Bookcase

The books on this reading list are all centered on the blog’s main themes, which are sociality and reality. Nonetheless the majority is inspired by lecturing Management of Immaterial Values, in which designing for sociality was the common theme. A Dutch, yet comprehensive, reading list on popular writtings on social software is maintained by Martin Kloos.

Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology, and its use Practitioners, Teachers and Students
Peter Checkland and John Poulter
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Checkland’s definitive account on the underpinnings, practices and definition of soft systems methodology after 35 years, actually indicates both the method’s timeless relevance and its susceptibility to fallacies. What is especially useful is the distinction between hard and soft systems thinking, or the difference between what is actually observed and the meaning that people ascribe to an event. That leads Checkland to talk about problem situation, instead of problems, and putting into focus the rich pictures of relations between events and people, instead linear textual descriptions of problems. The method, although not as ‘waterfall like’ as System Development Methodology, actually presents a fertile soil for dealing with real-world or wicked problems, without the necessity to stripping its ambiguity and indeterminedness to gain a concrete, yet oversimplified, starting point.

Design Methods (2^nd edition)
John Chris Jones
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Jones’ seminal book is a splendid example of the beginnings of Design Theory. Although the methods, which are rather techniques, in the second part of the book look to be a bit outdated, the real value of the book resides in the first part and the preface. The concept of design without a product (logically resulting from the evolutionary stages of design as a craft, design by drawing and design as a process) is actually now becoming ‘materialized’ in the age of immaterial and networked values. In the case of social software pur sang Jones’ theory is the first to identify that we ultimately cannot design the actual outcome, but solely the adaptive process to balance all constraints that will be encountered during the design, by which he adheres to our credo ‘sociality cannot be designed, it can only be designed for‘.

Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy
Max H. Boisot
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An objectivistic account on knowledge management. Although the current interests of academics tend to favor more subjectivistic accounts, Boisot’s explanation of his I-space (click here for my recapitulation) excels in its carefully thought out discourse. His three dimensional space, consisting of diffusion (x), codification (y) and abstraction (z), presents a breeding ground to map various organizational phenomena, like organizational learning, knowledge transformation, organizational evolution, technological evolution or forms of cooperation, etc. Furthermore, it provides a valuable framework for assessing an organization outsourcing capabilities or core competencies. Although its introduction might be at times puzzling, perseverance and understanding will be rewarded. The book knowledge based view claims that sustainable value does not reside in individual knowledge assets, cooperative bodies or techniques, but in the unique linkages between them.