Social system

About: Social system is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2974 publications have been published within this topic receiving 92395 citations.

System dynamics meets the press

Abstract: The shared para- digms of society, the public discourse, the deepest assumptions about how the world works, these are the ultimate sources of system structure and the primary obsta- cles to structural change. The reigning paradigms of the western world are astonishingly unsys- tematic, and they give rise to badly structured, difficult- to-manage large-scale System dynamics has met the press in continuous, sometimes dramatic, often frus- trating confrontation since the earliest days of the field. In 1969, when I first became aware of Jay Forrester, he was trying to explain to a nation in the midst of urban crisis that governments should pull down city housing instead of constructing it (Forrester 1969). The press was fascinated by this unusual message, just the inverse of the conventional wisdom of the day. That was when the word counterintuitive began to be applied to complex systems. The first article to be written about Forrester's world model was in Playboy, of all places. A year or so later I watched Dennis Meadows discussing The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) on the Today show. He was given three minutes to get across the ideas of exponential growth, overshoot, and collapse, right after a mouthwash commercial and just before a demonstration by the British dart-throwing champion. The press has paid sporadic attention to the work of the M.I.T. group on national economic modeling, but a 50-year long wave cannot hold the interest of a nation with 4-year election cycles and a media attention span of a few weeks. The experiences of system dynamicists with the press have sometimes been funny, sometimes frustrating, sometimes fruitful. Those of us who use system dynamics to model large-scale social systems have had many such experiences, and we will continue to have them. We seek out the press because we think our field gives us valuable, sometimes crucial, insights about the world, and we want those insights to be spread widely. The press seeks us out because we usually have something to say that is relevant and off-beat. We rarely come at a topic the same way everybody else does, and the novelty and controversy we generate are magnets for the media. Strangely enough, given all these skirmishes with the press, our field has paid much more attention to communicating with managers and policymakers than it has to getting ideas across to the general public. Our focus on policy-level communication is understandable, since our models direct our awareness to the decision points in systems. But our field also makes clear the overarching power of paradigms, deep- level, socially shared assumptions about the nature of the world that set up the structures of decision makers, institutions, feedback loops, and system goals in the first place. If we communicate only to decision makers, we might be able to install better decision rules, we might redirect a physical or information flow or two, but we will not achieve the thoroughgoing restructuring of systems that we know is necessary to solve some of the world's gravest problems: the three big ones-poverty, pollution, and war, and a host of smaller ones-inflation, public indebtedness, land-use plan- ning, city management, and farm failures. For our larger social purposes our proper audience is the general public. Our only way of reaching that audience is through the mass media.

Legitimacy, Adaptation and Resilience in Ecosystem Management

Abstract: Ecologists have made great strides in developing criteria for describing the resilience of an ecological system. In addition, expansion of that effort to social-ecological systems has begun the process of identifying changes to the social system necessary to foster resilience in an ecological system such as the use of adaptive management and integrated water resource management. But what of the social system itself? Can a social system be considered resilient if it fosters ecological resilience while ignoring equity and justice in the social system? More importantly, will changes to governance needed to foster ecosystem resilience be possible without careful attention to equity and justice in designing those changes? This paper uses the concept of legitimacy in governance as a necessary component of resilience in the social system and will turn to network theory as a means to facilitate integrated water resource management. Using work on the type of adaptive management/governance and integration across management authorities required to foster ecological system resilience, the paper will discuss means to delegate more flexible, adaptive and integrated authority to water management entities, while retaining legitimacy in governance.

Developments in social terminology: semantic battles in a conceptual war.

Abstract: The problems posed by the evolution of the diverse forms of animal sociality are among the most important and fascinating in evolutionary biology. The conceptual and terminological framework guiding studies of social evolution has been based on a particular insect model, namely, that of highly derived family-structured societies. Virtually all other social systems have been categorized as 'less social' relative to these societies. Recently, the ambiguities and constraints inherent in this hierarchical classification have led to numerous proposals to amend social terminology. What is the best framework for studying social evolution? Should the traditional classification be expanded, narrowed or abandoned altogether? In an important respect, most recent proposals present the same wine in a different bottle by retaining and recasting key terms of the traditional social-evolutionary classification.

Social trajectories and the evolution of social behavior

Abstract: Helms Cahan, S., Blumstein, D. T., Sundstro¨m, L., Liebig, J. and Griffin, A. 2002.Social trajectories and the evolution of social behavior. – Oikos 96: 206–216.Current research on the evolution of sociality seeks to integrate a wealth ofspecies-specific studies to draw more generalized conclusions. Developing a unifiedtheory of social evolution has been a challenging process, hampered by the inherentcomplexity of social systems. By viewing a species’ social structure as the result of aseries, or ‘‘trajectory’’, of decisions individuals make about whether or not to dispersefrom their natal territory, whether to co-breed or refrain from breeding, and whetheror not to provide alloparental care, we can more easily evaluate whether selectivefactors influencing each social decision are similar across taxa. At the same time, thesocial trajectory framework highlights the interrelationships among different socialdecisions, both throughout the life of an individual and over evolutionary time. Thereare likely to be multiple unifying themes within sociality research; we hope that thesimple framework outlined here will promote exchange between researchers acrosstaxonomic disciplines to begin to identify common principles.

Theorizing the client—consultant relationship from the perspective of social-systems theory

Abstract: Over the last few years research on management consulting has established itself as an important area in management studies. While, traditionally, consulting research has been predominantly a-theoretical, lately researchers have been calling for an exploration of different theoretical approaches. This article has been written in response to these calls. It explores a new perspective for theorizing the client—consultant relationship based on the theory of social systems by Niklas Luhmann. According to this approach, clients and consultants can be conceptualized as two autopoietic communication systems that operate according to idiosyncratic logics. They are structurally coupled through a third system, the so-called ‘contact system’. Due to the different logics of these systems, the transfer of meaning between them is not possible. This theoretical position has interesting implications for the way we conceptualize consulting, challenging many traditional assumptions. Instead of supporting the client in find...