Founded in 1954, the International Society for the Systems Sciences (Formerly the International Society for General Systems Research) has grown into one of the largest and most comprehensive professional societies of the systems movement. It's primary purpose is the formulation, testing, and application of a general theory of systems.
The founders of the ISSS, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, Margaret Mead, James Miller, and Anatol Rapoport strongly felt that this aspect of reality was lost in the fragmentation of phenomena typical of the conventional disciplines.
With members from 40 countries and virtually every recognized discipline, the ISSS provides an environment that enhances comparisons between the established specialties, and hastens recognition of and progress in new, transdisciplinary fields.
ISSS is one of the few societies world-wide that studies processes that go across disciplinary lines in its search for systems methods and systems analogies. Each analogy is based on formal, verifiable similarities simultaneously valid for the many unique systems despite their widely differing scales of magnitude and complexity.
The theoretical-empirical studies such as these are commonly excluded from specialty fields by the nature of their defining boundaries, their methodologies, and their focus on only certain dimensions of reality to the exclusion of others. The ISSS was created to provide a forum and base, that is inherently trans-disciplinary, for such increasingly timely and important studies.
The objectives stated in the By-Laws of the Society are as operational today as they were forty years ago:
Due emphasis has also been given to systems applications and management: the ISSS membership has responded to the increasingly pressing need to apply some of the more established elements of the systemic paradigm to the widespread problems facing human society and the crippling increase in scientific and technological complexity.
The ISSS has chapters in many major cities and newly formed divisions in many nations of Eastern and Western Europe, the Far East, Australia, and both North and South America.
Past leaders of the Society include many prominent scientists recognized for their achievements in their specialty fields, but who, like our general membership, possessed intellectual interests broader and deeper than the subject matter usually circumscribed by a particular discipline or profession.
We invite you to join this Society characterized by its fundamental questioning of assumptions and its provision of an intriguing environment of cross-fertilization in which to forge the answers.
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