Cybernetically informed pedagogy in two tertiary educational contexts : China and South Africa

Abstract: Discussing cybernetics as an enacted practice within specific contexts, the paper identifies key similarities and differences of two cybernetically informed approaches to tertiary education in the distinct contexts of China and South Africa..

The application of organisational cybernetics to the design and diagnosis of financial performance management systems

The object of this study is the processes that govern the flow of financial resources around an organisation. This is addressed in the context of the need for organisations to survive and prosper in an uncertain and dynamic world. Specifically, interest is focussed upon the mechanisms responsible for its ability to respond in an appropriate way to environmental disturbances in the short term and adapt to changes in the pattern of environmental disturbances over the longer term. The aim is to identify how this process is carried out and what implications this might have for the efficient and effective design of an organisations and practices and procedures.These are fundamental issues for any sort of social organisations. However, over the last fifty years a body of knowledge has accumulated – often described as systems theory – which seeks to identify and codify the principles that underpin all forms of organisation, whether it is sociological, biological or psychological. Advocates of systems theory claim that invariant principles can be applied, and knowledge transferred, across phenomenological domains.In academia, the study of the mechanisms that govern the flow of financial resources has received considerable attention. The study of Management Control Systems (MCS) in general and budgeting in particular is one of the most densely populated fields of accounting academic research. There has, however, been a surprisingly limited amount published on the application of systems theory to financial control processes.The broad issues that this thesis seeks to address are therefore:• What principles and concepts from systems theory can be applied to study ofthe management of financial resources in organisations?• How might they contribute to knowledge and understanding of such systems?• How can they be used to design and operate systems in practice

Cybernetics’s Reflexive Turns

In the history of cybernetics there have been several attempts by cyberneticians to put themselves into the circularities of their theories and designs, invoking a shift from the cybernetics of mechanisms to a cybernetics of cybernetics. The latter is the title of a book chapter by Margaret Mead (1968) and of Heinz von Foerster’s (1974) edited compilation of articles on cybernetics. Foerster introduced the concept of second-order cybernetics which may have overshadowed or sidelined other reflexivities. I am attempting to recover four reflexive turns, describe their origin, implications, and suggest ways in which they continue what Karl Müller (2007) calls an unfinished revolution. These turns are not discussed here in their historical succession but as conceptual expansions of cybernetics

Governance for sustainability: learning from VSM practice

Purpose – While there is some agreement on the usefulness of systems and complexity approaches to tackle the sustainability challenges facing the organisations and governments in the twenty-first century, less is clear regarding the way such approaches can inspire new ways of governance for sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to progress ongoing research using the Viable System Model (VSM) as a meta-language to facilitate long-term sustainability in business, communities and societies, using the “Methodology to support self-transformation”, by focusing on ways of learning about governance for sustainability. Design/methodology/approach – It summarises core self-governance challenges for long-term sustainability, and the organisational capabilities required to face them, at the “Framework for Assessing Sustainable Governance”. This tool is then used to analyse capabilities for governance for sustainability at three real situations where the mentioned Methodology inspired bottom up processes of self-organisation. It analyses the transformations decided from each organisation, in terms of capabilities for sustainable governance, using the suggested Framework. Findings – Core technical lessons learned from using the framework are discussed, include the usefulness of using a unified language and tool when studying governance for sustainability in differing types and scales of case study organisations. Research limitations/implications – As with other exploratory research, it reckons the convenience for further development and testing of the proposed tools to improve their reliability and robustness. Practical implications – A final conclusion suggests that the suggested tools offer a useful heuristic path to learn about governance for sustainability, from a VSM perspective; the learning from each organisational self-transformation regarding governance for sustainability is insightful for policy and strategy design and evaluation; in particular the possibility of comparing situations from different scales and types of organisations. Originality/value – There is very little coherence in the governance literature and the field of governance for sustainability is an emerging field. This piece of exploratory research is valuable as it presents an effective tool to learn about governance for sustainability, based in the “Methodology for Self-Transformation”; and offers reflexions on applications of the methodology and the tool, that contribute to clarify the meaning of governance for sustainability in practice, in organisations from different scales and types

NON-PLACES OF IMMATERIAL LABOUR

Andreas Rumpfhuber is Architect and Researcher and currently based in Vienna, Austria. He studied architecture at University of Technology in Graz and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He is member of the research collective roundtable.kein.org at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College in London. He has taught and lectured at architecture schools in Europe and is a regular contributor to the Vienna street newspaper Augustin and architecture journals like derivé, UmBau, Monu, Arkitekten. In his office he is currently working on small scale projects

All That Is Cyber Melts into Control: a Rhetorical Analysis of Cybernetic Metaphors

This thesis historicizes and interprets the logic of cybernetics as a communication technology and how it shaped notions of control in the mid-20th century. To situate my analysis, I focus on cybernetics, the tradition within communication studies that focuses on controlling communication through the application of feedback loops to a particular system. Since the discovery and popularization of cybernetics by the late 1950s, its central logic has been widely applied to computational technology and influenced future systems theories. Specifically, my thesis employs a rhetorical examination of cybernetic metaphors through metaphor criticism to trace the genealogy of cybernetic discourses that I argue attempted to reconstitute political structures through stabilizing systems that would maintain and regulate the social, political, and economic forces of society. My thesis explores archival exchanges between Soviet Cybernetics Review, Ali İrtem, and Stafford Beer to tracing the intellectual history of discourses that employed cybernetic thinking through metaphors to re-constitute the political-economic systems internationally

Philosophy of Modeling: Neglected Pages of History

The work done in the philosophy of modeling by Vaihinger (1876), Craik (1943), Rosenblueth and Wiener (1945), Apostel (1960), Minsky (1965), Klaus (1966) and Stachowiak (1973) is still almost completely neglected in the mainstream literature. However, this work seems to contain original ideas worth to be discussed. For example, the idea that diverse functions of models can be better structured as follows: in fact, models perform only a single function – they are replacing their target systems, but for different purposes. Another example: the idea that all of cognition is cognition in models or by means of models. Even perception, reflexes and instincts (animal and human) can be best analyzed as modeling. The paper presents an analysis of the above-mentioned work

Cybernetic transdisciplinarity as pedagogy

A core characteristic of cybernetics is the construction of transdisciplinary theory through the creation of analogies between different situations in terms of feedback processes. Feedback, which can be understood as processes where the observed outcomes of action are taken as input for new action, is widespread across social, ecological, biological, and technological contexts, giving cybernetics its transdisciplinary character. Cybernetics is often abstract in character, seeking to understand principles that apply in many situations. For instance, Wiener characterized cybernetics as relevant to both “the animal and the machine”, Ashby saw it as concerned with “all possible machines”, and Mead understood it as form of language “sufficiently abstract to make it possible to cross disciplinary boundaries”. This abstraction affords cybernetics its extraordinarily broad scope, explanatory power, and transgressive character, with ideas able to move between contexts. However, this abstraction also brings limitations. First, it focuses attention on general principles at the expense of material embodiment and the specifics of a situation. Second, positioning cybernetics as explanatory tends to characterize its relation to practice in terms of a theory-application relationship that is, at least to some extent, at odds with cybernetics’ core ideas about circularity. Third, the ease with which cybernetics moves ideas between contexts risks uncritical deployments of its analogies as if they represent equivalencies, such as thinking of machines as if they are brains or vice versa. In this paper, we present a way in which cybernetic analogies may be deployed in a manner which is embodied (rather than abstract) and methodological (rather than explanatory). The example we take is from our own teaching practices, focusing on a curriculum developed in the context of supporting postgraduate architecture and design students in understanding research. This is an area in which cybernetics has theory to offer, notably Glanville’s argument that research (including scientific research) is designed. By outlining the approach to teaching and learning developed in this curriculum, we describe how Glanville’s theoretical stance may be reformulated as a pedagogic process, where students reposition their growing expertise in design as expertise in (designing) research. We discuss the advantages of this in the context of education for design research, such as avoiding positioning research as something external to design and opening research to the sorts of critique that one may apply to other design outcomes. Reviewing the legacy of this curriculum in students’ subsequent project work, we conclude by speculating on the extent to which the pedagogic approach presented here may be taken up in other practical situations

Courses for Horses, The In-Side Track, Part II

At the 2013 NBEA conference we introduced and presented our paper “Courses for Horses, Making Change Stick in the Workplace” and we laid out the framework for our systemic cybernetically informed process model to enable organizations to achieve second order change (Alanson, 1971) or “change that sticks”. We also addressed issues of language (Koestler, 1979) and currency (Llopis, 2012)