This book is concerned with control issues in complex industrial organizations. The word control is used here in a rather wide sense, including decision making, coordination and planning as well as activities such as the design and implementation of organizational structures or computerized information systems. There are various ways of defining complexity; here we use this term to indicate that the organizations in question consist of many sub organizations which are operationally interdependent but at the same time have a fair degree of independence of control. The control of the interactions between these suborganizations through coordination will be a key issue in this book. The discussion will be confined to industrial organizations; our results are only applicable to a limited extent to other types of organizations such as universities, hospitals or government offices. The main contribution we intend to make in this book is the development of a system oj concepts on control and coordination in industrial organizations which can be used in the design of organizational control structures such as planning systems, information systems or relations between positions or departments. Rather eclectic use has been made of various scientific disCiplines in the development of this conceptual system with some bias towards the use of system theory and cybernetics. The book is intended for professional workers in the field of 'organizational control technology', such as automation and .organization specialists in complex organizations and workers in the related disCiplines at University.

A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.

This book contains all refereed papers that were accepted to the fourth edition of the « Complex Systems Design & Management » (CSD&M 2013) international conference which took place in Paris (France) from December 4-6, 2013. These proceedings cover the most recent trends in the emerging field of complex systems sciences & practices from an industrial and academic perspective, including the main industrial domains (transport, defense & security, electronics, energy & environment, e-services), scientific & technical topics (systems fundamentals, systems architecture & engineering, systems metrics & quality, systemic tools) and system types (transportation systems, embedded systems, software & information systems, systems of systems, artificial ecosystems). The CSD&M 2013 conference is organized under the guidance of the CESAMES non-profit organization.

Includes bibliographies.