A Critical Systems Metamethodology for Problem Situation Structuring

The increasing complexity and diversity of management problem situations in organizations, as well as the increasing variety of theories, methodologies, methods, techniques, and models that can be employed in problem situation structuring and solving, must be considered as relevant aspects of management process in contemporary circumstances. Creative holism in management problem situations in organizations is enabled by means of Critical Systems Thinking (CST) as well as Critical Systems Practice (CSP), as the resulting metamethodology. In other words, through CST and CSP, it can be significantly contributed to the management of the increasing diversity and variety of methodologies, methods, techniques, and models, with the aim of improving the management of problem situations in organizations. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global

Exploring meaning: the implications of a hyphen for socio-technical theory and practice

In this paper, the authors explore the hyphenated spelling variant on papers taken from the Business Source Complete (BSC) repository. This paper finds that the hyphenated spelling variant is popular with more recent authors and that in total, socio-technical article publishing has recently recovered from the relative decline of the 1980s and 1990s. Within the socio-technical area, the topics of Work and Technology are receiving increased attention and studies of Behaviour, Change and major Stakeholder Groups are waning. The authors have critiqued the articles that indicated in their BSC Subject terms that their contents are related to Methodology but have found that few actually consider the socio-technical methodologies. Systems and socio-technical theory papers are critiqued, including papers by Enid Mumford and her work. Also discussed are lessons learned when using online repositories, such as the need to save search results to manage the surprising level of volatility of such academic databases. Finally, opportunities for future analysis are discussed, including trends; changes of emphasis within topics; researching into other academic search engines; and US based analysis

Designing personalised learning resources for disabled students using an ontology-driven community of agents

The exploration of social artifacts for the disabled is an important and timely issue. The affordances of new technologies like the Semantic Web allow more intelligent handling of educational learning resources that open up the potential of personalisation of services to individuals. Contemporary legislation calls for "reasonable adjustments" and "reasonable accommodation" to be made to services in order to accommodate the needs of disabled people. Here, the authors examine, from a design perspective, how this might be done in the context of higher education. Specifically, they advocate a design based upon an ontology-based personalisation of learning resources to deliver to students' real needs. To this end, so far little effort has been directed towards disabled students in higher education. The authors note some of the problems and issues with online assistive/adaptive technologies and propose a methodological fix. Here, they propose an ontology-based methodology for a Semantic Web community of agents that personalises learning resources to disabled students in higher education, specifically highlighting a disability-aware Semantic Web agency development methodology. The authors also present the results of usability evaluation of the implemented visual interface with some disabled and non-disabled students