Theory (GST). Vickers observes that the GST movement is currently unable to provide such support because it is handicapped by the inevitable difficulties ″attendant on interdisciplinary work which lacks a professional focus″ . This analysis is insightful because it relates the current problems of GST to the absence of a strong link between systems theory and systems practice. Implicit in Vickers' analysis is an analogy between (systems-based) management and the engineering professions. The purpose of the present paper is to explore some consequences of this analogy and to demonstrate how it contributes to understanding the logical structure of one well-known 'soft' systems methodology.