Social Systems Design: Normative Theory and the MAPS Design Technology (New York: North-Holland, 1977)

by Ralph H. Kilmann

 

From the Book Jacket

Here is a bold new book that faces up to the challenge in social science: designing social systems to be more efficient, effective, and responsive to societal needs. In the present age of ever more rapid change, creating or changing such systems as businesses, schools, government agencies, communities, and even committees, is essential. Social Systems Design supplies the tools, with a technology called MAPS—Multivariate Analysis, Participation, and Structure.

MAPS is the first comprehensive integration of organization design theories into a practical design technology. Although it is heavily normative, giving guidelines, criteria, and principles to suggest how social systems should be designed, it grounds itself in the growing substantive knowledge of psychology, social psychology, sociology, computer science, and the philosophy of science. As any technology of social change must do, MAPS uses both the quantitative and behavioral traditions in social and management science. MAPS combines the sort of statistical analysis that can only be done by computers with the clinical skills, judgment, and deliberation over values practiced, for example, by organizational development (OD) specialists.

To date, no other technology purports to do what the MAPS Design Technology does. Reading the book provides an ideal way to confront the critical substantive, methodological, and value issues which inevitably arise in social system design. This pioneering technology is laying the foundation, in both its shortcomings and successes, for future efforts. Anyone interested in social systems design either theoretically or practically will have to be familiar with it.

Book CoverTo Order SOCIAL SYSTEMS DESIGN

 

Table of Contents

    Preface

    Foreword by Chris Argyris

    INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW


    Part I: FOUNDATIONS

  1. Conceptual Models of Organization Design: Theory and Research
  2. Purposefulness, Values, and Structural Interventions


    Part II: THE MAPS DESIGN TECHNOLOGY
  3. Entry and Diagnosis
  4. Input, Analysis, and Output
  5. Implementation
  6. Evaluation


    Part III: APPLICATIONS, ETHICS, AND THE FUTURE
  7. Designing Problem Solving Systems
  8. Current Applications and Research with MAPS
  9. The Ethics, Validity, and Future of MAPS
Appendices

References

Indexes

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