9320219 Merchant Ms. Debora Hammond, working on her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Professor Carolyn Merchant, is examining the emergence of general systems theory by focusing specifically on the four individuals (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard and Anatol Rapoport) who established the Society for General Systems Research. Ms. Hammond's is studying the events leading to the formation of the Society as well as influences which the Society's activities and publications had on developments in various disciplines, particularly in terms of the relationship between biological, psychological, and sociological sciences during the period from 1950-1979. The Society is representative of several general trends which characterize this period, including efforts to overcome the increasing fragmentation of disciplinary specialization through interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving and a belief that the social sciences could benefit from the same kind of intensive research effort that had proven so successful in the physical sciences during World War II. Ms. Hammond is evaluating the contributions of this particular group in the context of similar and parallel developments in other fields. ***
