Advances in Multiple Criteria Decision Making and Human Systems Management: Knowledge and Wisdom

421 Pages·2007·7.132 MB·English

by  Y. Shi

ADVANCES IN MULTIPLE CRITERIA DECISION
MAKING AND HUMAN SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT:
KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM
http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield

Advances in Multiple Criteria
Decision Making and Human
Systems Management: Knowledge
and Wisdom
In honor of Professor Milan Zeleny
Edited by
Yong Shi
School of Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
David L. Olson
Department of Management, University of Nebraska, USA
and
Antonie Stam
Department of Management, University of Missouri, USA
Amsterdam • Berlin • Oxford • Tokyo • Washington, DC
© 2007 The authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-58603-748-2
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Advances in Multiple Criteria Decision Making and Human Systems Management v
Y. Shi et al. (Eds.)
IOS Press, 2007
© 2007 The authors. All rights reserved.
Preface
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,
con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a
bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve
equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty
meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insect.
(Robert A. Heinlein)
Motto of Milan Zeleny
This volume, edited as a Festschrift in honor of Prof. Milan Zeleny, reflects and emu-
lates his unmistakable legacy: the essential multidimensionality of human and social
affairs. There are many levels of this multidimensionality presented in this volume: 1.
Multidisciplinarity of contributed papers, 2. Multinationality of their authors, extending
even to the editors and the publisher, 3. Multicultural and multilevel exposition, rang-
ing from empirical studies to philosophical foundations. Generally, these papers can be
divided into three parts: Multiple Criteria Decision Making; Social and Human System
Management; and Information, Knowledge and Wisdom Management.
Just going through some keywords in the titles of individual contributions to this
volume, represents an adventure in multidimensionality: multi-value decision making,
multicriteria communication, multi-objective EMI, multicriteria analysis of OECD,
digest wisdom, enlightenment, collaborate for win-win, value focused management,
highly intelligent nation, KM pragmatism, human ideals, outsourcing risks, mobile
technology, intelligent knowledge, purposeful coordination of action, high technology
R&D, de novo programming, continuous innovation, competence set analysis, knowl-
edge sharing, wisdom shaped management, socio-technical enablers, informed intent –
such new words promise fresh insights, affirm that a new era has arrived, and invite the
reader to the challenges of integration and synthesis, to knowledge and wisdom.
It is the recognition of multidimensionality in decision making, economics, opti-
mization, systems, cybernetics and the pursuit of knowledge that bear the stamp of spe-
cific Zeleny’s contributions. His life-long dedication to multidimensionality has pro-
duced an ultimate multidimensional being, living in academic “multiverse”, function-
ing in a boundaryless world of all continents, cultures and countries. He has lost all
respect for nonpermeable boundaries and artificially imposed limits when he crossed
the first such border in 1967: from his native Czechoslovakia (now non-existent) to his
beloved United States of America.
To this volume we have invited top researchers and scientists from an amazing va-
riety of countries, ranging from the U.S.A., China, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and
Taiwan, to England, Greece, Finland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Slo-
vakia. Even so, it is only a small sample of all the countries Milan has visited and
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worked in. He has become a truly global professor, with ongoing appointments on four
continents, expanding his activities into a growing circle of areas, cultures, countries
and friends.
Together with multidimensionality comes naturally integration, cooperation and
systems – the other side of the coin of recognized and appreciated multidimensionality.
Finally, with any integrative and collaborative efforts come knowledge and wisdom,
the other natural pursuits of people who integrate and collaborate across all boundaries,
real, self-imposed or virtual. Knowledge and wisdom are the pursuits he is trying to
mold into respectable academic areas, moving beyond their metaphorical or habitual
traditions of usage.
It all ads up to human systems management as the transdisciplinary expression of
humane pursuits of human interests through systems. It is no coincidence that his
brainchild, the journal of Human Systems Management, is celebrating its first 25 years,
while Milan celebrates 65 years of his still accelerating quest for the new, the unknown
and the original in social systems. Reading through the titles of his publications, one
can see that there is very little coincidence in Milan’s work: it all unfolds from many
different starting directions, evolves and begins to “come together” in the end – as if all
has been carefully designed and crafted, all planned. It probably was, although assem-
bling his impressive body of knowledge and wisdom has been executed spontaneously
and with apparent ease.
Nobody ever saw Milan working. He is always enjoying life, enjoying good food
and drink, going to interesting places and cherishing the ever-evolving company of
even more interesting men and women from all around the globe. As he escaped the
ever-tightening borders of the ever-diminishing Czechoslovakia, he has continued “es-
caping” ever since: always ahead of the curve, pushing the envelope, outside the box.
Milan has contributed to so many fields and areas, that most of us, being special-
ists, do not know the true extent of his work. He is certainly not a one-topic man: he
has become known to many non-intersecting groups and societies, often he himself
being their sole intersection. Just consider: artificial life, autopoiesis and tradeoffs-free
resource allocation. His contributions to all those multiple fields are always original,
fundamental and controversial, yet immediately recognizable for their emphasis on
multidimensionality, contextual dependency, dynamics and pragmatic utility.
Zeleny clearly abhors the “mainstream” of anything; he avoids it like a vacuum:
mainstream thinking, mainstream research, mainstream values, mainstream life. He
escaped the “mainstream” long time ago and shows no intentions of returning. He even
escapes the fields he himself established or founded – as soon as they show the deadly
signs of becoming “mainstream”. Mainstream thinking, he says, invites mediocrity,
routine, copy and self-approval: perhaps useful and necessary to some, but so unexcit-
ing, boring and unchallenging to boundary-crossing seekers. The very definition of
“mainstream” implies: within the boundaries, accepted by majority, mass behavior with
no individuality, no surprises and certainly no inner rewards.
So, in this Festschrift we also honor a challenge. What are we to think of a man
who initiated, introduced or contributed to not only multiple criteria decision making,
multiple criteria simplex method, linear multiobjective programming, de novo pro-
gramming, eight concepts of optimality, compromise programming, knowledge-based
fuzzy sets, knowledge management, self-producing social systems, spontaneous social
orders, high technology management, theory of the displaced ideal, conflict dissolution,
multidimensional radar diagrams, osmotic growths, inorganic precipitates, etc., but also
historical studies on Trentowski’s Cybernetyka, Bogdanov’s Tectology, Leduc’s Syn-
vii
thetic Biology and Smuts’ Holism, as well as original contributions to management,
strategy, systems sciences, cybernetics, autopoiesis, artificial life, game theory, APL
simulations, social judgment theory, economics of interactions, tradeoffs-free econom-
ics, and so on.
How do we honor such a student, teacher and man?
It seems to us that only through a book like this one: a book that is as diverse and
as multidimensional as the man and his work.
Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Yong Shi’s doctoral stu-
dents at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xingsen Li, Rong Liu and Zhongbin Ouy-
ang for their hard work on the formation of this book. We also acknowledge grants
from National Natural Science Foundation of China (#70621001, #70531040,
#70501030, #70472074), 973 Project #2004CB720103, Ministry of Science and Tech-
nology, China, and BHP Billiton Co., Australia for their support in the preparation of
the book.
Yong Shi
Beijing,China
David L. Olson
Lincoln,Nebraska,USA
Antonie Stam
Columbia,Missouri,USA

ix
Biosketch of Milan Zeleny
Milan Zeleny, Professor of Management Systems, Fordham
University, New York City, recently published Information
Technology in Business (Thomson International), co-edited
New Frontiers of Decision Making for the Information Tech-
nology Era (World Scientific). His current book, Human Sys-
tems Management: Integrating Knowledge, Management and
Systems, is to be followed by The BioCycle of Business: Man-
aging Corporation as a Living Organism, Roads to Success:
Bata Management System and other works-in-progress, includ-
ing Knowledge of Enterprise, and The Art of Asking Why:
Foundations of Wisdom Systems.
His previously published books include Multiple Criteria Decision Making
(McGraw-Hill), Linear Multiobjective Programming (Springer-Verlag), Autopoiesis,
Dissipative Structures and Spontaneous Social Orders (Westview Press), MCDM-Past
Decades and Future Trends (JAI Press), Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organization
(Elsevier North Holland), Uncertain Prospects Ranking and Portfolio Analysis (Verlag
Anton Hain), Multiple Criteria Decision Making (University of South Carolina Press),
Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Kyoto 1975 (Springer-Verlag), and others.
Milan Zeleny was born 22. 1. 1942, in a small village of Klucké Chvalovice in
Bohemia. After studies at Prague School of Economics (Ing., 1964), military service in
Prague, and a few years at the Czech Academy of Sciences, he left the communist
Czechoslovakia in 1967 in order to extend his studies for Ph.D. in Operations Research
and Business Economics at the University of Rochester, where he earlier got his M.S.
in Systems Management in 1970.
Milan’s roots are in the literary family of Vácslav and Vladivoj Zelený. His father,
Josef Zelený, founded one of the first organizational consulting firms in the 30s and
40s in Prague (“ZET-organizace”). After the communist takeover in 1948, his father
became a coal miner (in Kladno) and his uncle worked in the uranium mines of Jachy-
mov. Milan’s fate as an exulant from his own country and a global professor of his later
years was sealed.
After studies in the US, he followed a string of employments: 1971–1972, Univer-
sity of South Carolina, Columbia, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Management
Science; 1972–1979, Columbia University, New York, Associate Professor of Business
Administration; 1979–1980.
Copenhagen School of Economics, Copenhagen, Denmark, Professor of Econom-
ics; 1980–1981, European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM),
Brussels, Belgium; Professor of Management Science. Since 1982 he has become Pro-
fessor of Management Systems at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York,
which then became his permanent tenured appointment.
Since 1998 he holds parallel appointments at the Tomas Bata University in Zlin
and since 2004 also at Xidian University in Xi’an, China. In 2006 he worked at Fu Jen
University in Taipei and in 2007 at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.