Systems, Volume 3, Issue 1 (March 2015) – 3 articles , Pages 1-26

This paper suggests a new methodology capable of accessing in detail the contribution of companies to countries’ sustainability related to economic performance. The concept of sustainability has been brought up in several debates, leading to a clearer understanding of its progress in recent decades. The most adequate indicators to achieve a unique value to define sustainability have been identified. However, specific behaviors of economic agents such as exist in particularly large organizations, have rarely been exposed and evaluated regarding their positive or negative contribution to the increase of sustainability throughout the world. This paper proposes an integrated approach incorporating an evaluation of the positive and negative contributions to sustainability by means of a logistic biplot application. This allows the creation of a summarized index that combines all single sustainability indicators. These synthetic indices allow the positioning of each of the companies in a geometric representation for an original exploration of the sustainability paradigm. The supplied method permits accessing and evaluating information concerning specific behaviors of economic agents such as big companies. In our paper, we have followed the engagements towards sustainability of big corporations, individually or as groups, across the different activity sectors in Portugal and Spain. Full article

The aim of this editorial is to briefly introduce some papers of different nature presented by the contributors to the special issue on “Second Generation General System Theory”. These contributions have been focused on the need for building a post-Bertalanffy Systemics, based on new problems, representations, and approaches to complexity. Furthermore, such new Systemics is expected to be able to theoretically generalize new related systemic concepts and approaches introduced by different disciplines. Such a theoretical generalization is going to coincide with a new kind of interdisciplinarity. The latter should substitute the classical one, based on considering problems and solutions within a discipline as equivalent to problems and solutions within another one. This equivalence was used within the framework of general systemic concepts like Anticipation, Completeness, Feedback, Finality, Forecast, Separability, Openness, and Reversibility. The contributions contained in this special issue constitute very interesting examples of new approaches and of their possibilities of theoretical generalization. Therefore, the issue itself can be considered as a window on the new Systemics and its challenges. Full article