Stafford Beer

Stafford Beer (25 September 1926 – 23 August 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics, as well as the architect of Cybersyn, a Chilean project from 1971-73 during the presidency of Salvador Allende which aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy.

Cybersyn

Stafford Beer on the Cybersyn project, Manchester Business School, 24 May 1974.
WEBM (42 mb). Source.

Writings

• The Scope for Operational Research in Industry, Sheffield: Institution of Production Engineers, 1957, 23 pp.

• Le champ de la recherche opérationnelle dans l'industrie, Brussels: Office belge pour l'accroissement de la productivité, 1959, 71 pp. (French)
  • De omvang van het toepassingsgebied van operations research in de industrie, Brussels: Belgische Dienst Opvoering Produktiviteit, 1959, 74 pp. (Dutch)

• Cybernetics and Management, English Universities Press, 1959; 2nd ed., 1967, ix+240 pp.
  • Kybernetik und Management, trans. Ilse Grubrich, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1962, 255 pp. (German)
  • Cibernética y administración, trans. Luis Gurza Bracho, México: Compañía Editorial Continental, 1963, 254 pp. (Spanish)
  • Kibernetika i upravlenie proizvodstvom, trans. V.A. Altaev, Moscow: Nauka, 1965, 391 pp. (Russian)
  • Kybernetika a řízení, trans. Karel Berka, afterw. Oldřich Kýn, Prague: Svoboda, 1966, 224 pp. (Czech)
  • Cybernetyka a zarządzanie, trans. Świetozar Sorokowski, Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1966, viii+235 pp. (Polish)
  • Cybernetica en management, trans. Arend Buitendam, et al., Amsterdam: Agon Elsevier, 1968, 232 pp. (Dutch)
  • Cibernetica e direzione aziendale, Milan: Bompiani, 1969, 313 pp. (Italian)
  • Cibernética e administração industrial, trans. Emanuel Rottenberg, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1969, 274 pp. (Brazilian Portuguese)

• The Theory of Operational Research, London: Science in General Management, 1964, 28 pp.

• Decision and Control: The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics, John Wiley & Sons, 1966, xii+556 pp; repr., Wiley, 1995.
  • Decisión y control: el significado de la investigación de operaciones y la administración cibernética, trans. Marcial Suárez, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982, 570 pp. (Spanish)

• Management Science: The Business Use of Operations Research, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968, 192 pp.
  • Management die Praxis der Unternehmensforschung, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969, 192 pp. (German)
  • La Science de la gestion : la recherche opérationnelle dans l'entreprise, trans. Jacques Boulle, Paris: Larousse, 1970, 192 pp. (French)
  • Att använda OA : operationsanalysens mål och metoder, Stockholm : Rabén & Sjögren, 1970, 192 pp. (Swedish)
  • Ciencia de la dirección: la investigación operativa en la empresa, Buenos Aires: Librería el Ateneo, 1974, 133 pp. (Spanish)

• Managing Modern Complexity, Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1970, 24 pp. [1]

• Designing Freedom, London: Wiley, 1974, 100 pp.
  • Diseñando la libertad, trans. Amparo Rodríguez, Madrid/México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977, 164 pp. (Spanish)
  • Kanri shakai to jiyū [管理社会と自由], trans. Kōichi Miyasawa (宮沢 光一), 1981. (Japanese)

• Brain of the Firm: The Managerial Cybernetics of Organization, London: Allen Lane, 1972, 319 pp; 2nd ed., Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1981, xiii+417 pp. Excerpt.
  • Kybernetische Fuehrungslehre, Frankfurt a.M.: Herder Herder, 1973, x+263 pp. (German)
  • L'azienda come sistema cibernetico, intro. Pasquale Saraceno, Milan: ISEDI, 1973, xvi+240 pp. (Italian)
  • Virksomhedens hjerne: om virksomhedens styringsmekanisme, Copenhagen: Branner og Korch, 1974, 405 pp. (Danish)
  • Cibernetica na administração: visão totalmente original de como organizar e administrar desde uma pequena empresa ate um pais, trans. Jose Reis, São Paulo: Ibrasa, 1979, 323 pp. (Brazilian Portuguese)
  • Kigyō soshiki no zunō [企業組織の頭脳: 経営のサイバネティックス], trans. Kōichi Miyasawa (宮沢 光一), , 1987, 494 pp. (Japanese)
  • Mozg firmy, trans. M.M. Lopukhin, Moscow: Radio i sviaz, 1993, 413 pp. (Russian)

• Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer, John Wiley & Sons, 1975, 457 pp.

• The Heart of Enterprise, Chichester: Wiley, 1979, xiv+582 pp. Companion vol. to Brain of the Firm.

• Beer, et al., Il progetto Cybersyn: cibernetica per la democrazia, Milan: CLUP, 370 pp. (Italian)

• Diagnosing the System for Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, 1985.
  • Diagnosi e progettazione organizzative: principi cibernetici, trans. Sergio de Vio and Giovanni Mauro, Torino: ISEDI, 1991, 224 pp. (Italian)
  • Kigyō soshiki no shisutemu shindan [企業組織のシステム診断], trans. Sekiya Shō, 1994, 152 pp. (Japanese)

• Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity, Chichester: Wiley, 1994, xi+367 pp.

Literature

• Raul Espejo (ed.), Kybernetes. The International Journal of Systems & Cybernetics 33(3/4): "Tribute to Stafford Beer", 2004. [2]

• Miller Medina, Jessica Eden, The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964-1973, 2005.

• Andrew Pickering, The Science of the Unknowable: Stafford Beer’s Cybernetic Informatics, Aarhus: Centre for STS Studies, 2006.

• Miller Medina, Jessica Eden, "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile", Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006), pp 571-606.

• Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, MIT Press, 2011. [3]

• Jonathan Rosenhead, "Stafford Beer", in Profiles in Operations Research, Springer, 2011.

• Evgeny Morozov, "The Planning Machine: Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation", The New Yorker, 13 Oct 2014.

• Evgeny Morozov, et al., The Santiago Boys: The Tech World That May Have Been, 2023. A nine-part podcast about a group of radical utopians around Salvador Allende, Chile's socialist president.

• Hugo Palmarola, Eden Medina, Pedro Ignacio Alonso (eds.), How to Design A Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2024, 336 pp. Publisher.

Links

• Stafford Beer Collection at Liverpool John Moores University, Digitized material.