Critique of two contributions to soft systems methodology

The European Journal of Information Systems recently published two articles seeking to contribute to the body of knowledge about soft systems methodology (SSM). The present paper is a response to these. The papers discussed relate SSM to other bodies of knowledge: grounding SSM (Brown, 1992) and offering a toolkit for rich picture diagramming (Avison et ah, 1992). This paper argues that, in these two papers, there is a tendency to pay too little attention to the intrinsic characteristics of SSM. While SSM is user-dependent and open to interpretation, this paper raises some issues pertinent to a critique of these two articles from an SSM perspective, and suggests more rigour and subtlety in dealing with SSM.