The term "sustainability" has entered the lexicon of many academic disciplines and fields of professional practice, but to date does not appear to have been seriously consid ered within the systems community unless, perhaps, under other guises. Within the wider community there is no consensus around what sustainability means with some authors identifying 70 to 100 definitions of the term. Some see sustainability as the precise and quantifiable outcomes of biological systems whilst others see it in terms of processes rele vant to personal and organizational change with the potential to effect...

Proceedings of the 3rd United Kingdom Systems Society International Conference on Systems Science, held in Paisley, Scotland, July 1993, to provide the opportunity for systems scientists from many nations to debate the contribution that systems science is making to specific areas of human endeavor a