Systems Practice
In the later years Vickers wrote and lectured on the subject of social systems analysis and the complex patterns of social organisation. His work was taken-up by researchers at the Open University in particular. Vickers is regarded as a systems practitioner rather than an academic. He introduced the concept of appreciative systems to describe human activity. He recognized that appreciation of systems requires the participation of not only the observer, but also that of the subject.
Much of his work is devoted to the analysis of judgement in terms of what he called 'appreciative behaviour': this is described most effectively in The Art of Judgement (1965). He believed that social institutions are best analysed as systems, and his published work, notably Human Systems are Different (1983), made far-reaching contributions to systems thinking in its applications to human society.
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