Where does the nation-state end and globalization begin? In Territory, Authority, Rights, one of the world's leading authorities on globalization shows how the national state made today's global era ...possible. Saskia Sassen argues that even while globalization is best understood as "denationalization," it continues to be shaped, channeled, and enabled by institutions and networks originally developed with nations in mind, such as the rule of law and respect for private authority. This process of state making produced some of the capabilities enabling the global era. The difference is that these capabilities have become part of new organizing logics: actors other than nation-states deploy them for new purposes. Sassen builds her case by examining how three components of any society in any age--territory, authority, and rights--have changed in themselves and in their interrelationships across three major historical "assemblages": the medieval, the national, and the global.
Barry Oshry explains how genocides occur when cultures meet and demagogues sell us messages of superiority or purity. The two conventional solutions to encountering the "other," Purity and Tolerance, ...both exact a terrible cost. Instead we must change our patterns of interaction so the possibility of Power and Love, working together, can emerge.
Resilience engineering has consistently argued that safety is more than the absence of failures. Since the first book was published in 2006, several book chapters and papers have demonstrated the ...advantage in going behind 'human error' and beyond the failure concept, just as a number of serious accidents have accentuated the need for it. But there has not yet been a comprehensive method for doing so; the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) fulfils that need.
Complex adaptive systems Miller, John H; Miller, John H; Page, Scott E
2009., 20091128, 2009, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20070101, Letnik:
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eBook
This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock ...markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations,Complex Adaptive Systemsfocuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents.
John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.
•Big data represent a new, self-renewable resource for agriculture.•Big data can increase the environmental and economic performance of farming.•The introduction of big data in agrifood systems acted ...as a speciation mechanism.•New power geometries that challenge the sustainability of big data farming emerge.•Science has not yet managed to evaluate the sustainability of big data agriculture.
Big data represent a new productive factor (the “new oil” for advocates) that generates new realities in agriculture. By adding an extra “cyber” dimension to current farming systems, big data lead to the emergence of new, complex cyber-physical-social systems. However, our understanding of the sustainability of such systems is still at a rudimental stage. In this critical review we attempt to shed some light on this topic, by identifying and presenting some issues that put in doubt the sustainability of big data agriculture. By using a punctuated equilibria lens, we argue that despite their contribution to the economic and environmental performance of farming, big data act as a speciation mechanism. Hence, they lead to new forms of intraspecific, interspecific and intergeneric competition, thus putting at risk the most vulnerable players of the game. We conclude by pointing out that to holistically address the interrelation between big data and agricultural sustainability we need a hybrid research line, which will combine the qualities of both technology-oriented research and critical social science.
The emergence of cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) as a novel paradigm has revolutionized the relationship between humans, computers and the physical environment. In this paper, we survey the ...advancement of CPSS through cyber-physical systems (CPS), cyber-social systems (CSS) and CPSS, as well as related techniques. CPSS are still at their infancy, most recent studies are application-specific and lack of systematic design methodology. To exploit the design methodology for CPSS, we review the existing system-level design methodologies in multiple application domains and further compare their performance characteristics and applicability for CPSS. Finally, we introduce our latest research advancement on system-level design methodology for CPSS and summarize future challenges for designing CPSS.
•This paper discusses the relationships between cyber-physical-social computing and ubiquitous computing.•This paper reviews cyber-physical-social systems with their development stages.•The major system-level design methods are reviewed to examine their applicabilities for CPSS design.•This paper presents the latest research advancement on system-level design methodology for CPSS.
Organizations have to cope with the complexity of their environment in order to survive. A considerable body of research has shown that organizations may respond to environmental complexity by ...creating internal complexity – for example, by expanding internal structures and processes. However, researchers know less about how organizations create collaborative complexity collectively – for example, by establishing alliances or developing common standards. This paper uses social systems theory to explore how organizations collaborate in response to complexity and to analyse the conditions under which they create either internal or collaborative complexity (or both) to address environmental complexity. It also examines how these types of complexity feed back into environmental complexity. To illustrate our conceptual model, we use corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Studies on organizational paradoxes often explain paradox salience exogenously, as a state of latency awaiting detection. Based on social systems theory, this process study develops an explanation of ...paradox salience and latency beyond an actor’s cognitive ability to think paradoxically. Such an explanation lies endogenously within the interactions of actors coping with paradox. Analysing the discussions of a hospital executive board during a change initiative reveals how factual, social and temporal references surface and submerge contradictory tensions. The proposed model for visibilizing and invisibilizing paradox explains salience and latency – even if individuals are aware of paradox – as integral to coping with paradox. As a paradox invisibilizes in an interaction it resurfaces somewhere along the line and thereby transforms within an organization.
Community resilience has been addressed across multiple disciplines including environmental sciences, engineering, sociology, psychology, and economics. Interest in community resilience gained ...momentum following several key natural and human-caused hazards in the United States and worldwide. To date, a comprehensive community resilience model that encompasses the performance of all the physical and socio-economic components from immediate impact through the recovery phase of a natural disaster has not been available. This paper summarizes a literature review of previous community resilience studies with a focus on natural hazards, which includes primarily models of individual infrastructure systems, their interdependencies, and community economic and social systems. A series of national and international initiatives aimed at community resilience are also summarized in this study. This paper suggests extensions of existing modeling methodologies aimed at developing an improved, integrated understanding of resilience that can be used by policy-makers in preparation for future events.
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