Stuart Umpleby is a professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at The George Washington University. He received degrees in engineering, political science, and communications from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. From 1975 to the present he has been a professor at The George Washington University. From 1994 to 1997 he was the faculty facilitator of the Quality and Innovation Initiative in the GW School of Business and Public Management. From 1997 to 2000 he worked on the Year 2000 Computer Crisis, viewing it as an opportunity to test social science theories using a before and after research design. He teaches courses in the philosophy of science, cross-cultural management, organizational behavior, cybernetics, and systems science. Other interests include process improvement methods, group facilitation methods, and the use of computer networks.
Umpleby has published articles in Science, Policy Sciences, Population and Environment, Science Communication, The Futurist, Futures, World Futures, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Simulation and Games, Business and Society Review, Journal of International Business and Economics, Review of Business Research, Telecommunications Policy, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Reflexive Control, Systems Practice, Kybernetes, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Cybernetics and Systems and several foreign language journals. He is a past president of the American Society for Cybernetics. He is Associate Editor of the journal Cybernetics and Systems.
Umpleby has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Central Asia Research Initiative. He has consulted with the World Bank, with government agencies in the U.S. and Canada and with corporations in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China. He has advised on the creation of a PhD program in management and business in Almaty, Kazakhstan. In May 2008 he conducted a video conference on "How to do Research" with Uzbek scholars at the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent.
In connection with his work in systems theory and management, he has been a guest scholar at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, the University of Vienna, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria, and the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland. He is a member of the Principia Cybernetica Project at the Free University of Brussels. In spring 2004 he was a Fulbright Scholar in the School of Economics and Business, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Between 1981 and 1988 Umpleby was the American coordinator of a series of meetings between American and Russian scientists to discuss the foundations of cybernetics and systems theory. These meetings were supported by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the International Research and Exchanges Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. His interest in the transitions in the post-communist countries has resulted in his presenting lectures at various institutes of the Academies of Science of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria.He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Cybernetics, the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and the International Society for the Systems Sciences.
In the years after World War II the field of cybernetics and several variations of systems science were created. These fields added several dimensions to scientific investigations: from linear to circular causality, from direction to self-organization, from reductionism to holism, from environment free to environment full investigations, and from not including the observer to including the observer. Hence the systems sciences expanded the subjects of scientific investigations on several dimensions. These dimensions, identified by Eric Dent, define the systems sciences relative to earlier disciplines. They also explain why systems science has had difficulty coming together as a unified field, since different groups within systems science have emphasized different combinations of the dimensions.
We now seem to be witnessing a second expansion of science. Whereas physics provides a theory of matter and energy relationships, the goal of cybernetics was to create a common language of control and communication, or of information and regulation, to aid research among social scientists, those working on information machines, and those working in the fields of design. The current interest in reflexivity is helping to create this second expansion of science which emphasizes that theories in the social sciences have an effect on the phenomena being studied. Apparently we now need to describe a “second order science” which describes the effects of first order theories (and second order theories as well) on the phenomena of interest.
