Discussions of "systems" and the "systems approach" tend to fall into
one of two categories: the panegyrical and the disparaging. Scholars who
praise the systems approach do so in the belief that it is a powerful
and precise method of study. Scholars who try to shoot it down fail to
see any advantage in it; indeed, many deem it periIicious. Van Dyne
(1980, p. 889) records a facetious comment he once heard, the gist of
which ran: "In instances where there are from one to two variables in a
study you have a science, where there are from four to seven variables
you have an art, and where there are more than seven variables you have
a system". This tilt at the systems approach is mild indeed compared
with the com- ments of an anonymous reviewer of a paper by myself
concerned with the systems approach as applied to the soil. The reviewer
stated bluntly that he or she had no time for an approach which
falsifies and belittles work that has been done and is of no use for
future work. My summary of the paper opened with the seemingly innocuous
sentence "The notion of the soil as a system is placed on a . formal
footing by couching it in terms of dynamical systems theory".