This book deals with the contribution of a systems approach to a range of disciplines from philosophy and biology to social theory and management. It weaves together material from some of the pre-eminent thinkers of the day. In doing so it creates a coherent path from fundamental work on philosophical issues of ontology and epistemology through specific domains of knowledge about the nature of information and meaning, human communication, and social intervention.

John Mingers is Professor of Operational Research and Information Systems at Canterbury Business School, University of Kent. He is Deputy Director of the business school and Director of Research. He is a past Chair of the UK Systems Society and has been a member of the Council of the OR Society. John Mingers studied Management Sciences for his first degree at Warwick and later completed a Masters in Systems in Management at Lancaster University and a PhD at Warwick. He also worked in industry as a systems analyst and then as an OR analyst.

His research interests include the use of systems methodologies in problem situations - particularly the mixing of different methodologies within an intervention (multimethodology); the application of multimethodology to research methods within information systems; the development of the critical systems approach; autopoiesis (self-producing systems) and its applications; and the nature of knowledge, information and meaning as relevant to information systems. He has published over 80 papers in these areas in journals such as the Information Systems Research, The Sociological Review, Information Systems Journal, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Systems Practice, Management Learning and Organization. He has published the first comprehensive study of autopoiesis - Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis (Plenum, 1995), and has also edited Multimethodology: the Theory and Practice of Combining Management Science Methodologies (Wiley, 1997, with Tony Gill), Information Systems: an Emerging Discipline? (McGraw Hill, 1997, with Prof. Frank Stowell), and Rational Analysis for a Problematic World Revisited (Wiley, 2001, with Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead). He is currently editing, with Leslie Willcocks, a book titled Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems (Wiley, 2004)