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At the Silver Anniversary meeting of the General Systems Research Society in 1979 several speakers showed acute disappointment at the lack of progress within recent years in the matter of practical application of Systems Theory and Cybernetics. Research was gradually floundering to a halt through lack of new ideas. Since novelty is the quintessence of systems thinking this was indeed serious criticism. In this paper two (at least) new concepts are presented which, by their novelty, might well pull Systems Theory out of the morass. These are the concepts of (1) Unchange, applied to live systems and bureaucracies, and (2) Net reciprocal dependence between members of groups, systems etc. The latter concept leads to alternative percepts of human behaviour within and outside bureaucratic settings. The psychological concept of the ego fits neatly within the model proposed.

Using the backdrop of an (apparently) extended visit to the West Indies, analogies with key concerns of internal audit are drawn. An unusual and refreshing way of exploring the main themes ‐ a discussion between Bill and Jack on tour in the islands ‐ forms the debate. Explores the concepts of control, necessary procedures, fraud and corruption, supporting systems, creativity and chaos, and building a corporate control facility.

Using the backdrop of an (apparently) extended visit to the West Indies, analogies with key concerns of internal audit are drawn. An unusual and refreshing way of exploring the main themes ‐ a discussion between Bill and Jack on tour in the islands ‐ forms the debate. Explores the concepts of control, necessary procedures, fraud and corruption, supporting systems, creativity and chaos, and building a corporate control facility.

The purpose of this paper is to present the radial basis function (RBF) networks‐based adaptive robust control for an omni‐directional wheeled mobile manipulator in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances.

First, a dynamic model is obtained based on the practical omni‐directional wheeled mobile manipulator system. Second, the RBF neural network is used to identify the unstructured system dynamics directly due to its ability to approximate a nonlinear continuous function to arbitrary accuracy. Using the learning ability of neural networks, RBFNARC can co‐ordinately control the omni‐directional mobile platform and the mounted manipulator with different dynamics efficiently. The implementation of the control algorithm is dependent on the sliding mode control.

Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, the stability of the whole control system, the boundedness of the neural networks weight estimation errors, and the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the tracking error are all strictly guaranteed.

In this paper, an adaptive robust control scheme using neural networks combined with sliding mode control is proposed for crawler‐type mobile manipulators in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. RBF neural networks approximate the system dynamics directly and overcome the structured uncertainty by learning. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, the stability of the whole control system, the boundedness of the neural networks weight estimation errors, and the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the tracking error are all strictly guaranteed.

Argues that in increasingly turbulent and complex environments, the tools of “systems thinking” may provide a valuable resource in the drive to attain integration between strategic and operational objectives. Particular examples in the domain of production control and supply‐chain management are presented as illustrations of the dynamicist’s paradigm. Hence it is suggested that familiar concepts such as JIT/Kanban and supply chains are actually special cases of generic feedback control principles, while pure MRP is a classic example of feedforward. In practice, the complexities of real world operations require combinations of these two approaches and the paper therefore assesses the implications of these theoretical concepts, for the design of practical operations systems.

This paper seeks to lay the computational and mathematical foundations for a “postmodern cybernetics” based on ancient Kabbalah. This new Kabbalistic cybernetics is introduced to act as an unifying science addressing simultaneously, in a common language and framework the triple nature of human, psychological, social, economic, financial, political, cultural systems and their present multi‐faceted crises and conflicts: cognitive objective level of attaining knowledge; subjective emotional level and physical action and behavioral level.

Feedback, hierarchical control and other system and control theoretic features in the Tree of Life (TL) of Kabbalah were identified. These were used to develop a general system theoretic framework of a new type to address human and societal system dynamics, evolution, interaction and feedback control by simultaneously taking into account their triple nature.

The postmodern cybernetics of the TL introduced here as a general system framework, exhibits feedback control with internal model principle, hierarchical control, system multi‐valued logic, category theory pullback and pushout mechanisms, advanced knowledge engineering to aggregate, learn, evolve and solve problems and crises in an integrated way.

“Kabbalistic postmodern cybernetics” proposed here for human and societal systems is the unified scientific framework to solve problems that led to or are just related to economic, financial, political, cultural, societal and human crises and conflicts by addressing their triple intertwined human nature.

Computational foundations for a postmodern cybernetics based on Kabbalah are introduced, where the cognitive, emotional and behavioral and physical action facets of human systems are dealt with in a unified integrated framework to address global problems and crises.

The conceptual foundations of performance measurement and management (PMM) are predominantly rooted in control systems research. However, the appropriateness of this paradigm for volatile and uncertain environments has been questioned. This paper explores whether grounding PMM in social systems theory and viewing uncertainty from an organisational behaviour perspective provides new insights into the PMM theory–practice gap.

A framework, rooted in social systems theory and practice theory, is created that describes how organisational behaviour shapes the social processes associated with organisational change. Semi-structured interviews of 35 people from 16 organisations coupled with thematic analysis are employed to identify the organisational behavioural characteristics that influence how PMM is executed in practice. PMM is then reconceptualised from the perspective of this social systems-based framework.

This investigation proposes (1) performance management is concerned with elements of PMM-related practices open to flexible interpretation by human agents that change the effectiveness of organisational practices, whereas performance measurement is concerned with elements of PMM-related practices not open to interpretation but deliberately reproduced to provide a consistent comparison with the past; (2) the purpose of PMM should be to achieve organisational effectiveness (OE) and (3) the mechanisms underlying performance management and performance measurement are social intervention and embeddedness, respectively.

This first social systems perspective of PMM advances the development of PMM's theoretical foundations by providing a behaviour-based interpretation of, and framework for, PMM-mediated organisational change. This competing approach has strong links to practice.

This paper offers various state‐space representations in the context of applications of the system control theory to dynamic economic systems and examines interrelationships between the alternative representations in both economics literature and system control engineering literature. In particular, some characteristics of various state‐space forms are assessed with respect to the structural properties of each form, thereby demonstrating the relative advantages and disadvantages of different realization methods presented in this paper.

As has been pointed out throughout this edition the whole concept of financial control in the literature has been treated in rather a narrow, confused way. The purpose of this present article is not to repeat these arguments but rather to highlight a major omission in the literature and this edition — the whole idea of what could be called “external” financial control.

On modern markets, supply chains (SC) shape the competition landscape. At the same time, considerable research advancements have been recently achieved in the area of collaborative networks. Trends in information technology progress for networked systems include development of cyber‐physical networks, cloud service environments, etc. The purpose of this paper is to identify an inter‐disciplinary perspective and modelling tools for new generation SCs which will be collaborative cyber‐physical networks.

This study addresses the above‐mentioned research goal by first, developing a methodical vision of an inter‐disciplinary modelling framework for SCM based on the existing studies on SC operations, control and systems theories; and second, by integrating elements of different structures with structures dynamics within an adaptive framework based upon the authors' own research.

The inter‐disciplinary modelling framework for multi‐structural SCs has been developed. A new inter‐disciplinary level of model‐based decision‐making support in those SCs is claimed based on the integration of previously isolated problems and modelling tools developed in such disciplines like operations research, control theory, system dynamics, and artificial intelligence.

The novelty of this paper is the consideration of SC modelling in the context of collaborative cyber‐physical systems. This topic is particularly relevant for researchers and practitioners who are interested in future generation SCs. Particular focus is directed towards the multi‐structural SC modelling, structure dynamics, and inter‐disciplinary problems and models in future SCs. Challenges of integrated optimization in the organizational and informational context are discussed.