noting in this connection that KotarbiIiski's assumptions were proved
true many years later, and that increasingly representatives of various
scientific disciplines have come to observe paradigms of efficiency
which had often tended to be ignored; empirical studies involving a
large concentration of personnel, financial resources and equipment are
now guided by the principles of efficiency and economy. In his second
paper Kotarbiriski referred to Alfred Espinas, the French philosopher
and sociologist, and to other authors who repre- sented the
praxiological viewpoint, together with that of the general systems
approach. KotarbiIiski was the first to accept a theory more general
than praxiology, which he termed the theory of complexes. He considered
one of its representatives to be A. Bogdanov (1873-1928), the Marxist
theorist and author of Tectology. A General Theory of Organization
(first written in Russian, published in the German- language version as
Allgemeine Organizationslehre in the 1920's, and recently translated
into English in Canada). KotarbiIiski also realized that he was not the
only praxiologist, that even the name of the dis- cipline had been used
earlier by various authors not aware of the work of others.