Blending Complexity and Activity Frameworks for a Broader and Deeper Understanding of IS

A new age of significance and opportunity for Information Systems (IS) is upon us driven by current developments in the use of digital artifacts. In this paper we endeavor to make sense of contemporary IS, as well as possible future directions of IS, by bringing together the notions of complexity and activity within two theoretical frameworks, namely the Cynefin framework and contemporary uses of Activity Theory. We describe activity as a holistic unit of analysis within the Complicated and Complex Domains of the Cynefin framework. This will enable us to make sense of tool-mediated IS activities in those Domains. Our proposed research philosophy blends these frameworks to support new thinking about IS that impacts on our choices of research methods, the way we apply them and the way we modify them as the world we study evolves into an uncertain future context

Grappling with the complexity of the New Zealand Curriculum: Next steps in exploring the NZC in initial teacher education.

Teacher educators in New Zealand are charged with supporting student teachers' understandings of the New Zealand Curriculum document (Ministry of Education, 2007). Integral to this challenge is the need to provide relevant knowledge and understandings that are contextually and pedagogically appropriate (Fullan, 2007; Jasman, 2003). Aspects of the "front end" of the New Zealand Curriculum document such as the vision, principles, values and key competencies along with the learning area statements need to be understood by newly graduated teachers who will be applying this curriculum in their own classrooms. This paper reports on ongoing research investigating and reflecting on student-teacher understandings of these components of the New Zealand curriculum, on completion of three different compulsory papers within the Bachelor of Teaching degree and Graduate Diploma of Teaching (Primary). Implications for pre-service teacher education and for supporters of provisionally registered teachers are considered

Study on Capacity, Change and Performance: Interim Report

In 2002 the chair of the Govnet, the OECD's Network on Governance and Capacity Building, asked the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, to undertake a study of the capacity of organisations and groups of organisations, mainly in low-income countries, its development over time and its relationship to improved performance. The specific purposes of this study were twofold:to enhance understanding of the interrelationships amongst capacity, change and performance across a wide range of development experiences; andto provide general recommendations and tools to support the effectiveness of external interventions aimed at improving capacity and performance

Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions, representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective, multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences, sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions. When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics. We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our different research fields that include information studies, computability, human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor

Fault lines or Songlines? The influence of remote Aboriginal communities in shaping social research priorities in child protection.

The first in a portfolio of publications the author identifies her social work experience within remote Australia as the catalyst for the development of the research topic, Keeping kids safe in remote Aboriginal communities: exploring community driven approaches for the protection of children from sexual abuse. Review and reform of Australia’s child protection systems rarely critique the theoretical foundations of the now overloaded, overwhelmed and fracturing system. The study explores in depth the issue of child sexual abuse through the eyes of Aboriginal people from remote communities of the Northern Territory (NT), those same communities impacted by the 2007 Australian Government Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). It was not the first, nor has it been the last time that governments would conflate remote Aboriginal communities with child sexual abuse to justify a broader political agenda. The research aims to forge space within the existing western dominated knowledge base that underpins child sexual abuse to position and amplify remote Aboriginal voices. It is only through the lived experiences of this ancient culture that a strong foundation can be considered for the protection of children within remote areas from sexual abuse

The Holistic Archival Personality Profiling Model (HAPPM): Comprehensive Data Integration for Personality Analysis

The traditional approach to biographical profiling, predominantly reliant on limited and fragmented datasets, has frequently resulted in superficial personality understandings. This is largely due to an overemphasis on official records and notable events, neglecting the rich tapestry of everyday experiences and personal interactions that significantly shape personalities. To address this shortcoming, this article introduces a multi-disciplinary methodology, The Holistic Archival Personality Profiling Model (HAPPM), which integrates a diverse array of archival materials, including personal correspondences, social media footprints, and family memorabilia. This approach involves digitizing various data forms, including handwritten documents, into machine-readable text, and then semantically classifying this data with biotags, chronotags, and geotags for organization within specific spatial and temporal contexts. Such comprehensive data aggregation establishes a more accurate space-time continuum for individuals, enhancing our understanding of their lives. The innovative aspect of HAPPM is the utilization of large language models to converse with the data, facilitating a more holistic representation of personalities. Preliminary results from applying HAPPM have shown its efficacy in uncovering previously unknown aspects of individual lives, offering insights into personal beliefs, daily routines, and social interactions. This has been validated through comparative analysis with existing biographical data, revealing a more complete and nuanced understanding of personalities. Therefore, HAPPM marks a significant advancement in personality profiling, capturing not only the grandiose but also the mundane, and offering a comprehensive tool for researchers and historians to explore the full spectrum of human experience

Kite-marks, standards and privileged legal structures; artefacts of constraint disciplining structure choices

As different countries and regions continue to develop policy and legal frameworks for social enterprises this paper offers new insights into the dynamics of legal structure choice by social entrepreneurs. The potential nodes of conflict between exogenous prescriptions and social entrepreneur’s own orientation to certain aspects of organization and what social entrepreneurs actually do in the face of such conflict is explicated. Kite-marks, standards and legal structures privileged by powerful actors are cast as political artefacts that serve to discipline the choices of legal structure by social entrepreneurs as they prescribe desirable characteristics, behaviours and structures for social enterprises. This paper argues that social enterprises should not be understood as the homogenous organisational category that is portrayed in government policy documents, kite-marks and privileged legal structures but as organisations facing a proliferation of structural forms which are increasingly rendered a governable domain (Nickel & Eikenberry, 2016; Scott, 1998) through the development of kite marks, funder / investor requirements and government policy initiatives. Further, that these developments act to prioritise and marginalise particular forms of social enterprises as they exert coercive, mimetic and normative pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) that act to facilitate the categorising of social enterprises in a way that strengthens institutional coherence and serves to drive the structural isomorphism (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2017; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) of social enterprise activity. Whilst the actions of powerful actors work to maintain (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006) the social enterprise category the embedded agency of social entrepreneurs acts to transform it (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009). The prevailing Institutional logics (Ocasio, Thornton, & Lounsbury, 2017; Zhao & Lounsbury, 2016) that serve to both marginalise and prioritise those legal structures are used to present argument that the choice of legal structure for a social enterprise is often in conflict with the social entrepreneur's orientation to certain aspects of how they wish to organise. Where the chosen legal structure for a social enterprise is in conflict with the social entrepreneur's own organising principles as to how they wish to organise then this can result in the social entrepreneur decoupling (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009) their business and/or governance practices from their chosen legal structure in order to resolve the tensions that they experience. Social entrepreneurs also experiencing the same tension enact a different response in that they begin to create and legitimate new legal structures on the margins of the social enterprise category through a process of institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Hardy & Maguire, 2017)

Power and Scale: The Shifting Geography of Industrial Relations Law in Australia

In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale perspective to the analysis of recent industrial relations legislation in Australia, I show that the nature and direction of rescaling is “fixed” by the powers of institutional actors and the scope of their jurisdictions. I then draw on the distinctively scaled relations of the Australian context to assess the extent to which Australia's national rescaling processes can be seen as representing a process of convergence toward universal “spaces of neoliberalism”

Objective institutionalized barriers and subjective performance factors of new migrant entrepreneurs

Purpose This paper seeks to explain how the ‘objective’ institutionalized barriers (of which social, human, and financial capital are decisive factors) and the subjective performance of new migrant entrepreneurs jointly affect their business attitudes and observed behaviour. Design/methodology/approach The paper’s analysis of individualized performance factors (dependent on how ‘objective’ institutionalized barriers are subjectively construed) – in line with the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) – enables a response to recent calls to embrace complexity and pluralism in entrepreneurship through applying social constructivist lenses. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 Eritrean entrepreneurs, and the empirical data was subjected to grounded theory analytical procedures and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) theoretical coding. Findings Six core beliefs mitigated entrepreneurial attitudes independently from the objectivized institutionalized barriers: (1) know-how needs to be acquired formally; (2) available sources of financing are internal, and scarce; (3) market expertise is in the books, rather than in the market; (4) blending in the host country’s culture is uncalled for, and the resulting difficulty of operating in the ‘foreign’ market is a price worth paying; (5) risk is to be avoided at all cost; and (6) strong intra-communal bonds need not entail support for their business activity, rendering external contacts hardly necessary or trustworthy. Originality/Value The paper concludes with recommendations potentially informing policies and targeted interventions by highlighting that any policy intervention or an attempt at structural change of conditions in which new migrant entrepreneurship unfolds should consider entrepreneurs as ‘performing’ individuals, as well as representatives of wider cultural, economic and social dynamics relating to these ‘objective’ institutionalized barriers