The Semiotics of Global Warming: Combating Semiotic Corrruption

The central focus of this paper is the disjunction between the findings of climate science in revealing the threat of global warming and the failure to act appropriately to these warnings. The development of climate science can be illuminated through the perspective provided by Peircian semiotics, but efforts to account for its success as a science and its failure to convince people to act accordingly indicate the need to supplement Peirce’s ideas. The more significant gaps, it is argued, call for the integration of major new ideas. It will be argued that Peirce should be viewed as a Schellingian philosopher, and it will then be shown how this facilitates integration into his philosophy of concepts developed by other philosophers and theorists within this tradition. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of the ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ will be integrated with Peirce’s semiotics and used to analyse the achievements and failures of climate science. It will be suggested that the resulting synthesis can augment Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology and so provide a better basis for comprehending and responding to the situation within which we find ourselves

Darwinism, probability and complexity : market-based organizational transformation and change explained through the theories of evolution

The study of transformation and change is one of the most important areas of social science research. This paper synthesizes and critically reviews the emerging traditions in the study of change dynamics. Three mainstream theories of evolution are introduced to explain change: the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest, the Probability model and the Complexity approach. The literature review provides a basis for development of research questions that search for a more comprehensive understanding of organizational change. The paper concludes by arguing for the development of a complementary research tradition, which combines an evolutionary and organizational analysis of transformation and change

Innovation Ecosystem Emergence Barriers: Institutional Perspective

Innovation ecosystems are built around new technologies, ideas, and innovations and their supporting actors and structures. However, the emergence of ecosystems is constrained by a host of institutional, system-level barriers in the existing organizational field that inhibit the legitimacy, resourcing, and growth of new initiatives. Through an empirical study in the Finnish energy sector, we find a strong and interdependent set of regulative, normative, and cultural–cognitive barriers that restrict the emergence of innovation ecosystems with new technologies. In particular, we identify a set of barriers and related field-sustaining mechanisms. The findings offer important implications for the theory and practice of innovation ecosystem emergence and related system-level barriers

Challenges in Complex Systems Science

FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda

Western Tien-Shan World Heritage Site (Kyrgyz Part): From Traditional to Modern Management Challenges

The Western Tien-Shan World Heritage Site (WTS WHS) includes sites in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, in Central Asia. The Kyrgyz part of the WTS WHS includes the Sary-Chelek Nature Reserve (also UNESCO Biosphere Reserve), Besh-Aral State Nature Reserve, and Padysha-Ata State Nature Reserve. The Kyrgyz territory protected areas, that are included in the WTS WHS, are subject to existing management plans developed within the framework of the Environmental Law of Kyrgyzstan. Historically established, local, clanbased governance systems, in natural and cultural heritage sites, began to collapse during the Soviet era and, currently, they are either dispossessed or highly deteriorated. Learning from international experiences, the WTS WHS management can be improved with fresh assessments of the natural and cultural values, greater oversight to implement international standards, better promotion of tourism and pilgrimage routes, and by developing effective management at the World Heritage Site