1,311 research outputs found
Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems: A new transdisciplinary framework for studying farm enterprises?
The growing attention to sustainable food production and multifunctional agriculture calls for a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research and development perspective on farming, which is able to grasp the environmental, social, technical, and financial aspects of a farm and the dynamic relationship between the farm enterprises and the surrounding world. Our thesis is that a transdisciplinary approach needs to build on a working ontology that goes beyond the epistemology of each discipline and that is not just pieced together of the ontologies connected to these different epistemologies. Based on a review of three prevailing theoretical frameworks within the field of agro-sociology: The farming styles approach, the Bawden approach, and Conwayâs agroecosystem approach, we argue that these existing theories do not offer such a theoretical framework. The claim of this paper is that a new concept of a farm enterprise as a self-organizing social system, which combines ideas from Actor-Network theory (ANT) and Luhmannâs theory of social systems, can serve as a useful ontological platform for understanding a farm-enterprise as an entity independent of a scientific observer.
In this framework, each farm is understood as a self-organizing node in a complex of heterogeneous socio-technical networks of food, supply, knowledge, technology, etc. This implies that a farm has to be understood as the way in which these network relationships are organised by the farm as a self-organizing social system. Among all the different possible ways in which to interact with the surrounding world, the system has to select a coherent strategy in order to make the farming processes possible at all.
It will be discussed how this framework may add to the understanding of the continuous development of a heterogeneity of farm strategies and contribute to a more comprehensive view of the fields of regulation and extension
Enactivism and Robotic Language Acquisition: A Report from the Frontier
In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained humanârobot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivismâs applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the frameworkâs reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
Observing Environments
> Context ⢠Society is faced with âwickedâ problems of environmental sustainability, which are inherently multiperspectival, and there is a need for explicitly constructivist and perspectivist theories to address them.
> Problem ⢠However, different constructivist theories construe the environment in different ways. The aim of this paper is to clarify the conceptions of environment in constructivist approaches, and thereby to assist the sciences of complex systems and complex environmental problems.
> Method ⢠We describe the terms used for âthe environmentâ in von UexkĂźll, Maturana & Varela, and Luhmann, and analyse how their conceptions of environment are connected to differences of perspective and observation.
> Results ⢠We show the need to distinguish between inside and outside perspectives on the environment, and identify two very different and complementary logics of observation, the logic of distinction and the logic of representation, in the three constructivist theories.
> Implications ⢠Luhmannâs theory of social systems can be a helpful perspective on the wicked environmental problems of society if we consider carefully the theoryâs own blind spots: that it confines itself to systems of communication, and that it is based fully on the conception of observation as indication by means of distinction
Communicative Competencies and the Structuration of Expectations: The creative tension between Habermas' critical theory and Luhmann's social systems theory
I elaborate on the tension between Luhmann's social systems theory and
Habermas' theory of communicative action, and argue that this tension can be
resolved by focusing on language as the interhuman medium of the communication
which enables us to develop symbolically generalized media of communication
such as truth, love, power, etc. Following Luhmann, the layers of
self-organization among the differently codified subsystems of communication
versus organization of meaning at contingent interfaces can analytically be
distinguished as compatible, yet empirically researchable alternatives to
Habermas' distinction between "system" and "lifeworld." Mediation by a
facilitator can then be considered as a special case of organizing historically
contingent translations among the evolutionarily developing fluxes of
intentions and expectations. Accordingly, I suggest modifying Giddens'
terminology into "a theory of the structuration of expectations.
Components of cultural complexity relating to emotions: A conceptual framework
Many cultural variations in emotions have been documented in previous research, but a general theoretical framework involving cultural sources of these variations is still missing. The main goal of the present study was to determine what components of cultural complexity interact with the emotional experience and behavior of individuals. The proposed framework conceptually distinguishes five main components of cultural complexity relating to emotions: 1) emotion language, 2) conceptual knowledge about emotions, 3) emotion-related values, 4) feelings rules, i.e. norms for subjective experience, and 5) display rules, i.e. norms for emotional expression
The Consultant-Client Relationship: A Systems-Theoretical Perspective
The aim of this paper is to explain consulting failure from a systems-theoretical perspective and to provide a new framework for analysing consultantâclient relationships. By drawing on Luhmannâs systems theory, clients and consultants are conceptualised as two autopoietic communication systems that operate according to idiosyncratic logics. They are structurally coupled through a third system, the so-called âcontact systemâ, which constitutes a separate discourse. Due to their different logics no transfer of meaning between the three discourses is possible. This contradicts the traditional notion of consulting as a means of providing solutions to the clientâs problems: neither is the consultant able to understand the clientâs problems nor is it possible to transfer any solutions into the client system. Instead, consulting interventions only cause perturbations in the client system. Consequently, the traditional functions of consulting are called into question. The paper discusses the implications of this analysis with relation to the traditional approach to consulting, and presents a tentative framework for a systemic concept of consulting
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Hear After: Matters of Life and Death in David Tudorâs Electronic Music
In David Tudorâs electronic music, home-brew modular devices were carefully connected together to form complex feedback networks wherein all componentsâincluding the composer/performer himselfâcould only partially âinfluenceâ one another. Once activated, the very instability of mismatched connections between the components triggered a cascade of signals and signal modulations, so that the work âcomposed itself,â and took âa life of its own.â Due to this self-producing, perpetuating nature of his works, Tudor insisted on what he called âthe view from inside,â focusing more on the internal observation of his devices and sound than in materials external to the immanence of performance. When Tudor passed away in 1996, it became apparent that the sheer lack of resources outside the workâscores, instructions, recordings, textsâhad made many of his music impossible to perform in his absence. The works that took a life of their own could not survive their composerâs death partially because of his utter reliance on them to do their work. By connecting often mismatched resources obtained from extended research on Tudor, this paper presents modular observations that seem to offer certain perspectives on the issue of life and death surrounding Tudorâs music. A comparison with developments in systems theory, most notably autopoiesis, outlines a mechanism for the endless life of sounds that compose themselves. Moving out of this theoretical reflection, a fieldwork report of an ongoing attempt to âreviveâ some of Tudor\u27s works is offered. This report demonstrates the observer shifting from one âinsideâ to anotherâfrom an electronic circuitry inside a particular device, to a network composed of several devices, and further into the activation of a composite instrument. Meandering away from the archives, the composerâs âview from insideâ of his electronic devices is set side by side with recent insights of object-oriented ontology. A certain portion of this observation then feeds itself back to the perspective of autopoiesis, while others proceed to extract a distinct notion of âlifeâ out of object-orientation, this time in programming: an indeterminate âwaitingâ time inherent in each âobjectâ that cannot be computed within a singular universal time. This latency embedded in objects that await activation correlates to the trajectory of the observer who is always in a transit from one âinsideâ to another, finding different objects on each level of observation, and for whom, therefore, the delineation between life and death is always indeterminate. This view provides further explanation to the operative mechanism of Tudorâs music, wherein mismatched components sought to activate and influence one another, constituting an âelectronic ecologyâ endowed with a life of its own, but filled with partial deaths. The paper thus observes ultimately a parallel between the composerâs trajectory within his performances and that within his life, while attempting to reenact the complex nature of these said trajectories through the meandering manner of its own delivery
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