Tag: Third order cybernetics

Third and Higher Order Cybernetics

Ratio Club: A Brief History of British Cyberneticians

Profiles in Operations Research

On Holons and Holarchy

History of Operations Research

Hierarchy Theory in Biology, Ecology and Evolution

Hierarchical Planning: Integration of Strategy, Planning, Scheduling, and Execution

Gantt Chart Simulation for Stock Flow Consistent Production Schedules

Production and Distribution Planning : Strategic, Global, and Integrated

Single, Double, and Triple Loop Organizational Learning

Accounting for Global Value Chains/Global Supply Chains

Stock Flow Consistent Models for Ecological Economics

Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, Circular and Cumulative Causation in Economics

Feedback Thought in Economics and Finance

Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in Economics

Wassily Leontief and Input Output Analysis in Economics

Towards the Circular Economy

Long Wave Economic Cycles Theory

Stock Flow Consistent Input Output Models (SFCIO)

Milankovitch Cycles: Astronomical Theory of Climate Change and Ice Ages

Micro Motives, Macro Behavior: Agent Based Modeling in Economics

Stock-Flow Consistent Modeling

Contagion in Financial (Balance sheets) Networks

Oscillations and Amplifications in Demand-Supply Network Chains

Classical roots of Interdependence in Economics

George Dantzig and History of Linear Programming

Morris Copeland and Flow of Funds accounts

Networks and Hierarchies

Boundaries and Networks

Monetary Circuit Theory

Understanding Global Value Chains – G20/OECD/WB Initiative

Quantitative Models for Closed Loop Supply Chain and Reverse Logistics

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Recursive Vision of Gregory Bateson

Law of Dependent Origination

Paradoxes, Contradictions, and Dialectics in Organizations

Key Sources of Research

Organicism: The Philosophy of Interdependence

Archie J. Bahm

International Philosophical Quarterly
Volume 7, Issue 2, June 1967
Pages 251-284
https://doi.org/10.5840/ipq19677251

Comparing civilizations as systems.

Bahm, A.J. (1988),

Syst. Res., 5: 35-47. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3850050105

“Organic unity and emergence.”

Bahm, Archie J.

Emergence: Complexity and Organization 14, no. 2 (2012): 116+. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed April 24, 2023). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A299258807/AONE?u=anon~a582c343&sid=googleScholar&xid=031287de.

The nature of existing systems.

Bahm, A.J. (1986),

Syst. Res., 3: 177-184. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3850030307

Five systems concepts of society.

Bahm, A.J. (1983),

Syst. Res., 28: 204-218. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830280304

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bs.3830280304

FIVE TYPES OF SYSTEMS PHILOSOPHY,

ARCHIE J. BAHM (1981)

International Journal of General Systems, 6:4, 233-237, DOI: 10.1080/03081078108934801

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03081078108934801

Holons: Three conceptions.

Bahm, A.J. (1984),

Syst. Res., 1: 145-150. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3850010207

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sres.3850010207

SYSTEMS THEORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Rob de Vries

https://www.academia.edu/45044397/SYSTEMS_THEORY_AND_THE_PHILOSOPHY_OF_SCIENCE

Introduction to Systems Philosophy

Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought

By Ervin Laszlo
Copyright 1972

ISBN 9781032071428
352 Pages
Published September 30, 2021 by Routledge

https://www.routledge.com/Introduction-to-Systems-Philosophy-Toward-a-New-Paradigm-of-Contemporary/Laszlo/p/book/9781032071428

“General systems theory: origin and hallmarks”,

Skyttner, L. (1996),

Kybernetes, Vol. 25 No. 6, pp. 16-22. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684929610126283

General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications.

Bertalanffy,L.1968.

New York: George Braziller.

(New York: Braziler, 1972 revised edition, 280p.).

The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design.

Bronfenbrenner, U. 1979.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

General Systems Theory: Its Present and Potential.

Rousseau, D (2015),

Syst. Res., 32, 522– 533. doi: 10.1002/sres.2354.

General Systems Theory: Its Past and Potential.

Caws, P (2015),

Syst. Res., 32, 514– 521. doi: 10.1002/sres.2353.

Systems Philosophy and the Unity of Knowledge.

Rousseau, D. (2014),

Syst. Res., 31: 146-159. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2189

The science of synthesis : exploring the social implications of general systems theory

Debora Hammond.

2003 University Press of Colorado

THE MEANING OF GENERAL SYSTEM THEORY

The Quest for a General System Theory

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Chapter 2 from General System Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications Ludwig von Bertalanffy
New York: George Braziller 1968
pp. 30-53

Click to access Bertalanffy,%20Ludwig%20von%20-%20The%20Meaning%20of%20General%20System%20Theory.pdf

TRENDS IN GENERAL SYSTEM THEORY

George J. Klir, Ed

Wiley-Interscience, N.Y ., 1972, 462 pp.

Introduction to System Theory

by Niklas Luhmann, Peter Gilgen (Trans.)
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, pbk. (ISBN: 978-0745645728), 300pp.

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=sspt-21-(default).pdf&site=412#page=68

GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY

Anatol Rapoport

University of Toronto, Canada

SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND CYBERNETICS – Vol. I – General Systems Theory – Anatol Rapoport

Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS)

Click to access E6-46-01-02.pdf

Systems Theories:
Their Origins, Foundations, and Development

By
Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner

Published in:
J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

The Architecture of Complexity

Herbert A. Simon
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106, No. 6. (Dec. 12, 1962), pp. 467-482.

Click to access ArchitectureOfComplexity.HSimon1962.pdf

A Taoist Foundation of Systems Modeling and Thinking

Karl R. Lang and Jing Lydia Zhang

Department of Information and Systems Management,
HK University of Science & Technology (HKUST), Hongkong

Email: {klang, zhangjin}@ust.hk

Click to access PARA142.PDF

Systems Theory

BRUCE D. FRIEDMAN AND KAREN NEUMAN ALLEN

FRAMEWORKS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

Click to access 32947_Chapter1.pdf

The History and Status of General Systems Theory

LUDWIG VON BERTALANFFY

* Center for Theoretical Biology, State University of New York ot Buffalo

George J. Kiir, ed., Trends in General Systems Theory (New York: Wiley-lnterscience, 1972).

Click to access the_history_and_status_of_general_systems_theory.pdf

Click to access bertalanffy.pdf

The Nature of Living Systems: An Exposition of the Basic Concepts in General Systems Theory.

Miler,James G.

Click to access ED039774.pdf

World Systems Theory

by Carlos A. Martínez-Vela

Click to access WorldSystem.pdf

An Outline of General System Theory (1950)

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Aug., 1950), pp. 134-165

Click to access Bertalanffy1950-GST_Outline_SELECT.pdf

On the Philosophical Ontology for a General System Theory

CUI Weicheng
Key Laboratory of Coastal Environment and Resources of Zhejiang Province (KLaCER) School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

Philosophy Study, June 2021, Vol. 11, No. 6, 443-458

doi: 10.17265/2159-5313/2021.06.002

Click to access 2021_10_Cui_cuiweicheng.pdf

Systems Theory as the Foundation for Understanding Systems

Kevin MacG. Adams
Peggy T. Hester
Joseph M. Bradley
Thomas J. Meyers
Charles B. Keating
Old Dominion University

Systems Engineering, 17(1), 112-123. 2014

doi:10.1002/sys.21255

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=emse_fac_pubs

A Brief Review of Systems Theories and Their Managerial Applications.

Cristina Mele, Jacqueline Pels, Francesco Polese, (2010)

Service Science 2(1-2):126-135. https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2.1_2.126

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/serv.2.1_2.126

Systems Philosophy

Ervin Laszlo

https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/uram.1.3.223

Systems Philosophy

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_philosophy

Centre for Systems Philosophy, UK
Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, UK
Club of Budapest, Hungary
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science
http://www.bcsss.org/

Systems Theory

Rudolf Stichweh

Click to access OntSoc4.pdf

Systems Philosophy and Cybernetics

Nagib Callaos
Founding President of the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (IIIS)

SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS VOLUME 19 – NUMBER 4 – YEAR 2021

Click to access IP139LL21.pdf

Systems Philosophy: An Integral Theory of Everything?.

Pretel-Wilson, Manel. (2017).

10.13140/RG.2.2.25388.16003.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322910282_Systems_Philosophy_An_Integral_Theory_of_Everything

Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory

by George P. Richardson (Author)

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pegasus Communications (January 1, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 374 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1883823463
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1883823467

Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory

“Semiotic systems”

BUNGE, MARIO.

In Systems: New Paradigms for the Human Sciences edited by Gabriel Altmann and Walter A. Koch, 337-349. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110801194.337

Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift

Michael R. Matthews

Springer International Publishing, Aug 1, 2019 – 827 pages

Systemism: the alternative to individualism and holism

Mario Bunge

The Journal of Socio-Economics
Volume 29, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 147-157

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-5357(00)00058-5

https://philpapers.org/rec/BUNSTA

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053535700000585

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=00e5dd26b0f93ae70714a1fa6aa8219a6907ca5a

On Mario Bunge’s Definition of System and System Boundary.

Cavallo, A.M.

Sci & Educ 21, 1595–1599 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9365-0

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-011-9365-0

A systems concept of society: Beyond individualism and holism.

Bunge, Mario (1979).

Theory and Decision 10 (1-4):13-30.

DOI 10.1007/bf00126329

https://philpapers.org/rec/BUNASC

Emergence and Evidence: A Close Look at Bunge’s Philosophy of Medicine

Rainer J. Klement 1,* and Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay 2

1Department of Radiation Oncology, Leopoldina Hospital Schweinfurt, Robert-Koch-Straße 10, 97422 Schweinfurt, Germany
2 Department of History & Philosophy, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, 59717, USA
* Correspondence: rainer_klement@gmx.de; Tel.: +49-9721-7202761

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/17047/

Official URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/4/3/50

Causality and Modern Science

Fourth Revised Edition

by Bunge, Mario (2008) Paperback

SYSTEM BOUNDARy

MARIO BUNGE (1992)

International Journal of General Systems, 20:3, 215-219, DOI: 10.1080/03081079208945031

A CRITICAL NOTE ON BUNGE’S ‘SYSTEM BOUNDARY’ AND A NEW PROPOSAL

JEAN-PIERRE MARQUIS (1996)

International Journal of General Systems, 24:3, 245-255, DOI: 10.1080/03081079608945120

Correspondence: Systems profile.

Bahm, A.J. (1987),

Syst. Res., 4: 203-209. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3850040306

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Reflexivity, Recursion, and Self Reference

Individual, Relational, and Collective Reflexivity

Key Terms

Reflexivity
Individual Reflexivity
Collective Reflexivity
Self Reference
Social Reflexivity
Socio Cybernetics
Autopoiesis
Cybernetics
Social Theory
Second Order Cybernetics
Third Order Cybernetics
Reflexivity and Psychology
Reflexivity and Sociology
Reflexivity and Anthropology
Reflexivity and Economics/Finance
Reflexivity and International Relations
Reflexivity in Qualitative Research
Reflexivity and Systems Science / Cybernetics
Reflection
Self Reflection
Self Knowledge
Self Awareness
Self Referential
Mindfulness
Self Organization
Self Correction
Feedback Loop
Cybernetic Loop
Unintended Consequences
Self Fulfilling Prophecy
Epistemological Circularity
Reflexive-Relational Logic
Circular-Dialectical Process
Auto Regulation
Subjectivity
Objectivity
Subject Object
Inter Subjectivity
Semiotic Self
Dialogical Self
Personal Reflexivity
Interpersonal Reflexivity
Methodological Reflexivity
Contextual Reflexivity
Internal Conversation
Complex Dialogical Interaction
RC51 of ISA
I and Me
We and Us
Meta Reflexivity
Relational Reflexivity
Relational Realism
Critical Realism
Relational Subject
Relational Sociology
Trichotomous Recursion.
Epistemic Reflexivity
Reflexive Dialogical Action Research
Self-other Reflexivity
Multi Frames
Multi Perspectivism
Positional Reflexivity
Institutional Reflexivity

Reflexivity Scholars

Pierre Bourdieu
Alvin Gouldner
Harold Garfinkel
Margaret Archer
Heinz Von Foerster
Victor Turner
Robert K. Merton ?
George Herbert Mead
Norbert Wiley
P Donati
Tobin Nellhaus
Charalambos Tsekeris

What is Reflexivity?

Source: A practical guide to reflexivity in qualitative research: AMEE Guide No. 149

What is reflexivity?

Many different definitions of reflexivity exist, and, as a result, researchers are often left unsure of what reflexivity is, let alone how to do it. To construct a comprehensive definition of reflexivity that both respected the variety of definitions available and appreciated the differences between them, we searched the qualitative methodological literature for publications focused explicitly on reflexivity. We then inductively analyzed them to identify congruences. Table 1 provides examples of some of the descriptions we encountered, which are incorporated in the definition provided below. We then synthesized these findings to develop the following comprehensive definition:

Reflexivity is a set of continuous, collaborative, and multifaceted practices through which researchers self- consciously critique, appraise, and evaluate how their subjectivity and context influence the research processes.

Source: A practical guide to reflexivity in qualitative research: AMEE Guide No. 149

Descriptions of Reflexivity

Source: Reflexivity, description and the analysis of social settings

The concept of ‘reflexivity’ has become an often-intoned mantra in contemporary social science, particulary, perhaps, sociology. This article, however, argues that the ‘blanket use’ of ‘reflexivity’ glosses over and confuses many different actual definitions and understandings of the concept – not least because the concept operates differently as a move within each of the divergent analytic ‘games’ that compose the overall discipline. One (among many other) crucial distinctions is that between ‘stipulative’ and ‘essential’ reflexivity – the former originating in part in G.H.Mead’s notions of the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’, and extended within current theories of reflexive modernity. This concept has been wrenched by professional social scientist from its mundane moorings and has been ‘elevated’ into an analytic technique of self interrogation. By contrast, ‘essential’ reflexivity, as adduced by ethnomethodological sociologists, remains resolutely emplaced in the domain of lay society-members’ ordinary sense-making practices: it here refers to the reciprocal, back-and-forth determinations of sense of members’ mundane descriptions of their specific circumstances and of the circumstances they describe – description and circumstance reflect upon each other during the sense-making practices. A brief example of essential reflexivity is given- reflexive formulations in ordinary conversations.

Source: REFLEXIVITY IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND SOCIAL ACTION

The present paper constitutes a theoretical overview of the well-established, yet highly contested, concept of reflexivity as one of the main buzzwords in sociology throughout the last two centuries. Its central aim is to comprehensively describe and critically discuss the changing historical relationships between reflexivity, sociological knowledge and everyday social life. In a rather detailed way, it carefully discerns the complex scientific meaning-making of reflexivity, from phenomenology and ethnomethodology to contemporary critical theory and the sociology of science, and extensively elaborates on its various interconnections to social action. Within this analytic framework, reflexivity is particularly associated with issues of consciousness and meaning, as well as with systematic theoretical efforts of effectively transcending old subject-object or action-structure dualistic dichotomies.

Source: Reflexivity: A Concept and its Meanings for Practitioners Working with Children and Families

We were able to identify six themes that represented the participants’ conceptualisations of reflexivity in relation to their practice:

as self-reflection, distinct from reflection

as a way to combine objectivity and subjectivity

as a critical appraisal of action and knowledge creation, in the moment

reflexivity as a tool for practice/an introspective process

reflexivity as a learning tool/critical practice approach

as a process of critical reflection on policy (D’Cruz et al., 2004)

Defining Reflexivity

Source: “Outing” the Researcher: The Provenance, Process, and Practice of Reflexivity

Defining Reflexivity

Reflexivity can be defined as thoughtful, conscious self-awareness. Reflexive analysis in research encompasses continual evaluation of subjective responses, intersubjective dynamics, and the research process itself. It involves a shift in our understanding of data collection from something objective that is accomplished through detached scrutiny of “what I know and how I know it” to recognizing how we actively construct our knowledge. “The reflexive ethnographer does not simply report ‘facts’ or ‘truths’ but actively constructs interpretations of his or her experiences in the field and then questions how those interpretations came about” (Hertz, 1997, p. viii).

Callaway (1992) extended the notion with reference to gender politics:

Often condemned as apolitical, reflexivity, on the contrary can be seen as opening the way to a more radical consciousness of self in facing the political dimensions of fieldwork and constructing knowledge. Other factors intersecting with gender— such as nationality, race, ethnicity, class, and age—also affect the anthropologist’s field interactions and textual strategies. Reflexivity becomes a continuing mode of self-analysis and political awareness. (cited in Hertz, 1997, p. viii)

Reflexivity can often be confused with reflection—and, indeed, in much of the literature, these terms are used interchangeably. The concepts are perhaps best viewed on a continuum where both ends are acknowledged to be important across the stages of a project. At one end of the scale, reflection can be understood as “thinking about.” As a subject, I reflect on an object. The process is a distanced one— the thinking is about something else and it takes place after the event. At the other end of the scale, reflexivity taps into a more immediate, continuing, dynamic, and subjective self-awareness.

A lived experience does not confront me as something perceived or represented; it is not given to me, but the reality of lived experience is there-for-me because I have a reflexive awareness of it, because I possess it immediately as belonging to me in some sense. Only in thought does it become objective. (Dilthey, 1985, cited in van Manen, 1990, p. 35)

Although actual (prereflective) lived experience can never be fully grasped in its immediate manifestation, with reflexive analysis, the researcher is aware of experiencing a world and moves back and forth in a kind of dialectic between experience and awareness. As Hertz (1997) put it, “To be reflexive is to have an ongoing conversation about the experience while simultaneously living in the moment” (p. viii). Having come to understand that the researcher, the world, and the researcher’s experience of the world are intertwined, the challenge is to identify that lived experience that resides in the space between subject and object. The researcher strives to capture some of the connections by which subject and object influence and constitute each other.

Theoretical Foundations

Methodological self-consciousness in the form of “confessional accounts” have been a common genre since the 1970s among ethnographers and anthropologists (Seale, 1999). In this kind of research, field-workers have been portrayed as infiltrating a group and then reporting authentically the experience of being an insider. The key process turns on transforming the personal experience data into public and accountable knowledge—hence the reflexive, methodological account. Coffey and Atkinson (1996) explain:

Transactions and the ideas that emerge from [the research process] . . . should be documented. The construction of analytic or methodological memoranda and working papers, and the consequent explication of working hypotheses, are of vital importance. It is important that the processes of exploration and abduction be documented and retrievable. (p. 191)

In less explicit ways, the provenance of the concept of reflexivity can also be found within other theoretical frameworks, including phenomenological, social constructionist, and psychodynamic theories and participative research approaches. Here, competing, sometimes contradictory, accounts of the rationale and practice of reflexivity are offered. Although it is possible to draw on several theoretical frameworks simultaneously, researchers who practice reflexivity tend to subscribe to particular visions and reject others. These fragmented origins contribute to the ambiguity of the concept. In the following discussion, my aim is to map this diverse territory, providing signposts for the uncertain researcher-explorer.

Phenomenologists focus on the way subject and object are enmeshed in prereflective existence. One key route to understanding is to reflexively interrogate our subjectivity as part of investigating how the subject is present in the object. In Gadamerian terms, reflexivity involves a positive evaluation of the researcher’s own experience to help him or her understand something of the fusion of horizons between subject and object (Outhwaite, 1985).

From this starting point, phenomenological philosophers such as Heidegger (1962) argued that each person will perceive the same phenomenon in a different way; each person brings to bear his or her lived experience, specific understandings, and historical background. This way of being-in-the-world means that researchers cannot help but bring their own involvement and fore-understandings into the research.

Applying these ideas, phenomenologists begin their research with the data of their experience; their own reflecting, intuiting, and thinking are used as primary evidence (Moustakas, 1994). They seek to “embrace their own humanness as the basis for psychological understanding” (Walsh, 1995, p. 335). Phenomenologists argue that researchers need to look within to attempt to disentangle perceptions and interpretations from the phenomenon being studied. “For phenomenology,” commented Giorgi (1994), “nothing can be accomplished without subjectivity, so its elimination is not the solution. Rather how the subject is present is what matters, and objectivity itself is an achievement of subjectivity” (p. 205). Understanding thus results from a dialectic between the researcher’s preunderstandings and the research process, between the self-interpreted constructions of the researcher and those of the participant.

Social constructionists draw on the notion of reflexivity to explain how individuals make sense of the social world and their place in it. Three strands of argument about the social dimension of reflexivity can be differentiated:

Mead (1934) considered reflexivity—the turning back of one’s social experience on oneself—central to becoming a person. Arguing from a symbolic interactionist perspective, he understood that individuals gain self-awareness in and through interactions with others.

Giddens (1991), following Harré’s (1983) notion of “identity projects,” argued that identity has become a reflexive project in our postmodern (or late modern) age. He discussed how the construction of self is turned to as a source of both interest and meaning.

Habermas focused on the capacity of humans to be reflexive agents and on how through reflecting on our own history (as individuals and as members of larger societies) we can change the course of history. He argued that the more we can understand how structural forces shape us, the more we can escape from those constraints (Giddens, 1985).

Social constructionists argue against taking an inward approach to subjectivity, in which individuals look into themselves “in an infinite regress of cognitive dispositions” (Gergen & Gergen, 1991, p. 79). Instead, they invite the researcher to look outward into the realm of interaction, discourse, and shared meanings.

Social constructionists also emphasize that any qualitative research is a co-constituted account. They stress the need to explore the dynamics of the researcher- researched relationship, which is seen to fundamentally shape research results. A different researcher than the one involved will, they say, have a different relationship, responding differently, asking different questions, and prompting different replies. Social constructionists would also attend to the rhetorical function of the discourse being studied. The participants might be engaged in an exercise in presenting themselves to the interviewer, but the researcher is trying to persuade the wider academic community about the value of the research. Thus, reflexive analysis is necessary to examine the impact of the researcher and participants on each other and on the research. This is a complex undertaking; the distinction between the observer and observed is problematic given their “emerging relatedness in the interview situation as each observes the other observing” (Jorgenson, 1991, p. 210).

Psychodynamic theorists explore how unconscious processes structure relations between the researcher, the participants, and the data gathered. They recommend the use of both introspection and self-reflection (embracing a variety of psychoanalytic techniques, such as dream analysis and interpretation of fantasies) as research tools to enable researchers to become aware of the emotional investment they have in the research concerned. Such reflections are also assumed to provide data regarding the social/emotional world of the participant. Hunt (1989) provided an illustration of why the researcher might experience feelings of helplessness, loneliness, and alienation in the early stages of fieldwork. She recommended reflecting on possible links with past experience: For example, the culture shock experienced as an “outsider” might be related to childhood experience of the birth of a younger sibling.

Psychodynamic theorists emphasize the need for us to explore how conversation or text affects us and to reflect on what we bring to it ourselves. They see unconscious needs and transferences as structuring the relationship between researcher and participant. Equally, the participant’s transferences are seen to influence the stories they tell; the researcher might follow this up by asking “How does my participant’s story move me?” As Parker (1997) reminded us, “We need to be aware of ourselves as the dreamers . . . unlike instances of other people telling us their dreams, we understand and share, partially at least, at some level, the story” (p. 488).

Participative approaches to research are found within a broad range of methodologies, from humanistic new paradigm and cooperative inquiry research (Heron, 1996; Reason, 1988) to more sociological, discursive, and feminist research (e.g., Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor, & Tindall, 1994; Potter & Wetherell 1995; Wilkinson, 1988). These wide-ranging research methodologies are linked by the way they seek to enlist participants as co-researchers. Recognizing research as a co-constituted account, adherents of participative research argue that the research participants also have the capacity to be reflexive beings: They can be co-opted into the research as co-researchers. At the very least, this involves participants in a reflexive dialogue during data analysis or evaluation. Smith (1994) cited an example of how using participants’ interpretations resulted in the researcher’s confronting, modifying, and honing his own interpretations. Co-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996) approaches, on the other hand, apply reflexivity more completely. Here, researchers, simultaneously participants in their own research, engage in cycles of mutual reflection and experience.

Another characteristic of such participative approaches is that researchers openly acknowledge tensions arising from different social positions in relation to such factors as class, gender, and race. As Wasserfall (1997) explained, “The use of reflexivity during fieldwork can mute the distance and alienation built into conventional notions of ‘objectivity’ or objectifying those who are studied. The research process becomes more mutual, as a strategy to deconstruct the author’s authority” (p. 152).

Researchers from these traditions are sensitive to the way they frame research questions, select participants, and interact with them to produce the observations and texts of analysis. Hertz (1997) argued,

Through personal accounting, researchers must become more aware of how their own positions and interests are imposed at all stages of the research process—from the questions they ask to those they ignore, from who they study to who they ignore, from problem formulation to analysis, representation, and writing—in order to produce less distorted accounts of the social world. (p. viii).

Reflexivity, then, can be understood in a multitude of ways according to which research traditions are adopted. It can be understood as a confessional account of methodology or as examining one’s own personal, possibly unconscious, reactions. It can also mean exploring the dynamics of the researcher-researched relationship and how the research is co-constituted. In practice, it has been applied at different levels. At a minimum level, it means acknowledging the existence of researcher bias and explicitly locating the researcher within the research process. At a more active level, it involves a more wholesale embracing of subjectivity, for example, by exploiting researcher’s/co-researcher’s reflective insights and by engaging in explicit, self-aware meta-analysis throughout the research process.

Types of Reflexivity

Personal
Interpersonal
Methodological
Contextual

Source: Japanese Reflexivity and Japanese Market

Modes of Reflexivity

Source: Semiotic Scaffolding of the Social Self in Reflexivity and Friendship

Communicative reflexivity
Autonomous reflexivity
Meta-reflexivity
Fractured reflexivity

Source: Reflexivity / ISA / Archer

Source: Reflexivity, Recursion and Relationality in Organisational Research Processes

Source: Reflexivity in the transdisciplinary field of critical discourse studies

Four concepts of reflexivity

To clarify what a reflexive notion of critique for discourse studies might look like, I will draw upon four uses of the concept of reflexivity: (1) reflexivity as a general feature of interaction and subjectivity; (2) reflexivity as a methodological praxis in the social sciences; (3) reflexivity as a property of discursive and non-discursive systems; and (4) extended reflexivity as a key feature of late modernity. These four notions are distributed unequally among the different strands of discourse studies. Drawing on these four notions, I will amend the conceptual scheme for discourse studies discussed above with the concepts of reflexivity and reflexive loops.

Reflexivity as (1) a general principle of interaction and subjectivity is rather common in the pragmatist inspired approaches to discourse that can be found in the fields of linguistic pragmatics (Verschueren and Brisard, 2009: 33–35) and ethnomethodology-inspired conversation analysis (Psathas, 1998: 291; Titscher et al., 2000: 106). It is common in related disciplines such as interactional sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology, but under-theorized in post-structuralist discourse theory. The notion of reflexivity as (2) a methodological stance or praxis is well known in sociological and anthropological discussions on the relationship between researchers and their research objects. Reflexivity is thereby conceptualized as a practical value that should be part and parcel of a sociological habitus. This ethical take on reflexivity is relatively rare in the more linguistically oriented approaches in discourse studies but did impact on the ethics of sociologically oriented discourse analysis and theory.

Reflexivity as (3) a property of discursive and non-discursive systems is hardly ever discussed explicitly in discourse analysis and theory. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels between systems theory and discourse theory that merit closer attention. And last but not least, the concept of reflexivity as (4) a key feature of late modernity has been addressed from time to time in critical discourse analysis, but deserves closer attention if we are to understand how critical subjectivities can be established through discourse in our day and age. By exploring these four approaches to reflexivity, I will clear the ground for a more central place for reflexivity in the conceptual field of critical discourse studies.

Reflexivity and the Self

Source: Reflections on Reflexivity: Sociological Issues and Perspectives

Reflexivity also involves the inspiring novel conception of “internal conversation” (Archer, 2003) that theoretically describes the continuous self-confrontation of the individual, as well as its complex dialogical interaction with the (changing) social environment. It is therefore “the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa” (Archer, 2007: 4). The sociological theorization of this “complex dialogical interaction” heavily draws from the famous school of American Pragmatism (mainly grounded on the original stimulating insights of John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead).3

From a relational social epistemological analytic standpoint, the self (including the epistemological/philosophical or sociological self) is rather reflexively re-created; it is necessarily intertwined with the “real world” and dialectically re-constituted by the on-going, mutual, synergetic and (chaotic) self-organizing interaction of the ego (1) with the emergent social structures and (2) with the significant others (actual, imagined, or implied).4 The very existence (or appearance) of these “significant others” is completely integral to the evolutionary reflexive emergence of selfhood. Yet, in the original social interpretivist sense of George Herbert Mead, the “other” is not only the other (significant) person, “but another perspective: another way in which the world is judged or appreciated” (Natanson 1956: 64). The self thus appears neither as a mere “object” of knowledge, nor as an empirical ego, which somehow lacks autonomy, agency, imagination, choice, creativity, improvisation and spontaneity. In other words, the human subject is not passive, self-assured, atomistic, and narcissistically private any more (see e.g. Tsivacou, 2005; Cilliers and De Villiers, 2000; Briggs and Peat, 1999).5 The self-in-relation-with-others (methodological relationalism) is now clearly prevailing upon the old self-in-social-vacuum (methodological individualism) (Ho et al., 2001).

Instead of naively seeing subjectivity as an isolated, independent, self-contained and self-referred locus of individual experience (according to the classical Cartesian ego), the synthetic reflexive-relational logic, in the open spirit of Ludwig Binswanger (1963), fruitfully links it with objectivity and inter-subjectivity, through an (endless) uncertain circular-dialectical process, without however reducing ontological questions to epistemological ones (just as Kant did), or “facts” to performative descriptions and interpretations, symbolic categories and conceptual frameworks.

Within a relational-realist or reflexive- realist analytic framework, knowledge cannot and should not be erroneously confounded with the “recording and analysis of the ‘pre-notions’ (in Durkheim’s sense) that social agents engage in the construction of social reality; it must also encompass the social conditions of the production of these pre-constructions and of the social agents who produce them” (Bourdieu, 2003: 282).7

This is of course in line with Roy Bhaskar’s or Pierre Bourdieu’s stance of critical/relational realism, but not with Anthony Giddens’s ultra-activistic structuration theory, or with Berger/Luckmann’s subjectivistic accounts of social constructivism, which implicitly reproduce and naively celebrate the old tradition of phenomenological individualism.

Collective Reflexivity

Source: Relational Realism, Collective Reflexivity and Social Movements

Source: Collective reflexivity in social marketing through ethnographic film-making: The Yolngu story of tobacco in Yirrkala, Australia

Literature review and theoretical framework

On reflexivity

Researchers have identified how collective understandings emerge through contestation regarding discourse and framing (Daellenbach and Parkinson, 2017), a sense of imagined community (Cayla and Eckhardt, 2008) or social movements (Gurrieri et al., 2018; Varman and Belk, 2009). Although this article sits within these broader discussions of social relationality, our specific focus is on reflexivity in Indigenous and relational settings. This context reflects the complex and multi-stakeholder social marketing arrangements in which collective relationships and reflexive processes can have a discernible impact on how social issues and social change are understood (Hastings, 2003; Johansson et al., 2018).

Initial work on reflexivity in consumer research focused on individual notions of reflexivity (Thompson, 2002; Thompson et al., 1998). Researcher reflexivity involves a researcher reflecting on their subjective influences on the construction of meaning during research, and how this may influence and inform research outcomes (Jayasinghe, 2015). More recently, the concept of participant reflexivity has emerged (Yang, 2015), through which research participants are recognised as reflexive actors and encouraged to reflect and contribute towards interpretations and representations.

Consumer culture scholars have also drawn attention to reflexive processes in the sociocultural realm. Askegaard et al. (2009) present the concept of cultural reflexivity, a practice of conscious reflection upon one’s culture. Cultural reflexivity is a process through which consumers revisit and renegotiate their identity and status, consumption practices and acculturation to marketplaces (Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012). Thompson et al. (2018) explain forms of consumer reflexivity as being critical, existential or reactive to uncover different relationships between consumer agency, social structures and identity goals and practices. Yet these conceptualisations still largely ground reflexivity as a personal endeavour, albeit one shaped by interactions between structure and agency (Beckett and Nayak, 2008).

Acknowledging the complex social and relational settings in which they operate (Hastings, 2003; Hastings and Saren, 2003), scholars are now focusing on reflexive processes that occur in collective contexts, within, between and across actors, and how these shape the framing and responses to social change issues (Casey et al., 2017; Gordon and Gurrieri, 2014). However, the conceptual underpinnings of collective notions of reflexivity are still not well understood in consumer research.

Collective reflexivity

Sociologists offer some conceptual tools that may help advance understanding. Archer (2013) asks whether we can conceive of ‘collective reflexivity’, a process of reflexive action at the interpersonal and intergroup relational level. This follows the line of Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) that multiple social actors related in a given field may engage in reflexivity. Donati (2011: 355) explains the concept of collective reflexivity as ‘the mental ability, shared by all (normal) people, to consider the influence of their relation(s) with others on to themselves and vice versa’. As such, an individual’s own behaviour is relational due to their immersion in a social world, and reflexive consciousness of the self is not something that occurs in and of itself and lacks any relations but is shaped by relations with other humans.

It follows that social relationality can and does structure the individual’s personal and social identity as well as agency – and this includes reflexive processes. This encourages us to acknowledge the personal I meeting the social realm in the form of Me, We and You during reflexive action (Archer, 2003). Therefore, considerations during a process of collective reflexivity may include questions of ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are you?’ and ‘How should I act?’ at the individual level and ‘Who are we?’ and ‘How should we act?’ at the collective level. Donati (2016) argues that collective reflexivity can occur when there are relational ties between humans who are oriented towards collective objectives, such as a common purpose or achievement. Therefore, for collective reflexivity to occur, the symbol of We needs to be held in common to create a relational subject.

Donati and Archer (2015) explain how such social identity and meaning are developed through collective reflexivity. They argue that reflections become social – that is, relational – when each person in a collective reflects not only upon the I-relation but also upon the We-relation, creating collective reflexivity. This does not necessarily mean there needs to be an identical interpretation of We among members, but that there is a common purpose and collective dynamic within the network (Donati and Archer, 2015).

Through a process of collective reflexivity, it is argued that a person’s inner dialogue can acknowledge feedback emerging from the reflexivity of a network of social relations in which that person is involved. This collective reflexivity then creates expressions of solidarity – a mutually beneficial strengthening of the social ties between community members – and subsidiarity – heightened member goodwill through acts of devotion or service to the community. Fostering solidarity and subsidiarity are important in social marketing (Dann and Dann, 2016), particularly in Indigenous contexts (Johansson et al., 2018).

Examples of collective reflexivity may be found on the micro level (e.g. when considering the relationship of a couple), the meso level (civic associations and organisations) and the macro level (e.g. citizen–government relationships) (Donati, 2016). Donati (2008) points out that the most positive expression of solidarity and subsidiarity would be the orientation of the members of a social network to the common good – a key concern in social marketing (Gordon et al., 2016). Scholars from other social change disciplines have identified the potential for collective reflexivity in understanding reflexive processes in group settings (Lawrence, 2017; Nellhaus, 2017). In our research context, the common good may involve a shared and representative understanding of tobacco and a commitment to tackling tobacco-related health and social harms.

However, one criticism of collective reflexivity is that it limits an understating of relationality and the process of intercession between structure and agency to reflexive deliberations (Caetano, 2015). However, we agree with Caetano (2015) and Vogler (2016) that this is not a matter of discarding Archer’s (2013) idea that collective reflexivity concerns relationality of people, but rather it requires an acknowledgement that understanding reflexivity and social relations may require the integration of Archer’s (2013) concepts with other concepts such as process-relational theory (Cobb, 2007; Cooper, 2005) that are concerned with relationality. Our focus in this study is not to address the critiques of Archer’s ideas or to study relationality per se. Rather, we aim to focus on collective reflexive processes and the generation of relational goods and evils relevant to social marketing in Indigenous contexts in which joint action on social change is an imperative (Archer, 2013; Johansson et al., 2018). This leads us to consider how collective reflexivity may be facilitated. We argue here that ethnographic film-making can offer a useful pathway.

Source: Embodied Collective Reflexivity: Peircean Performatives

The nature of agency and the place of reflexivity have long been key issues in critical realism. In the early 1990s Roy Bhaskar described agency’s primary ontological constituents using phrases such as ‘embodied intentional causal agency’, ‘intentional embodied causally efficacious agency’, and most compactly, ‘intentional embodied agency’—a conceptualization central to this article (Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 47, 144, 146, 153, 164, 185, 258). Some years earlier he also observed that

The capacity for a reflexive self-monitoring of one’s own causal interventions in the world, to be aware of one’s own states of awareness during one’s activity (to monitor the monitoring of one’s activity), is intimately connected to our possession of a language (Bhaskar 1989, 81).

As that sentence suggests, attention has mainly focused on intentionality and reflexivity in terms that are wholly linguistic. That said, more recently Margaret S. Archer, who has examined agency and reflexivity extensively, emphasized that ‘Our human reflexivity is closely akin to our human embodiment’ (2007, 1), arguing for the body’s position as the fulcrum of the self/other distinction, its experiences of (and ability to navigate) the natural environment, its accumulation of skills and habits, its role in emotion, and similar functions. This is a crucial matter—but as I will explain, embodiment pervades cognition (both conscious and unconscious) far more deeply than she evidently realizes. Thus, within critical realism’s theory of agency, embodiment’s role in reflexivity needs to be further fleshed out.

Moreover, analyses of agents’ reflexivity have largely concerned the individual; study of collective (or group) agency and reflexivity has been less focal. Archer (2013) considers collective agents’ reflexivity in some of her writings, but her argument only covers collective reflexivity conducted through language. Communication through gesture, facial expressions and other physical movements, proximity, clothing, hairstyle and the like, alone or together with speech—that is, embodied communication—is left untouched. Yet communication between people in all its forms is a core part of how agents make their way in the world, and requires us to look beyond individuals and their internal cogitations.

In short, much less work has been done on collective reflexivity than individual reflexivity, and the discussions of reflexivity have treated only reflexivity exercised through discourse, not through the agent’s entire ontology. But if, as we saw in Bhaskar’s definition, agents have three major aspects—intentionality, causal efficacy and embodiment—we cannot assume reflexivity can occur via only one of the three; and if agents are fundamentally social, we cannot assume collective reflexivity is marginal or simply derivative from individual reflexivity. This is the issue I will be considering: the conjunction of collectivity, reflexivity and embodiment—in other words, collective reflexivity conducted not just by saying, but also by doing. As I will show, embodied collective reflexivity is a prominent part of many people’s lives and so must figure in our understanding of how society operates.

Reflexivity and recursion

An individual’s reflexivity is her deliberation on her own thoughts and activities in relation to the context in which they occur, her circumstances, and perhaps her options for future actions. Its structure is recursive. That generates complexities for conceptualizing embodied reflexivity, so further detail is warranted. Recursion refers to the application of a process or structure upon itself. One of its outcomes is self-similarity, in which a part is similar to the whole, and so it often embeds other instances of itself (e.g. a sentence can contain another sentence). In mathematics recursion is essential to numerous concepts and formulas. In geometry recursion produces fractals—shapes that are self-similar at every level of scale—which have garnered considerable attention since the 1970s partly because they accurately model various natural phenomena, such as the growth patterns of certain algae and the branching patterns of fern leaves and various trees. Simple branching rules apply to every branch in the same way: for instance, ‘each branch generates two new branches’; but notably, a recursive method could also be ‘the right-hand branch generates two branches, but the left only generates one’. In principle (and in mathematics), recursion can be infinite; in practice it meets with some boundary. In fractal art the boundary is simply the current technological limit for image resolution (in print or on screen); in biology the limits of, say, branching lie more in the confluence of the requirements for capillary action, resistance against wind and other forces, and so on. Recursions in other natural phenomena likewise face material limits.

In human culture, recursion has figured for centuries and even millennia, expressed especially in images of self-containment (such as microcosms, the matryoshka doll and the mise en abyme), and also in spirals and other designs. However, recursion occurs not only in reflexivity and imagery, but also in numerous areas of social activity. The Dictionary of Critical Realism identifies recursion as ‘a cardinal property of the human social world as such’, and describes emergence itself as a form of nested embeddedness (i.e. self-containment) (Hartwig 2007, 405). One can go further: under the transformational model of social activity, each moment of agential action occurs on the basis of pre-given structural enablements and constraints, and subsequently establishes the structural enablements and constraints for the next moment of activity, in a potentially endless helical cycle of social reproduction and/or transformation. This too is a mode of recursion.

Reflexivity in consciousness is a special type of recursion due to its emergent character, both caused and (potentially) causing. On the one hand, it is motivated, often arising from uncertainty and/or under-determination. As Archer puts it,

people are necessarily reflexive about their ‘context’ or ‘circumstances’ when they ask themselves quotidian questions (in internal or external conversation) such as: ‘What shall we have for dinner?’, ‘Do I need to visit the dentist?’, or ‘Can one of us get back from work in time to pick the kids up from school?’ (2013, 145).

In short, the motivations for reflexivity are questions. Asking a question about one’s answers or method of answering generates a new recursion of reflexivity.

On the other hand, unlike other forms of discourse and intentionality, an agent’s reflexivity is self-targeted: the agent herself is the object of reference and/or action. Where most recursion elaborates a product, reflexivity enfolds the producer. This is the specific recursion that makes thought or activity reflexive. Archer calls a person’s reflexivity an ‘internal conversation’, involving dialogic interchanges between the ‘I’ who is presently deliberating and a metaphorical ‘me’ representing the sedimented self who has arrived at the present point of deliberation, and also (or alternatively) between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ representing the self who is coming into existence and might undertake one action or another (Archer 2003, 74–8, 95–116).1 Thus there is a dialectic in which one plays in turn both speaker and audience. The recursion involved in individual reflexivity would not be well described as a type of nested embeddedness; a more suitable image is the spiral—open and potentially ever-expanding, with each turn of the spiral motivated by a question.

It is clear enough that reflexivity about intentions depends on language, and consists of discursive (semiosic) activities. However, agents do not simply consist of their intentionality and their power of reflexivity in ‘internal conversation’: agency is also necessarily embodied and capable of taking action. We are whole beings, who emerged from natural processes. What, then, would reflexivity through entire bodies involve? What would count as embodied reflexivity?

Performatives

When agents seek causal efficacy, usually their motives are to bring about changes in the world, be it to get dinner on the table, secure social connections through gossip, or whatever else. Speech itself (including texts) is a type of action or way to do things. More precisely, as J. L. Austin argued, all utterances are speech acts, from the obvious like declarations that a meeting is adjourned, to the more subtle like logical proofs and truth claims: they accomplish or enact things. Austin’s term for speech acts is performatives.2

However, the very fact that agents incorporate self-awareness and embodiment into their causal efficacy means that their embodied intentional activities (and often their unintentional activities) bear meaning. My point is deeper than the adage, ‘Actions speak louder than words’: more, actions can in effect be utterances, sometimes via conventions, but also intrinsically. This is essential to the concept of embodiment I am forwarding. An everyday example is a hug, which (depending on the context) can communicate caring feelings such as ‘I’m happy to see you’, ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sorry you feel bad’. At a more complex level, one can glimpse this understanding of embodiment from a moment in the film Vanilla Sky, when a character asserts that ‘when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not’. The comprehensibility of this statement (whether or not one agrees with the sentiment) lies in an understanding of embodiment’s meaningfulness. But that meaningfulness is not (or not just) semiotic; it is also experiential, emotive and social. It infuses a person’s habits, their gestures and physical styles, the way they touch or do not touch others, the quality of their voice, their sense of timing, and many more aspects of comportment. It is also sedimented in the way they inhabit their body and inhabit the area around them—for example, some people ‘own’ a space as soon as they enter it while others seem to make themselves disappear.3 The meaningfulness of embodied activity can thus both express agency and influence its conduct, partly because embodiment is one of the conditions of possibility for agential action, and partly because, like any system of meaning, it has aspects that are constructed socially. Consequently, I expand the concept of performatives to embrace not only speech acts, but also acts that speak.

The recursive structure of embodied reflexivity must be different from the speech acts of an ‘internal conversation’ because there is a fundamental difference between the ‘spiral’ of discourse, in which the only causal power undergoing recursion is semiosis (principally language), versus the recursion of full agentiality, in which multiple causal powers are involved and are intrinsically interrelated—but do not necessarily recurse in the same way. ‘Intentional embodied causally efficacious agency’ describes a stratified structure that arose through natural and historical emergence. At its base is mere physical existence, a feature we share with stones and water, which provides the matrix of possibility for all else. From simple materiality emerged entities with the power to act upon the environment, a power all biological forms possess, and which transforms the living being’s physical composition into its body. Through their embodiment, life-forms obtain food, protect themselves from danger, and reproduce. Humans do many other things, of course, but this emergent ability to act upon the environment is the causal efficacy necessary for agency.

Finally, the emergent powers of intentionality and semiosis arose within humans; but intentionality would be nothing without the ability to act, which in turn depends on embodiment.

All three aspects of agency must be involved in the recursion required for embodied reflexivity. Due to the line of dependency and the different natures of these three characteristics, acts that speak—embodied performatives—require not only the recursion of all three layers of embodied intentional agency, but a recursive method that is governed by the relationship between them, namely stratification and emergence.

Trichotomous Recursion.

Source: Embodied Collective Reflexivity: Peircean Performatives

My related posts

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Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, and Social Systems Theory

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From Systems to Complex Systems

Key Sources of Research

Reflexivity (social theory)

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On Reflexivity: Tribute to Catherine Kohler Riessman

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Narrative Works

Issues, Investigations, & Interventions

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Reflexive Qualitative Research

Wendy Luttrell

Subject: Research and Assessment Methods

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For Social Reflexivity in Organization and Management Theory

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The Production of Managerial Knowledge and Organizational Theory: New Approaches to Writing, Producing and Consuming Theory

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Volume 20, 2013 – Issue 4: Reflexivity and Economics: George Soros’s Theory of Reflexivity and the Methodology of Economic Science

Pages 330-342 | Received 24 Sep 2013, Accepted 17 Oct 2013, Published online: 13 Jan 2014
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Reflexivity and Its Limits in the Study of Social Inequalities

Reflexivität und seine Grenzen bei der Untersuchung sozialer Ungleichheit
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Habitus, Symbolic Violence, and Reflexivity: Applying Bourdieu’s Theories to Social Work

Wendy L. Wiegmann
University of California – Berkeley, wendy.wiegmann@gmail.com

WMU The Journal of Sociology and Social Work

Volume 44
Issue 4 December 2017

https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3815&context=jssw

Subjectivity and Reflexivity in the Social Sciences:

Epistemic Windows and Methodical Consequences

Franz Breuer

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Reflexivity and Structural Positions: The Effects of Generation, Gender and Education

Tea Golob¹

Matej Makarovič^1,2,*

¹School of Advanced Social Studies in Nova Gorica, Institute for Social Transformations, Gregorčičeva 19, SI-5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia

²Faculty of Information Studies, Ljubljanska 31a, SI-8000 Novo Mesto, Slovenia

^*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Soc. Sci. 2019, 8(9), 248; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8090248

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/9/248

Meta-reflexivity and epistemic cognition in social science teacher education

Marcus Kindlinger

University of Wuppertal

Journal of Social Science Education

2021, Vol. 20(3) 29-54

Edited by: Olga Bombardelli,Reinhold Hedtke,Birgit Weber

https://www.jsse.org/index.php/jsse/article/view/4087

“Outing” the Researcher: The Provenance, Process, and Practice of Reflexivity

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São Leopoldo, Brasil

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Reflexivity: A Concept and its Meanings for Practitioners Working with Children and Families

By Heather D’Cruz, B.S.W., M.S.W., Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Social Work, School of Health and Social Development, Deakin University, Waterfront campus, Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Philip Gillingham, B.A. (Hons), M.S.W., CQSW, Lecturer in Social Work, School of Health and Social Development, Deakin University, Waterfront campus, Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Sebastien Melendez, B.S.W. (Hons), Social Worker, Bethany Community Support, North Geelong, Victoria, Australia

https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/csw/article/download/5744/4687?inline=1

REFLEXIVITY IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND SOCIAL ACTION

Charalambos Tsekeris, Nicos Katrivesis

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Greece Email: tsekeris@gmail.com
University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece
E-mail: nkatrive@uom.gr

FACTA UNIVERSITATIS
Series: Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology and History Vol. 7, No1, 2008, pp. 1 – 12

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REFLEXIVITY IN SOCIAL SYSTEMS: THE THEORIES OF GEORGE SOROS

UMPLEBY STUART1
1International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences

Systems Research and Behavioral Science 24, 515-522 (2007)

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Social responsibility, Reflexivity and development of Cybernetics

Kybernetes

Submission deadline: January 31st 2020

Guest editors

Igor Perko, University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business, igor.perko@um.si
Vladimir Lepskiy, Russian Academy of Science, Institute of Philosophy, lepsky@tm-net.ru

https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/k/social-responsibility-reflexivity-and-development-cybernetics

Sociology in an Era of Fragmentation: From the Sociology of Knowledge to the Philosophy of Science, and Back Again.

Steinmetz, G., Chae, O. B., (2002),

University of Michigan

Click to access SteinmetzGouldner.pdf

UNIT 4 REFLEXIVITY

eGyankosh

Click to access Unit-4.pdf

Risk society: towards a new modernity

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Understanding Metatheater

Key Terms

Meta Theater
Sanskrit Drama
Meta Play
Meta Drama
Many Voiced
Polyphony
Dialectics
Dialogs
Interaction
Drama
Metacommentary
Victor Turner
David Boje
Margret S. Archer
Tobin Nellhaus
Lionel Abel
Richard Hornby
Reflexivity
Collective Reflexivity
Embodied Collective Reflexivity
Self Reference
Recursion
Cybernetics
Cybernetic Loop
Social Drama
Frames
Multiple Frames
Competing Frames
TAMARA
Postmodern Theater
Polyphonic Organization
CHEN Jing-xia
T G Rosenmeyer

Metatheater

Source: Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism

Source: From theatrics to metatheatre: The Enron Drama

We review briefly dramatism and theatrics and attempt to synthesize several views of metatheatre to suggest that metatheatre has the potential to govern theatrics. We posit metatheatre can influence theatrics by dis-integrating dominant theatrics to reveal differences, and provide those competing theatrics a stage for enactment. On the other hand, metatheatre may provide a means for competing theatrics to achieve dialectic resolution through antenarrative synthesis. We think metatheatre serves both dialectic purposes, sometimes by engendering a dialectic of disintegration as well as resolving competing theatrics when metatheatre offers an antenarrative that either synthesizes theatrical dialectics or enables them to co-exist on the same stage. These two metatheatrical governed events occur simultaneously and continuously, continuing without closure in rhizomatic fashion. The only criteria metatheatrics must met is that it allows theatrics to continue to find a way to move (forward, backward, sideways, up, down, etc.), so that players, in our case, people in organizations, can continue to coordinate ongoing action.

Aligning ourselves with dramatism and the narrative paradigm in general, we begin by reviewing theatrics and metatheatre. We then explore Enron’s context and the related theatrics. We demonstrate how metatheatre mediates all these theatrics and then discuss how metatheatre operates and the implications of metatheatre for future research on the topic of organizational theatre. We hope to offer a view of metatheatre that can be applied widely in the analysis of social life.

Dramaturgy, Theatrics, and Antenarrative

The two main influences of dramaturgy in organizational studies are Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman. Both of them encourage us to look at social interaction through a theatrical lens, seeing how people dramatize and mystify everything they do in everyday life. Focusing this lens on organizational life allows us to analyze organizations as context made up of actors playing roles on a particular stages. Dramaturgy assumes a close relationship between language and action (Burke, 1966, 1969). Dramas are literary compositions that tell a story, often of human conflict, by means of dialogue and action, and are performed by actors’ in front of an audience (Turner, 1986).

In organizational studies, drama is used as an umbrella metaphor (Czarniawska, 1997) encompassing a wide range of events where meaning emerges from social interaction: story-as-performed, enacted stories, scripts, cultural performance, plays, etc. Mangham and Overington (1987) present a dramaturgical model for understanding organizational interactions and the staging of organizational reality, looking at the various ways organizational members project appearances in various organizational settings. Continuing that work, Clark and Mangham (2004) look at dramatic events that are explicitly scripted and produced. They examine the power corporate theatre has in suggesting new values and challenging everyday assumptions as the authors, audience and actors collude in turning scripts into an imaginative life made present. The difference with the examination we present is that the audience was an unwitting one.

Clark and Mangham (2004) review a piece of corporate theatre where the audience was invited to what they knew was a corporate show, a Hollywood-style production. In the performance we analyze here, the audience was an unwitting one. They were not aware they were watching scripted theatrics. And while the producers knew the show was make-believe, the audience thought they were witnessing everyday life, and not a special show created in a liminal space set aside for the scripted performance. Our example provides a backstage peek at some Goffmanesque trickery and mystification.

Dramaturgy’s bent on social construction is that social reality is co-constructed through a community of players and witnesses to the play (Barry, 1997). Dramatrugists assert that human behavior is constituted by rhetoric; individuals use discourse to persuade and influence the behavior of others (Brissett & Edgley, 1990).

“The synthetic nature of stories goes beyond saying what did happen, to imply what should happen or what can happen. In this way, they not only influence thought, feeling, and will, but the construction of social reality itself” (Feldman, 1990, italics in original).

In addition to discourse, dramaturgy recognizes that part of the meaning of peoples’ social interaction is to be found in the manner which they express themselves during interaction (Brissett & Edgley, 1990). Thus, how people express themselves to, and in conjunction with, others to create meaning is the central focus of dramaturgy (Gardner & Avolio, 1998).

Organizational theatrics remind us that a drama is never really complete until it is performed; acted on some kind of a stage before an audience.

‘Even the most trivial forms of day-to-day talk involve immense skill and presume a great deal of learning. Talk can become art in the sense that particular forms of convention or contrivance may be employed to secure certain expressive and communicative ends. Storytelling, displays of wit, rhetoric and drama exist in all types of society. The ‘success’ of these verbal forms, however, is directly involved with their performance…’ (Giddens, 1987).

Those particular theatrics, their production and for whom and what purpose, by what means, become organizational episodes, along with their scripts, that we can explore using narrative and ethnographic methods. For the organization itself, organizational theatre provides a model, in one concentrated image, of the ways in which members can give meaning and direction to their work lives. While organizational narratives furnish an ideal, theatrics enact particular stories, specifying roles suited for particular actors and contexts. By engaging in theatrics in various settings for particular audiences, actors attempt to shape their definition of the situation Goffman (1959).

But this shaping can be met with resistance. People have their own projects and there are represented by competing discourses and expressed by people performing those discourses in competing theatrics (Boje, 2002a; Boje and Rosile, 2003b). They are enacting new and alternative narratives and fighting for stage time.

This competition often begins with antenarrative. Antenarrative theory (Boje, 2001) is closely tied to Kristeva (1980: 36) and Bakhtin (1981), who suggest that each text has an intertextual “trajectory” that is historical and social (Boje, 2001, O’Connor, 2002). Used as an adverb, “ante” combined with “narrative” or “antenarrative” means earlier than narrative. Antenarrative shifts the focus of narrative analysis from “what’s the story here” to questions of “why and how did this particular story emerge to dominate the stage?” Used as a noun, ‘ante’ indicates a bet, a pre-narrative speculation that offers new possibility. As opposed to an existing or dominant narrative, antenarrative is nothing more than a wager. Antenarrative signifies discourse that is fragmented, nonlinear, incoherent, collective, yet unplotted. The bet is that such a pre-story can be told and theatrically performed to thereby enroll stakeholders in intertextual ways that transform the world of action into theatrics. A narrative of dominant discourse usually tries to retain its elite status by silencing alternative discourse or swashing antenarrative newcomers. People in power re-double their efforts at theatrics that enact the narratives that serve their own purposes and projects. They do not want to share stage time with competing theatrics or antenarrative rookies, much less rebels.

Antenarrative is threatening to narrative because its theatrics are potentially liberating. Clark and Mangham(2004) explains how in theatrics, imaginative events take on for a moment the presentness of physical events; in theatre, ‘physical events take on for a moment the perfection of imaginative form’ (Cole, 1975, cited in Clark and Mangham). These moments involve a power to reveal the seen but unnoticed by juxtaposing the lived and experienced world with the presentation of the narrative ideal (to contrast the profane with the sacred), and the role that theatrics play depends on the manifestation of imaginative life as physical presence (Clark and Mangham, 2004).

But theatrics are tenuous, and liberation and change is far from guaranteed. While organizations themselves are becoming more fragmented, polyphonic (many voiced) and collectively produced, and we would like to think that as modernist organizations make way for postmodern organizations, dominant narratives must make way for multiple stories. The issues of power and politics, along with the marginalization and silence of alternative discourses and antenarrative is ever present.

The focus of our analysis are these currently-under-construction and fragmented theatrics, the discourses just beginning to compete through enactment. These organizational theatrics are the theatrics of the antenarrative versus the theatrics of narrative. Looming over this staged battle is metatheatre.

Metatheatre

In this paper, we synthesize two metatheatre perspectives. Victor Turner (1985: 181) uses the term to indicate all the communication regarding a particular communication process, the metacommentary that spectators and actors engage in as they reflect upon their own roles and actions on various stages. We all engage in this metacommentary, reflecting and talking about what we have said and done or even what we are saying and doing. “Thus, if daily living is a kind of theater, social drama is a kind of meta-theater, that is, a dramaturgical language about the language of ordinary roleplaying and status-maintenance which constitutes communication in the quotidian social process” (Turner, 1985:181). This metatheatre involves reflexivity by everyday actors about their performances where they reveal to spectators what they are doing.

For Boje and Rosile (2003a), the term metatheatre highlights the simultaneity of multiple theatres. For them, metatheatre indicates the multiple and contending theatres that constitute organizations. Boje (1995) uses the metaphor of a multi-play performance called Tamara, where the audience follows different threads of stories, following actors from room to room. Doing so, the audience only ever sees portions of the larger script. They get peaks and pieces depending on the theatrics they witness. The metatheatre here is represented by the grand written script, the meta-script, by Tamara playwright John Krizanc (1981, 1989). For actors and audience alike, there is no ‘larger’ script. The only thing the audience can experiences in chasing actors from room to room are fragmented, emerging, incomplete theatrics. As with a grand narrative (Lyotard, 1979/1984), no one is ever in the position to witness metatheatre, but only local narratives and theatrics. The same is true for all of us, whether it be the metatheatrics of ‘capitalism’ or our organizations. We never see all the theatre performed; it is occurring simultaneously on different stages; some you see and perform, but other acts you hear about from colleagues, vendors, and customers (Boje & Rosile, 2002b). We know them, and change them, only through the theatrics that involve us.

The relation between theatrics and metatheatre might be compared to Gidden’s (1987) deep and surface structure which entails a duality of some construct simultaneously influencing and being influenced by, social interaction. The metatheatre provides an abstract frame for our theatrical actions, and those actions in turn influence the frame. Our actions also change our conception of metatheatre. We see similar dualities in organizational studies, as with the perspective of a culture that resides ‘above’ individual behavior or the simultaneous and recursive emergence between structure and strategy.

We synthesize these two metatheatre approaches so we can reflect on theatrics and their purposes and agenda, as well as attend to Tamara-esque fragmentation, liminality and indeterminacy of processual aspects of theatrics. Both perspectives take postmodern turns in dramaturgy, with Turner’s focusing on reflexivity and metacommentary while Boje and Rosile’s focus on fragmentation and multiple theatrics.

As we will see, both of these processual theatrical qualities are endemic to Enron (Boje, 2002b), and can be reveal through Enron actors reflecting on their actions and theatrics. At Enron, each integrating attempt by presidents, corporate leaders and boards of directors to evoke spectacular theatre, to control the center stage, and to enroll a cast of characters that will influence spectators, soon disintegrates as the pull of multiple scripts, plots, and characters spin out of control.

On one hand, metatheatre reveals a dialectic of disintegration that opposes integrative attempts by executive players. On the other hand, metatheatre might also offer a resolution by offering an antenarrative that allows multiple theatrics to co-exist on the same stage (that will become a Tamaraland), or perhaps the new antenarrative will turn out to be a good bet, bringing together or silencing the previous narratives, carving out enough space and stage to become the new dominant theatrics by subsuming or displacing competing theatrics. And eventually, these evolutions and revolutions in dialectic cycles of theatric-integration and disintegration, the networking of simultaneous stage-crafted performances seeking to instruct and control spectators and actors, also erupt into more fragmentation (Boje, 2002b: 10).

Our synthesis also allows us to make reflexive hermeneutic shifts. We make shifts between the metatheatric perspectives, between actor commentary about their theatrics and the theatrics that emerge from those reflections, as well as shift between the multiple competing theatrics. By making these shifts, we are able to explore and reveal fragmented, emerging theatrics that might plant a seed for change through dialectic confrontation or synthesis, as well as the actor and spectator reflections on their own performances and participation in theatrics.

Source: VICTOR TURNER’S POSTMODERN THEORY OF SOCIAL DRAMA: Implications for Organization Studies

Metatheatre – Turner (1985: 181) invents the term ‘meta-theater.’ Where for Burke and Goffman, all the world is a theatre stage, for Turner, ‘meta-theatre’ is the communication about the communication process, spectators and actors reflect upon how the actors do what they do on stage, ‘the ability to communicate about the communication process itself’ (p. 181). In contrasting his own dramaturgy work with Goffman’s, Turner (1985; 181) says that for him ‘dramaturgical analysis begins when crises arise in the daily flow of social interaction.’ Turner continues, ‘Thus, if daily living is a kind of theater, social drama is a kind of meta-theater, that is, a dramaturgical language about the language of ordinary role-playing and status-maintenance which constitutes communication in the quotidian social process’ (p. 181). Metatheatre then is for Turner, reflexivity by everyday actors about the communication system, where they consciously show spectators what they are doing. Turner studies reflexivity in crisis phase of social interaction, but also within the redressive phase. Turner theorizes four phases, breech, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration in what he calls ‘social drama.’

Metacommentary, is a term (Turner, 1982a: 104) borrows from Geertz, ‘a story a group tells itself about itself’ or ‘a play a society acts about itself.’ Metatheatre then builds upon the idea of metacommentary, ‘an interpretive reenactment of its experience’ (Turner, 1982a: 104). In the positive, metatheatre reenacts conflicts, giving them contextualization, so that with metacommentary, facets are illuminated and accessible for remedial action. Through multiple reflections, spectators are able to provoke transformations in everyday life. On the negative side, the metatheatre distorts event and context in ways that provoke conformity. For example, our weekly street theatre is a metacommentary on global, national, and local conflicts, a time for reflection and reflexivity. Our signs are commentary, and we resist conformity. We are opposed by metacommentary of our critics, what see our acts as traitorous, seditious, and rebellious. Both sides use drama to provoke and persuade.

Metatheatre is about the dialectic process of framing through theatre, in ways that appeal to the frame of mind of the spectator; resistance is about bringing counter-frames to bear on dominant frames.

UNDERSTANDING METATHEATRE

Introduction

“Meta” is a Greek word, meaning “after” and “with” or “alongside”. It becomes a very active prefix. Like other words that are coined with a prefix “meta”, such as metafiction, metahistory, and metanarrative, metatheatre1, also denoting the concept of self-reflectivity, is a scrutiny of and concern with theatricality and the making of theatre. The practice of metatheatre has a long history; however, the term, both seminal and much-debated, was initially used in 1963 by the critic and playwright Lionel Abel in his work Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, a loose collection of essays on metatheatre. He declared that a new form has succeeded tragedy as the dominant force of modern theatre, which he termed “metatheatre”. Abel’s discussion has aroused the interest of critics. Since his coinage of the term, other important works on metatheatre have been published, trying to demarcate the domain of metatheatre and attempting at the itematization of the features of metatheatre.

Definitions and Features of Metatheatre

Abel (1963) defined metatheatre as “theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized” (p. 60), a theatre not concerned with the world “outside” the theatre, but only with the theatre itself. His theory of metatheatre rested on two basic postulates: First, the world was a stage; second, life was a dream (Abel, 2003, p. 163).

Abel pointed out the nature of metatheatre—a subset of theatricality, or the glorification of the theatre itself, and he also presented the particulars of metatheatre in a miscellaneous and combined manner2, but his definition was loose and sometimes erratic. Later critics redefined the term and expanded the scope of metatheatre.

Calderwook (1971) offered his definition of metatheatre in Shakespearean Metadrama: Metatheatre “is a dramatic genre that goes beyond drama (at least drama of a traditional sort), becoming a kind of anti-form in which the boundaries between the play as a work of self-contained art and life are dissolved” (p. 4). Calderwook’s understanding of metatheatre does not go beyond the confines established by Abel.

June Schluter in her Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (1979) understood metatheatre broadly as a concept focused on identity, a tool for the playwright to mark the distinctions between reality and illusion, art and life. Her study included postmodern dramatists, such as Peter Weiss, Edward Albee, and Tom Stoppard. She concluded that all plays under scrutiny in the book “reflect the modern artist’s ongoing awareness of the constantly changing dialectic of reality and illusion” (as cited in Gallagher, 2010, p. 2).

In 1982, Manfred Schmeling in his French monograph on metatheatre defined it as plays that refer to themselves as plays, primarily through the device of the play within the play. For instance, Shakespeare’s use of “The Murder of Gonzago” in Hamlet becomes a paradigm for such a device. Schmeling brought out the intertextuality in metatheatre and extended his study to certain Romantic plays. (Gallagher, 2010, p. 3) Schmeling was not the first to note the intertexuality in metatheatre. Gentili in Theatrical Performance in the Ancient World: Hellenistic and Roman Theatre (1979) observed the intertextuality when remarking “I used the term ‘metatheatre’ in the sense that played constructed from previously existing plays” (p. 15).

More critics emphasize interxtuality in metatheatre. Anderson in his Barbarian Play: Plautus’s Roman Comedy (1993) warned us of “this voguish term ‘metatheatre’” and remarked that we “must confine its usage” (p. 139). He reserved metatheatre to the changes one play rings upon another, or to its argument with it. Boyle (1997) referred to the process of play making as “The Palimpsestic Code” in Tragic Seneca. (ch. 5)

Slawomir Swiontek, a Polish drama theorist and semiotician, in his contribution to the theory of metatheatre in 1986 and 1993, called dramatic dialogue “meta-enunciative” in that it always contains the two theatrical axes of communication, among characters onstage and toward the audience (Gallagher, 2010, p. 2). William Fitzhenry in “The N-Town Plays and the Politics of Metatheatre” (2003) discussed two contrasting theatrical models: the monologic and the dialogic. He thinks:

The second model posits a more dynamic and interactive form of drama that initiates an open-ended dialogue between stage and audience. In this model, the boundaries between playwright, actor, and audience do not collapse to underwrite a single, overarching idea, but rather remain in tension with one another, multiplying interpretive possibilities rather than reducing them. (p. 23)

Most importantly in 1986, Richard Hornby (1986) published his seminal work Drama, Metadrama and Perception, giving a clear definition and taxonomy of metatheatre. Metatheatre, in his view, means “drama about drama”. It occurs “whenever the subject of a play turns out to be, in some sense, drama itself” (p. 31). It implies self-reflexivity, or a type of literature that is aware of itself as a literary object and concerned with the process of its own making. It is characterized with theatricality, self-awareness, self-reflexivity, and self-knowledge.

The various definitions and features of metatheatre examined here indicate that the understanding of metatheatre is deepened and the confines of it enlarged, as can be further demonstrated in the evolution of metatheatre.

The Evolution of Metatheatre

Baroque metatheatre and modernist metatheatre are generally regarded as the two great eras of metatheatricality. Abel and the critics following him believe that metatheatrical plays first appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For him, Shakespeare, Calderon, and other baroque playwrights wrote plays “about life seen as already theatricalized” with characters “unlike those in tragedy […] aware of their own theatricality” (as cited in Gallagher, 2010, p. 1). Abel later stresses the differentiation between tragedy and metatheatre in Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form, a collection of essays published in 2003. For him, tragedy deals “with the real world” and metatheatre “with the world of the imagination” (Abel, 2003, p. v). He regarded Macbeth as Shakespeare’s only tragedy, while Hamlet is a typical metatheatrical play.

Richard Fly (1986) noted that a growing body of scholars is concerned with the self-reflexive themes and techniques in Shakespeare’s plays. They find in his plays a preoccupation with “the materials and processes of art-making itself” (p. 124), and intend to view his masterpieces as “‘mirrors’ reflecting the artist’s ongoing struggle to understand and master the expressive potential of his medium” (p. 124). They conclude that

the drama in the plays becomes dislodged from plot and character and situated instead in the playwright’s self-conscious interaction with himself, his medium, and his audience. With this redirection of the creative process, mimesis gives way to self-analysis, and drama is subsumed in “metadrama”. (p. 124)

Later playwrights in the 20th-century, such as Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett inherited the legacy of the baroque playwrights and represented the illusory and theatrical qualities of both life and theatre. The Theatre of the Absurd is also considered as metatheatre.

In a remarkable introduction to Abel’s Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form, Martin Puchner differentiates between baroque metatheatre and modernist metatheatre. Despite the similarity that both represent and mediate on theatre, baroque playwrights used the form to “celebrate the theatre” and theatricality, while modernist playwrights “view the theatre with mistrust and suspicion”, exposing its problematic nature (Abel, 2003, p. 17). Puchner pointed out that German dramatist and director Brecht admitted to being driven by a continual “mistrust of theatre” and attempted to make the theatre less theatrical in his experiment with Epic Theatre (Abel, 2003, p. 17).

Most of Pirandello’s plays explore his meditation on reality as a problematic concept, which can be apprehended neither objectively nor scientifically. He produced a group of plays exploring the art of theatre, knowns as “theater in the theatre”, which include Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Each in His Own Way (1924), Tonight We Improvise (1930), and The Mountain Giants (1934). He used ingeniously play-within-the play to tear down the fourth wall, to keep reminding the audience that he is facing not reality and real people but a created work, performed by actors. In this way, he achieved the effect of estrangement and explored the themes of artistic creation, of the relationship between art and the everyday reality. Such a technique influenced Brecht.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a piece of metatheatre, a play-within-the-play. There are two interwoven plots. The first plot is a sentimental melodrama of a family, composed of six members: father, mother, son, stepdaughter, boy, and girl. These characters are conjured and then abandoned by their author, but have by now life in their own veins; therefore, they seek the means to exhibit their drama. The second plot centers on a company is about to do rehearsals for a new play, Pirandello’s The Game of Role-Playing. When the company starts the rehearsal of the second act, the family of the six characters comes on stage, claiming that they are really six most interesting characters and that their story should be acted out. The director agrees to actualize their drama.

The staging of a play and even the process of creation is put on stage. This play is what Pirandello called “the mirror theatre”, a play that turns a mirror onto the theatre itself, and exposes and renews the operating principles of the drama. In this way, Pirandello discussed the making of theatre and the nature of artistic creation, expressing his dissatisfaction with and rebellion against the bourgeois theatre of the turn of the 20th century. By attacking the actors’ style of performance in the play, Pirandello denunciated the commercial theatre at the turn of the century.

Different from Abel, Hornby holds the view that metatheatre is not a narrow phenomenon limited to certain playwrights or certain periods in the history of drama. In fact, it is always occurring. The evolvement of the theory of metatheatre has seen an extension of the application of its concept to classical Greek comedy and tragedy (Abel denied the theatricality of tragedy in his 1963 study) as well as to non-Western drama and world drama.

Critics observe metatheatre in the tragedies of Greek tragedian Sophocles. Batchelder in his The Seal of Orestes: Self-reference and Authority in Sophocles’s Electra (1995) read Sophocles’s Electra as a play about playwriting. He remarked “In its close association with speech and action, falsehood and truth, the [empty] urn also functions as a symbol of the deception of the theatrical situation per se. In this respect it is…a ‘metatragic’ symbol of tragedy…” (p. 35). Ringer’s Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheatre and Role-Playing in Sophocles (1998) is another impressive study on metatheatrical devices in Sophocles’s plays.

F. J. Lelièvre sees the connection between Aristophanes’s use of parody in his old comedies and metafiction (as cited in Zen, 2016, p. 31). Of his 44 plays, critics note that The Frogs (405 BC) and The Thesmophoriazusae (410 BC) are metadrama, which are concerned with drama itself.

Brian Crow in “African Metatheatre: Criticizing Society, Celebrating the Stage” (2002) claimed that “anotable feature of contemporary African drama is the persistence with which its writers foreground the act of performance itself and seem concerned to investigate its status” (p. 133). He attributed it partly to “a deep-seated pleasure in many African cultures in playful theatricalizing and comic, often satirical observation and parody of different kinds of behavior at the everyday social level” (p. 133), and partly to the fact that it is “a natural offshoot of the intense ‘theatricality’ of so much African theatre” (p. 134). He then observed that African uses of the theatrical image are strikingly different from “the primarily individualistic, existential, and often introspective quality of many Western examples of metatheatre” (p. 134). For African dramatists, the exploration of the metatheatrical aims to “anatomize oppression and injustice and to celebrate the capacity of theatre and the theatrical to function as modes of survival, resistance, and even, in their more optimistic moments, change in contemporary African societies” (p. 134). Crow also remarked that the ways in which African metatheatricality has been realized are formally varied. Besides setting a play in a theatrical environment or the performance of a play within the play, the less direct ways include the allusion to the oral narrative instead of dramatic and/or the theatrical conventions, establishing intertexuality with well-known African plays, and the use of “scripted ‘improvisations’ involving role-play and play-acting,” etc. (p. 138).

Increasing attention has been given to metatheatricality in Asian drama and drama in other parts of the world as well. This is due to the comprehensive and profound understanding of metatheatre.

Five Types of Metatheatre

As to metatheatricality, Hornby identified five types (devices) of metatheatre in Drama, Metadrama and Perception: the play within the play, the ceremony within the play, role-playing within the role, literary and real-life reference, and self-reference.

Hornby (1986) held that “the play within the play is projected onto life itself, and becomes a means of gauging it” (p. 45). The play within the play creates two strikingly distinctive layers of performances for the audience to have the experience of seeing double and noting the multiple layers of action. It indirectly reminds the audience of the illusory nature of theatre.

It is a strategy for constructing play texts that contain, within the perimeter of their fictional reality, asecond or internal theatrical performance, in which actors appear as actors who play an additional role. It doubles an aesthetic experience of a double reality (Fischer & Greiner, 2007, p. xi).

Hornby (1986) thought that ceremonies within plays are ubiquitous (p. 49). Anthropologists and theatre historians have long posited a generic and historical relationship between ritual and theatre. Drama had an origin in rituals; tragedy originated in ancient Greece. The word tragedy, of Greek origin, means “goat song” and may possibly refer to archaic performances in which dancers either competed for a goat as a prize or were dressed up as goats. Drama competition was enacted at the Great Dionysia, an annual religious and cultural festival held in honor of the god Dionysus, the god of wine. As part of the festival, four plays of each playwright—three thematically connected tragedies and a satyr play were played and judged. When Hornby talked about the ceremony, he meant the play involves a formal spectacle of some kind that is separated from the surrounding action; for instance, the crowning of a king, a wedding or a ritual sacrifice. The ceremony offers a communal pleasure that derives from the understanding of things that would otherwise be confusing or ephemeral.

Margaret Croyden (1974) gave insightful comments on the validity of “ritual”:

Attempts at ritual seem less successful when actors and audience share no common ground. In actual fact, ritual has always had a moral, religious, practical, or psychological significance, and has never existed for its own sake. Rites were a need. (as cited in Graham-White, 1976, p. 319)

William Frost lists numerous rites and ceremonies common to Elizabethan drama, such as prayers, formal curses, funerals, marriages, dances, feasts, banquets, ceremonial arrivals and departure, formal oaths, trials, banishments, royal court scenes, etc. (Stroup, 1977, p. 139). Critics note how Chekhov’s plays are built around such ceremonies as arrivals, departures, anniversaries, and parties (Graham-White, 1976, p. 320). Dramatists believe in the immense symbolical, allegorical, and universalizing values of these essentially dramatic phenomena.

Role-playing within the role, in Hornby’s (1986) view, is “an excellent means for delineating characters, by showing not only who the character is, but he wants to be” (p. 67). It is an effective revelation of the psychological truth of the character. Hornby further classified it into three broad types: voluntary, involuntary, and allegorical.

Literary and real-life reference stresses the intertextuality of theatre and the importance of understanding aplay in its cultural code. Hornby defined literary reference as:

Direct, conscious allusion to specific works (except for parody, which may be more general) that are recent and popular. The work or works referred to must not yet be part of the drama culture complex, but should preferably be avant-garde, or at least somewhat controversial. (1986, p. 90)

There are four categories of literary reference: citation, allegory, parody, and adaptation. Real-life reference means allusions to real persons, places, events, objects, etc.

Self-reference is the most extreme, intense form of metatheatre, which calls attention to itself as a play, thus producing “alienation effect” and avoiding catharsis.

Though these five varieties of metatheatre have their distinctive effects, they often occur together or blend into one another. They have “no truth in and of themselves, but rather a means of discovering truth” (Hornby 1986, p. 32). Metatheatre criticizes the conventions of realist and naturalist dramas and breaks the illusion onstage by tearing down the “fourth wall”, which is an invisible, imagined wall that separates the actors from the audience. Metatheatre discomforts the audience and creates the aesthetic effect of alienation or estrangement, consequently prompting the audience to meditate on life.

METATHEATER AND SANSKRIT DRAMA

About the Book

In 1963, Lionel Abel’s book, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, was published. The basic idea of metatheater is that of multiple ‘layers’ of illusion. The prefix ‘meta-‘, here, suggets ‘beyond’, ‘above’, or ‘within’.
Metatheater, in one of its senses, can be viewed as one make-believe (dramatic) world superimposed upon another make-believe (dramatic) world. Or as one dramatic world framed within another dramatic world. The most easily relationship is the ‘play-within-the-play’.

The question might be asked what relevance such a recent topic of literary criticism in the West would have to a study of ancient Sanskrit drama. Each of the six essays in Part One of this book provides an effective answer. In the sixth essay, a translation is given of the passage in the Abhinavabharati, wherein Abhinavagupta comments on the term ‘natyayita’. Remarkably, this ancient Sanskrit term is most appropriately translated by the freshly minted English word, ‘metatheater’! And it is through an understanding of this 30-year-old English term (‘metatheater’) that one is able to obtain a revealing insight into what Abhinava was saying one thousand year ago about ‘natyayita’, term used in the Natya-Sastra, in the section on Sarira Abhinaya, and illustrated by Abhinava with a reference to Subandhu’s play, Vasavadatta Natyadhara

The first five essays illustrate how profoundly a knowledge of the metadramatic structure of Sanskrit plays will affect the way in which they are to be understood and translated.

Part two of this book presents the text and translation of, and commentary on, two Sanskrit farces which were written in the seventh century A.D. by the South Indian king, Mahendravarman. These two plays superbly illustrate the multi-dimensional splendor of ‘metatheater’ in Sanskrit drama.

About the Author

Michael Lockwood and Vishnu Bhat are both faculty members of Madras Christian College, Tambaram.

Dr. Lockwood (Dept. of Philosophy) has written a number of articles on the Pallavas, and has published two books which deal with the art, philosophy and history of the Pallavas: Mamallapuram and the Pallavas and Mahabalipuram Studies (co-authored by Dr. Gift Siromoney and Dr. P. Dayanandan).

Dr. Vishnu Bhat (Dept. of English) had much of his early education in a Sanskrit school before receiving his higher degrees in the field of English literature and language. He has collaborated previously with Dr. Lockwook in writing several articale on the inscriptions of the Pallavas.

Preface

In 1963, Lionel Abel’s book Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, was published. In this book Abel introduced a new term: ‘Metatheatre’. According to him, ‘metatheatre’ is the right term to describe the only form possible to the contemporary playwright who wishes to treat a subject gravely. He held that tragedy, invented by the Greeks to describe pain and yet give pleasure, is unrealizable today. In the late Renaissance, a revolution occurred in human consciousness which made tragedy impossible. But playwrights such as Calderon and Shakespeare wrote ‘serious’ plays which were self-reflexive: the illusion that sustains the play worlds also sustains the world outside the plays – the so-called ‘real world’.

Abel’s theory of metatheater is not a simple one, and it is, perhaps, better to look at a later analysis of this and related terms: ‘metadrama’, ‘metaplay’, etc.

The basic idea of metatheater is of multiple ‘layers’ of illusion. The prefix, ‘meta-‘, here, suggests ‘beyond’, ‘above’, or ‘within’. Metatheater, in one of its senses, can be viewed as one make-believe (dramatic) world superimposed upon another make- believe (dramatic) world. Or as one dramatic world framed within another dramatic world. The most easily understandable example of this relationship is the ‘play-within-the-play’. Of course, this idea did not come into being in the age of Calderon and Shakespeare. The idea of multiple layers of illusion is as old as theater itself. But it is only since Abel’s book was published in 1963 that a whole area of criticism and theory has sprung up in the West under the general heading of , meta theater’ or ‘metadrama’. Richard Hornby, in his book, Drama, Metadrama, and Perception (1986), has given a clear and concise analysis of different types of ‘metatheater/metadrama’:

1. The play within the play:
i) The Inset type – the inner play is secondary
ii) The Framed type – the inner play is primary
2. The ceremony within the play:
In all cultures we find plays that contain feasts, balls,
pageants, tournaments, games, rituals, trials, inquests,
processions, funerals, coronations, etc.
3. Role playing within the role:
i) Voluntary, ii) Involuntary, iii) Allegorical
4. Literary and real-life references:
i) Citation, ii) Allegory, iii) Parody, and iv) Adaptation
Self-reference:
The play directly calls attention to itself as a play, an imaginative fiction

The question might be asked what relevance such a recent topic of literary criticism in the West would have to a study of ancient Sanskrit drama. Each of the six essays in Part One of this book provides, we hope, an effective answer. In our sixth essay, we translate the passage in the Abhinavabharati, where in Abhinavagupta comments upon the term ‘natyayita. Remarkably, this ancient Sanskrit term is most appropriately translated by the freshly minted English word, ‘metatheater’! And it is through an understanding of this 30-year-old English term (‘metatheater’) that we are able to obtain a revealing insight into what Abhinava was saying one thousand years ago about ‘natyayita’, a term used in the Natya-Sastra, in the section on Sarira Abhinaya, and illustrated by Abhinava with a reference to Subandhu’s play, Vasavadatta Natyadhara.

Part Two of this book presents the text and translation of, and our commentary on, two Sanskrit farces which were written in the seventh century A.D. by the South Indian king, Mahendravarman. These two plays superbly illustrate the multi- dimensional splendor of ‘metatheater’ in Sanskrit drama.

Contents

	Preface	v
1.	Sanskrit Drama – Its Continuity of Structure	1
2.	Natya-Yajna (Drama as Sacrifice)	11
3.	The Victorianization of Sakuntala	19
4.	Bhasamana-Bhasah or the Case of the Chimerical Kavi	33
5.	You or Us?	37
6.	Abhinavagupta’s Discussion of Metadrama (c. 1000 A.D.)	41
	Select Bibliography	49

Part-II Contents

Foreword	v
THE FARCE OF THE SAINT-COURTESAN
Introduction	3
Text	17
Translation	19
Appendix A – Royal Titles	41
Appendix B – The Dandis	42
Appendix C – Types of Drama	43
Appendix D – Contemporary Parallels	45
Appendix E – Garden List	46
Appendix F – Messenger of Death’s Route	48
A FARCE OF DRUNKEN SPORT
Introduction	51
Text.	59
Translation	61
Appendix G – Royal Titles	80
Bibliography	81

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METATHEATER AND SANSKRIT DRAMA

MICHAEL LOCKWOOD & A. VISHNU BHAT
PUBLISHER: MUNSHIRAM MANOHARLAL PUBLISHERS PVT. LTD.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
EDITION: 1995
ISBN: 8121506794

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Ester Vosu

December 2010
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DOI:10.12697/SSS.2010.38.1-4.05

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285816921_Metaphorical_analogies_in_approaches_of_Victor_Turner_and_Erving_Goffman_Dramaturgy_in_social_interaction_and_dramas_of_social_life

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Click to access Theatre-and-Embodied-Collective-Reflexivity.pdf

https://www.academia.edu/43504085/Theatre_and_Embodied_Collective_Reflexivity?from=cover_page

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Book, 2010

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JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM, 2017
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2016.1257198

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2889329

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The Hudson Review

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b Institute of Organization and Learning, University of Insbruck, Austria

c Aston Business School, Maastricht University, Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Book

VICTOR TURNER’S POSTMODERN THEORY OF SOCIAL DRAMA:

Implications for Organization Studies

David M. Boje, Ph.D., New Mexico State University

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Single, Double, and Triple Loop Organizational Learning

Key Terms

Learning
Organizational Learning
Chris Argyris
David Schon
Peter Senge
Single Loop Learning
Double Loop Learning
Triple Loop Learning
Quadruple Loop Learning
Error Correction
Feedback Loop
Gregory Bateson
Action Learning
Cybernetic Loop
Reflexivity
Reflection and Learning
Systems Thinking
Cause and Effects
Organizational Adaptability
Organizational Culture
Theory In Use Models I and II
Action Science
Ed Schein
Levels of Learning
Planning as Learning
Cybernetics
Second Order Cybernetics
Third Order Cybernetics
Perceptual Flaws
Cognitive Learning
Hierarchical Planning
Management Control Systems
Management Planning and Control Systems
Planning and Control Systems
Manufacturing Planning and Control Systems
Advanced Planning Systems (APS)
Balanced Scorecards
Strategic Management
Social Learning
Learning to Plan, Planning to learn
Deutero Learning
Meta Learning
Explicit Knowledge
Tacit Knowledge

Single and Double Loop Learning

Source: Deradicalization through Double-Loop Learning? How the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya Renounced Violence

Argyris and Schon thereby start with the assumption that “all deliberate action ha[s] a cognitive basis, that it reflect[s] norms, strategies, and assumptions or models of the world.”21 These mental models work as a “frame of reference” which determine expectations regarding cause and effect relationships between actions and outcomes.22 According to Argyris and Schon, organizational learning becomes necessary when there is an “error,” a mismatch between intended outcomes of strategies of action and actual results; consequently, they define learning as the “detection and correction of error.”23 This correction of errors happens through a continuous process of organizational inquiry of varying depth. Argyris and Schon distinguish two types of learning:24 In single-loop learning systems, the detection and correction of error connects the outcome in a single loop only to strategies of action whereas the governing variables remain unchanged. In double-loop learning systems, a double feedback loop “connects the detection of error not only to strategies and assumptions for effective performance, but to the very norms which define effective performance.”25 Hence, double-loop learning modifies the governing variables underlying objectives.

Single-loop learning to increase the effectiveness of actions is the dominant response to error and ingrained in routine procedures in any organization. Unfortunately, due to organizational inertia and a tendency to become defensive when confronted with failure, organizations have a tendency to produce learning systems that inhibit double-loop learning that would question their objectives and governing variables.26 Single-loop learning systems are characterized by attempts to increase effectiveness without questioning norms underlying objectives. When organizations initiate change to curb activities under existing norms, a conflict in the norms themselves can emerge. For example, requirements for change can come into conflict with the requirement of predictability.27 Argyris and Schon suggest that in order to double-loop learn, leaders must first recognize the conflict between conflicting requirements itself. They must become aware that they cannot correct the error by doing better what they already know how to do. They must engage in deep organizational inquiry: in this process the focus has to shift from learning concerned with improvement in the performance of organizational tasks to inquiry through which an organization explores and restructures the values and criteria through which it defines what it means by improved performance.28 This is often inherently conflictual. Double-loop learning can namely be inhibited when norms are undiscussable within organizations. That leaders may be unaware of the conflict between conflicting requirements may be one reason why norms become undiscussable within organizations, leading to a double-bind situation for individuals. If they expose an error, they question covert or unquestionable norms. If they do not expose an error, they perpetuate a process that inhibits organizational learning.29 Individuals thus face lose/lose

STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 5 situations in which the rules of the game are not open to discussion.30 Commonly,
organizational norms also make the double binds themselves undiscussable:
Such procedure means that the very information needed to detect and correct errors becomes undiscussable. If one wanted to design a strategy to inhibit double-loop learning and to encourage error, a better one could not be found.31

Argyris and Schon conclude that organizations have a tendency to produce learning systems that inhibit double-loop learning as it would question their objective and norms.32 Double binds indicate such single-loop learning systems. Does the lack of cognitive abilities, as well as perceptual flaws, explain why individuals become locked in double binds, and why learning in organizations becomes inhibited? According to Argyris and Schon, the problem lies with organizational defenses that lead to a lack of error perception, rendering errors uncorrectable. Defensive organizational routines come into play when threatening or embarrassing issues arise, preventing lessons from being learned.33 Defensive routines – such as sending mixed messages or being overly diplomatic – are frequently activated when they are most counterproductive. Defensive routines can create binds:

On the one hand, […] [p]articipants are not supposed to bypass errors. Moreover, the bypass is undiscussable […] On the other hand, if the errors, their undiscussability, and the cover-ups surface, the participants are subject to criticism … 34

Defensive routines therefore prevent members of organizations from discovering the root causes of the problem and lead to paradoxes because individuals design inconsistencies of meaning and camouflage them by producing mixed messages: “to be consistent, act inconsistently, and act as if that is not the case.”35 A second consequence is that people start creating attributions to make sense of other peoples’ actions – attributions which are frequently wrong but remain unquestioned. As a result, reactions lead to unintended consequences. So why do people create consequences that contradict their intentions?36 Argyris and Schon consider that people are responsible for their actions, and that individuals who deny responsibility usually put the blame on others.37

In contrast, in double-loop learning systems productive reasoning takes place, following a logic that is not self-referential, where people take responsibility, acknowledge when there is a mismatch between intention and outcome, share awareness of organizational dilemmas, engage such conflicts through inquiry, and decrease double binds.38 In this second learning loop, the focus shifts from learning how to better accomplish tasks within a given frame of reference to learning what to do by questioning the frame of reference itself.39 In other words, while single-loop learning focuses on improving what an organization already does, or “doing the things right,” double-loop learning is concerned with what organizations ought to do, or “doing the right things.”40 However, Argyris and Schon find only limited empirical evidence for double-loop learning systems and remark that it depicts an ideal type that can be approached, making it possible to speak of organizations learning in a more or less double-loop way.41 The dynamics described above explain how double-loop systems become inhibited and how people hide their responsibility by blaming the environment for their inability to double-loop learn. Argyris and Schon also address intervention strategies that help organizations approach double-loop learning. One tool is the drawing of a diagnostic map describing how the organization learns. Such a map, they suggest, can help with predictions if certain changes were to be implemented,42 and can be used to depict alternative scenarios and their consequences.

Single Loop Learning

Source: Wikipedia

Double Loop Learning

Source: Wikipedia

Single and Double Loop Learning

Triple Loops of Learning

Source: The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review

Many scholars have considered the concept of organizational learning as a dichotomy. In its basic, primary form they have described it as action oriented, routine and incremental, occurring within existing (mental) frameworks, norms, policies and rules. In the face of profound change in organizational environments, these scholars argue that a qualitatively distinct, secondary form of learning is necessary. This aims to change the (mental) frameworks, norms, policies and routines underlying day-to-day actions and routines (Cope, 2003).
This dichotomy has been expressed in a variety of terms: single-loop and double-loop (e.g. Argyris and Schön, 1974); lower-level and higher-level (Fiol and Lyles, 1985); first-order and second-order (Arthur and Aiman-Smith, 2001); exploitation and exploration (Levinthal and March, 1993; March, 1991); incremental and radical (Miner and Mezias, 1996); and adaptive and generative learning (Senge, 1990). Although these dichotomous terms stem from different perspectives on organizational learning, a reasonable consensus seems to have been established that they refer to comparable learning processes and outcomes (Argyris, 1996; Arthur and Aiman-Smith, 2001; Miner and Mezias, 1996). Thus, as defined by Argyris (1999: 68), single-loop learning occurs ‘whenever an error is detected and corrected without questioning or altering the underlying values of the system’, and double-loop learning occurs ‘when mismatches are corrected by first examining and altering the governing variables and then the actions’.
A number of authors have conceived of a further type of organizational learning, for which the most prominent term is ‘triple-loop’ learning (Flood and Romm, 1996; Isaacs, 1993; Romme and Van Witteloostuijn, 1999; Snell and Chak, 1998; Swieringa and Wierdsma, 1992; Yuthas et al., 2004). Typically, this is described as additional to, and metaphorically at a ‘higher’ or ‘deeper’ level than, primary and secondary forms of learning, the metaphor implying that this level has greater significance and profundity. Yet, in spite of its perceived importance, conceptualizations of this form of learning do not always make clear how it differs from, or relates to, primary or secondary forms. Scholars of organizational learning might look first to Argyris and Schön; significantly, though, we have established that whilst triple-loop learning has been inspired by Argyris and Schön, the term does not appear explicitly in their published work.
Within this we explore the original work of Argyris and Schön, and of the anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson, the major influences cited by authors who propose these conceptualizations. This enables us to make a theoretical contribution through identifying three distinct conceptualizations of triple-loop learning. These are:
A. a level beyond, and considered by proponents to be superior to, Argyris and Schön’s single-loop and double-loop learning;
B. an equivalent to Argyris and Schön’s (1978, 1996) concept of ‘deutero-learning’;
C. a proposed third level inspired by Bateson’s (1973)1 framework of levels of learning (specifically ‘Learning III’).
We discuss why these conceptualizations should be regarded as distinct from each other, and highlight some implications for practice.

Source: The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review

Source: Levels of learning: hither and whither

Source: Coping with Uncertainty in River Management: Challenges and Ways Forward

Source: TOOL | Single, Double and Triple Loop Learning

Quadruple Loops of Learning

Source: Policy learning and crisis policy-making: quadruple-loop learning and COVID-19 responses in South Korea

Levels of Learning

Source: The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review

Org. Culture, Learning, Performance

Source:A Configuration Model of Organizational Culture

Source: A GENERIC THEORY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Source: Approaches for Organizational Learning: A Literature Review

Management Planning and Control Systems

Source: Performance management: a framework for management control systems research

Hierarchical Production Planning and Control

Source: A bibliography of Hierarchical Production Planning

Production Planning and Control Systems

Source: Google Images

Strategic, Tactical, and Operational Decisions

Source: Hierarchical Production Planning / Bitran/Tirupati/1989

My Related Posts

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Recursive Vision of Gregory Bateson

Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, and Social Systems Theory

Autocatalysis, Autopoiesis and Relational Biology

Multilevel Approach to Research in Organizations

Feedback Thought in Economics and Finance

Third and Higher Order Cybernetics

Systems and Organizational Cybernetics

Hierarchical Planning: Integration of Strategy, Planning, Scheduling, and Execution

Hierarchy Theory in Biology, Ecology and Evolution

Jay W. Forrester and System Dynamics

Production and Distribution Planning : Strategic, Global, and Integrated

Key Sources of Research

Triple-loop learning : theoretical framework, methodology & illustration

(An example from the railway sector)

Guillaume Barbat, Philippe Boigey, Isabelle Jehan

Dans Projectics / Proyéctica / Projectique 2011/2-3 (n°8-9), pages 129 à 141

https://www.cairn.info/revue-projectique-2011-2-page-129.htm

What is Social Learning?

Author(s): Mark S. Reed, Anna C. Evely, Georgina Cundill, Ioan Fazey, Jayne Glass, Adele Laing, Jens Newig, Brad Parrish, Christina Prell, Chris Raymond and Lindsay C. Stringer

Source: Ecology and Society , Dec 2010, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec 2010) Published by: Resilience Alliance Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26268235

The learning organization and the level of consciousness

Ricardo Chiva

http://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10234/169412/54786.pdf?sequence=1

Click to access fcb2b57dc522ae5214090b33980425cfe718.pdf

Policy learning and crisis policy-making: quadruple-loop learning and COVID-19 responses in South Korea

Sabinne Leea, Changho Hwangb and M. Jae Moonc

aAssociate Research Fellow, Korea Institute of Public Administration, Seoul, South Korea;

bAssistant Professor, Dong-A University, Busan, South Korea;

cCollege of Social Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

POLICY AND SOCIETY
2020, VOL. 39, NO. 3, 363–381 https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2020.1785195

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14494035.2020.1785195

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14494035.2020.1785195

“A systemic approach to processes of power in learning organizations: Part I – literature, theory, and methodology of triple loop learning”,

Robert L. Flood, Norma R.A. Romm, (2018)

The Learning Organization, Vol. 25 Issue: 4, pp.260-272, https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-10-2017-0101
Permanent link to this document:
https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-10-2017-0101

“A systemic approach to processes of power in learning organizations: Part II – triple loop learning and a facilitative intervention in the “500 schools project””,

Robert L. Flood, Norma R.A. Romm, (2018)

The Learning Organization, https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-11-2017-0106
Permanent link to this document:
https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-11-2017-0106

A Mighty Step: Critical Systemic Interpretation of the Learning Organization

Robert Louis Flood and Hanne Finnestrand

The Oxford Handbook of the Learning Organization Edited by Anders Ragnar Örtenblad

Print Publication Date: Dec 2019
Subject: Business and Management, Organizational Theory and Behaviour
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198832355.013.11

Click to access A-Mighty-Step-Critical-Systemic-Interpretation-of-the-Learning-Organization.pdf

LEVELS OF LEARNING: HITHER AND WHITHER

“Guest editorial”,

Max Visser, Ricardo Chiva, Paul Tosey, (2018)

The Learning Organization, Vol. 25 Issue: 4, pp.218-223, https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-02-2018-0021
Permanent link to this document:
https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-02-2018-0021

http://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10234/176446/60253.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Learning from the future meets Bateson’s levels of learning

Alexander Kaiser

Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

The Learning Organization Vol. 25 No. 4, 2018 pp. 237-247

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TLO-06-2017-0065/full/html

The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review

Paul Tosey, Max Visser and Mark NK Saunders

Management Learning 2012 43: 291

originally published online 2 December 2011 DOI: 10.1177/1350507611426239

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://mlq.sagepub.com/content/43/3/291

Click to access The-origins-and-conceptualizations-of-triple-loop-learning-A-critical-review.pdf

Why aren‟t we all working for Learning Organisations?

Professor John Seddon and Brendan O‟Donovan

e-ORGANISATIONS & PEOPLE, MAY 200910, VOL 17. NO 2

Click to access why-arent-we-all-working-for-learning-organisations.pdf

The Culture of Learning Organizations: Understanding Argyris’s Theory through a Socio- Cognitive Systems Learning Model

Laura Friesenborg

University of St. Thomas, Minnesota

Thesis PhD 2013

https://ir.stthomas.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1030&context=caps_ed_orgdev_docdiss

FROM ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING TO SOCIAL LEARNING: A TALE OF TWO ORGANISATIONS IN THE MURRAY-DARLING BASIN

Michael Mitchell, School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania

http://dx.doi.org/10.5172/rsj.2013.22.3.230

Rural Society · June 2013

Click to access From-organisational-learning-to-social-learning-A-tale-of-two-organisations-in-the-Murray-Darling-Basin.pdf

Shifting from Unilateral Control to Mutual Learning

By Fred Kofman

Click to access Shifting_from_Unilateral_Control_to_Mutual_Learning_by_Fred_Kofman1.pdf

ChrisAgryris

Available online 6 February 2004.

Organizational Dynamics
Volume 11, Issue 2, Autumn 1982, Pages 5-22

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/009026168290002X

Problem-Solving as a Double-Loop Learning System

by Jeff Dooley
© 1999 Adaptive Learning Design

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.35.44&rep=rep1&type=pdf

chris argyris: theories of action, double‐loop learning and organizational learning

Click to access Argyris-C.-Theories-of-action-double-loop-learning-and-organizational-learning-revised-20-9-2011.pdf

Double Loop Learning in Organizations

Chris Argyris
Harvard Business Review
No. 77502

Harvard Business Review (September 1977)

Click to access Chris-Argyris-Double-Loop-Learning-in-Organisations.pdf

https://hbr.org/1977/09/double-loop-learning-in-organizations

Single-Loop and Double-Loop Models in Research on Decision Making

Author(s): Chris Argyris

Source: Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 363-375 Published by: Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2391848

Click to access 193959193.pdf

A Primer on Organizational Learning

By Olivier Serrat

ADB

Click to access primer-organizational-learning.pdf

Modes of Organizational Learning

by Soren Eilertsen, Ph.D., with Kellan London, M.A.

Click to access single_and_double_loop_learning.pdf

The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review

July 2012

Management Learning 43(3):291-307
DOI:10.1177/1350507611426239

Paul Tosey
Max Visser
Mark NK Saunders

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258171998_The_origins_and_conceptualizations_of_%27triple-loop%27_learning_A_critical_review

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-origins-and-conceptualizations-of-‘triple-loop’-Tosey-Visser/ea24da54380dc3cabdac74deb6cc57132a470c8a

TOOL | Single, Double and Triple Loop Learning

Click to access Tool%20-%20Single%20Double%20Triple%20Loop%20Learning.pdf

Good Communication That Blocks Learning

by Chris Argyris

Harvard Business Review 1994
Reprint 94401

Click to access Chris-Argyris-Good-Communication-that-Blocks-Learning.pdf

Double loop learning in organizations

By uncovering their own hidden theories of action, managers can detect and correct errors

Chris Argyris

Harvard Business Review September-October 1977

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/33422921/08_Argyris_doublelooplearning.pdf?1396993260=u0026amp;response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DDouble_loop_learning_in_organizations.pdfu0026amp;Expires=1627165288u0026amp;Signature=GOY4COga2LJKGnc3XAB5ge8ybpWvBBmeO779XhTzktEKTrIQREbkh9V8apE6z2QMCT2vufBoTq1NSSHNDJj0GGXu66VeCS8D37cTi-onZECbPUF5wXZ7Oa2U5Ih54fN-muWcED9BKEmV4G0e7kF3kDeAWrCs0jX5zC63JnOOvAyRL0ZjCcDGeF2~7T7WeNSnNZBKFJZW49tXy~LjhoRil2s7HBZxYI-Fjjp~fylKpDgDRZnfouPkCSnLU1rpeQBQOgrPnb8qmF0Bl6APCc-edECHKgsDYYBiqViUQ4epMm1yZbCSeUlYV6ODDm1dzWbfarwnOtRBnGWozuUbTYwIYg__u0026amp;Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

Analyzing the loops and taking the steps on the journey toward a learning organization

Simon Reese

University of Maryland University College, Seoul, Korea

The Learning Organization Vol. 24 No. 3, 2017 pp. 194-197

DOI 10.1108/TLO-01-2017-0004

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TLO-01-2017-0004/full/pdf?title=analyzing-the-loops-and-taking-the-steps-on-the-journey-toward-a-learning-organization

N-loop learning: part II – an empirical investigation

Bernard L. Simonin

The Learning Organization

ISSN: 0969-6474

May 2017

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TLO-12-2016-0100/full/html

N-loop learning: part I – of hedgehog, fox, dodo bird and sphinx

Bernard L. Simonin

The Learning Organization

ISSN: 0969-6474

Article publication date: 10 April 2017

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TLO-12-2016-0099/full/html

Challenges of the levels of learning

Nataša Rupčić

The Learning Organization

ISSN: 0969-6474

Article publication date: 14 May 2018

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TLO-03-2018-0037/full/html

Deradicalization through Double-Loop Learning? How the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya Renounced Violence

Carolin Goerzig

To cite this article: Carolin Goerzig (2019): Deradicalization through Double-Loop Learning? How the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya Renounced Violence, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2019.1680193

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2019.1680193

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/1057610X.2019.1680193?needAccess=true

Systems Thinkers

Magnus Ramage
Karen Shipp

2009

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-84882-525-3?page=2#toc

Reframing Conflict: Intercultural Conflict as Potential Transformation

Beth Fisher-Yoshida

Journal of Intercultural Communication No.8, 2005

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.321.335&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Developing the Leader’s Strategic Mindset: Establishing the Measures

John Pisapia, Daniel Reyes-Guerra, and Eleni Coukos-Semmel,

Kravis Leadership Institute, Leadership Review, Spring 2005, Vol. 5, pp. 41-68

What is Social Learning?

October 2010
ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY 15(4):r1

DOI:10.5751/ES-03564-1504r01

Authors:

Mark S. Reed

Scotland’s Rural College

Anna Clair Evely

Georgina Cundill

International Development Research Centre

Ioan Fazey

University of St Andrews

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259638979_What_is_Social_Learning

The social learning discourse: Trends, themes and interdisciplinary influences in current research.

Environmental Science and Policy, 25, 157-166.

Strategic Learning

MICHAEL L. BARNETT

University of Oxford
Saïd Business School, Room 30.015 Park End Street
Oxford, OX1 1HP
United Kingdom +44(0)1865 288844 michael.barnett@sbs.ox.ac.uk

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management

David Teece and Mie Augier (eds.)

Click to access Strategic-Learning.pdf

The Overview on Evolution of Learning Organization Theories

Sara. Ghaffari,1 Dr. Ishak. Mad Shah,2, and Jeveria Fazal3

Universiti Tecknologi Malaysia

Ishak@utm.my Saragh7@yahoo.com, Javb107@yahoo.com

Click to access The-Overview-on-Evolution-of-Learning-Organization-Theories.pdf

Modes of Knowing and Modes of Coming to Know Knowledge Creation and Co-Construction as Socio-Epistemological Engineering in Educational Processes

Markus F. Peschl

Constructivist Foundations

Volume 1 · Number 3 · Pages 111–123

Constructivist Foundations 1(3): 111–123.

http://constructivist.info/1/3/111

https://constructivist.info/1/3/111.peschl

Triple-loop learning as foundation for profound change, individual cultivation, and radical innovation: Construction processes beyond scientific and rational knowledge.

Peschl M. F. (2007)

Constructivist Foundations 2(2-3): 136–145.

http://constructivist.info/2/2-3/136

A Configuration Model of Organizational Culture **

Daniel Dauber1, Gerhard Fink2, and Maurice Yolles

SAGE Open 1–16
2012
DOI: 10.1177/2158244012441482

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244012441482

Exploring adaptability through learning layers and learning loops

Löf, Annette

Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science.

October 2010
Environmental Education Research 16(5):529-543

DOI:10.1080/13504622.2010.505429

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241715151_Exploring_adaptability_through_learning_layers_and_learning_loops

Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning: A framework for Collaboration

Dr. Michael Manning

CAAHE Academics Conference October, 2011
Austin, TX

Click to access KolbsModelofExperientialLearning.pdf

A GENERIC THEORY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Daniel Dauber, WU -Vienna University of Economics and Business (daniel.dauber@wu.ac.at)

Gerhard Fink, WU -Vienna University of Economics and Business (gerhard.fink@wu.ac.at)

Maurice Yolles, Centre for the Creation of Coherent Change & Knowledge (C4K) (m.yolles@ljmu.ac.uk)

Click to access A-Generic-Theory-of-Organizational-Culture.pdf

Cross-disciplinary collaboration and learning.

Pennington, D. D. 2008.

Ecology and Society 13(2): 8. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss2/art8/

Barriers to organizational learning: An integration of theory and research

Jan Schilling1 and Annette Kluge

International Journal of Management Reviews (2009)

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2370.2008.00242.x

Click to access Article.pdf

Organizational learning in complex world

Agnieszka Dziubińska

Faculty of Management, University of Economics in Katowice, POLAND, Katowice, 1 Maja street 50,
E-mail: agnieszka.dziubińska@ue.katowice.pl

Click to access 87-246-249.pdf

Coming to a New Awareness of Organizational Culture ,

Schein, Edgar H.,

Sloan Management Review, 25:2 (1984:Winter) p.3

Click to access coming-to-a-new-awareness-of-organizational-culture-schein-1984.pdf

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/coming-to-a-new-awareness-of-organizational-culture/

The Real Relationship Between Organizational Culture and Organizational Learning

Fumie ANDO

School of Business Administration, Nanzan University

E-mail:fumiea@nanzan-u.ac.jp

Annals of Business Administrative Science Vol.1, No.2 (July 2002)

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/abas/1/2/1_25/_pdf

A Review of the Concept of Organisational Learning

By Catherine L Wang & Pervaiz K Ahmed

Working Paper Series 2002 Number WP004/02

ISSN Number ISSN 1363-6839

Catherine L Wang

Research Assistant
University of Wolverhampton, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1902 321651
Email: C.Wang@wlv.ac.uk

Professor Pervaiz K Ahmed

Chair in Management
University of Wolverhampton, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1902 323921
Email: pkahmed@wlv.ac.uk

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.123.5478&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Double-Loop Learning, Teaching, and Research

December 2002
Academy of Management Learning and Education, The 1(2):206-218

DOI:10.5465/AMLE.2002.8509400

Chris Argyris

Performance management: a framework for management control systems research

David Otley􏰆

Management Accounting Research, 1999, 10, 363􏰀382

Article No. mare.1999.0115

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489.5281&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Management Control Systems: A Historical Perspective

January 2010

Jordi Carenys

EADA Business School

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293221830_Management_Control_Systems_A_Historical_Perspective

MANAGEMENT CONTROL SYSTEMS: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Peter Lorange

Michael S. Scott Morton

1974 MIT

Click to access SWP-0724-02506890.pdf

Double-loop learning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-loop_learning

Approaches for Organizational Learning: A Literature Review **

Dirk Basten, Thilo Haamann

First Published August 12, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018794224

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244018794224

A bibliography of Hierarchical Production Planning

Click to access A_BIBLIOGRAPHY.PDF

HIERARCHIES

IN PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL: A SURVEY

Camille M. Libosvar

Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

January 7. 1988

LIDS-P-1734

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge. Massachusetts

Click to access 4380696.pdf

HIERARCHICAL PRODUCTION PLANNING SYSTEMS

by
ARNOLDO C. MAX
and JONATHAN J . GOLOVIN

August 1977

Technical Report No. 135
Work Performed Under
Contract N00014—75—C—0556, Office of Naval Research
Multilevel Logistics Organization Models
NR 347—027
M.I.T. OSP 82491
Operations Research Center
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
cambridge , Massachusetts 02139

Click to access ADA045016.pdf

“Hierarchical Production Planning”

Gabriel R. Bitran*t Devanath Tirupati**

MIT Sloan School Working Paper #3017-89-MS

May 1989

*Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139

**Department of Management, The University of Texas at Austin

tThis research has been partially supported by the Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Click to access SWP-3017-20127291.pdf

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Hierarchical-production-planning-Bitran-Tirupati/ca83a1bab3540162c2b19f19d3d08a99a18c0165

HIERARCHICAL INTEGRATION OF PRODUCTION PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

by
Arnoldo C. Hax and Harlan C. Meal

May 1973

656-73

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/1868/SWP-0656-14561389.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Hierarchical Production Planning: A Single Stage System

Gabriel R. Bitran, Elizabeth A. Haas and Arnoldo C. Hax

Operations Research
Vol. 29, No. 4, Operations Management (Jul. – Aug., 1981), pp. 717-743 (27 pages)
Published By: INFORMS
Operations Research
https://www.jstor.org/stable/170387

Hierarchical planning systems — a production application

Hax A.C., Bitran G.R. (1979)

In: Ritzman L.P., Krajewski L.J., Berry W.L., Goodman S.H., Hardy S.T., Vitt L.D. (eds) Disaggregation. Springer, Dordrecht.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7636-9_5

Publisher Name Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN 978-94-015-7638-3
Online ISBN 978-94-015-7636-9

Hierarchical Production Planning: A Two Stage System

May 1980
Operations Research 30(2):37

DOI:10.1287/opre.30.2.232

Gabriel R. Bitran

Elizabeth A. Haas

Arnoldo C. Hax

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235064925_Hierarchical_Production_Planning_A_Two_Stage_System

Analytical Evaluation of Hierarchical Planning Systems

M. A. H. DEMPSTER

Balliol College, Oxford, England

M. L. FISHER

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

L. JANSEN, 8. J. LAGEWEG, J. K. LENSTRA Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A. H. G. RINNOOY KAN

Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

(Received December 1979; accepted March 1981)

Click to access RR-84-04.pdf

Deutero-Learning in Organizations: A Review and a Reformulation

April 2007
The Academy of Management Review 32(2)

DOI:10.5465/AMR.2007.24351883

Max Visser

Radboud University

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228975720_Deutero-Learning_in_Organizations_A_Review_and_a_Reformulation

https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/2066/19481/19481.pdf?sequence=1

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Third and Higher Order Cybernetics

The logic of the formation of third-order cybernetics is based on the transition from first-order cybernetics – “observable systems”, to second-order – “observing systems”, to third-order cybernetics – “self-developing poly-subject (reflexive-active) environments”. And also on the ascent from the paradigm “subject – object” to the paradigm “subject – subject” and then, in third-order cybernetics, to the paradigm of “subject – metasubject (self-developing poly-subject environment)”. Third-order cybernetics has its own specifics and also defines a paradigm (framework construction) that includes first and second order cybernetic paradigms, similar to post-non-classical scientific rationality.

What is required in third order cybernetics? Narrative arts such as Drama, Films, Literature, Stories, Novels as means of social reflexivity for providing ethical and moral grounds for social action & justice.

Key Terms

Cybernetics
Second Order Cybernetics
Third Order Cybernetics
Fourth Order Cybernetics
Reflexivity
Socio Cybernetics
Autopoiesis
Autocatalysis
Feedback
Interaction
Self Awareness
Observable Systems
Observing systems
Reflexive – Active system
Subject Object
Subject Subject
Subject Meta-Subject
Story Telling
Narratives
Mirroring of Experience
Social Reflexivity
Social Action
Social Justice
Coherence Narrative
Problem Structuring
Social Responsibility
Ethics in Society

https://www.wosc2020.org/section-1-5

World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics
18th Congress-WOSC2020
Moscow, 16th to 18th September 2020

1.5 Cybernetics of self-developing poly-subject (reflexive-active) environments: third-order cybernetics

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the development of socially-oriented types of cybernetics, the development of second-order cybernetics (S. Umpleby, V. Lepskiy, R. Vallée, S. Bozicnik & M. Mulej, T. Ivanuša and others). An urgent problem is the analysis of the foundations and models of different types of socially-oriented cybernetics. The focus of this section is third-order cybernetics developed in Russia.

Third-order cybernetics (V. Lepskiy, 1998) is formed on the basis of post-non-classical scientific rationality. The logic of the formation of third-order cybernetics is based on the transition from first-order cybernetics – “observable systems”, to second-order – “observing systems”, to third-order cybernetics – “self-developing poly-subject (reflexive-active) environments”. And also on the ascent from the paradigm “subject – object” to the paradigm “subject – subject” and then, in third-order cybernetics, to the paradigm of “subject – metasubject (self-developing poly-subject environment)”. Third-order cybernetics has its own specifics and also defines a paradigm (framework construction) that includes first and second order cybernetic paradigms, similar to post-non-classical scientific rationality.

On the basis of post-non-classical scientific rationality it became possible to integrate ideas and concepts of humanitarian studies: ideas about the noosphere (V. Vernadsky), the concept of society as a social system (N. Luhman), activity and subject-activity approaches (A. Leontiev, L. Vygotsky, S. Rubinshtein, et al.), contributions of Russian methodologists (G. Shchedrovitsky, et al.), interdisciplinary ideas of the formation of social cybernetics (S. Umpleby), sociohumanitarian analysis of the experience of developing automated systems (V. Lepskiy), and others.

Discussion points

Foundations and models of socially-oriented types of cybernetics (S. Umpleby, V. Lepskiy, R. Vallée, S. Bozicnik & M. Mulej, T. Ivanuša and others).

Civilization aspects of self-developing poly-subject environments (third-order cybernetics).

Philosophical and methodological aspects of third-order cybernetics.

Third-order cybernetics is an ontological integrator of first and second order cybernetics.

The problem of complexity is third-order cybernetics.

Reflexive processes in third-order cybernetics.

Ethical aspects of third-order cybernetics.

Social Responsibility in Third Order Cybernetics.

Public participation in self-developing poly-subject environments

Organization of hybrid (subject, digital, physical) environments in third-order cybernetics.

Socio-humanitarian ergonomics of self-developing poly-subject environments.

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10605

New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics

https://doi.org/10.1142/10605 | November 2017

Pages: 404

Edited By:

Alexander Riegler (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

,

Karl H Müller (International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences, Austria)

and

Stuart A Umpleby (George Washington University, USA)

In almost 60 articles this book reviews the current state of second-order cybernetics and investigates which new research methods second-order cybernetics can offer to tackle wicked problems in science and in society. The contributions explore its application to both scientific fields (such as mathematics, psychology and consciousness research) and non-scientific ones (such as design theory and theater science). The book uses a pluralistic, multifaceted approach to discuss these applications: Each main article is accompanied by several commentaries and author responses, which together allow the reader to discover further perspectives than in the original article alone. This procedure shows that second-order cybernetics is already on its way to becoming an idea shared by many researchers in a variety of disciplines.

Sample Chapter(s)

A Brief History of (Second-Order) Cybernetics

Contents:

Prologue:

A Brief History of (Second-Order) Cybernetics (Louis H Kauffman & Stuart A Umpleb)

Mapping the Varieties of Second-Order Cybernetics (Karl H Müller & Alexander Riegle)

Part I: Exploring Second-Order Cybernetics and Its Fivefold Agenda:

Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science (Stuart A Umpleby)

Obstacles and Opportunities in the Future of Second-Order Cybernetics and Other Compatible Methods (Allenna Leonard)

Connecting Second-Order Cybernetics’ Revolution with Genetic Epistemology (Gastón Becerra)

Shed the Name to Find Second-Order Success: Renaming Second-Order Cybernetics to Rescue its Essence (Michael R Lissack)

Beware False Dichotomies (Peter A Cariani)

Second-Order Cybernetics Needs a Unifying Methodology (Thomas R Flanagan)

Viva the Fundamental Revolution! Confessions of a Case Writer (T Grandon Gill)

Author’s Response: Struggling to Define an Identity for Second-Order Cybernetics (Stuart A Umpleby)

Cybernetics, Reflexivity and Second-Order Science (Louis H Kauffman)

Remarks From a Continental Philosophy Point of View (Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze)

Finally Understanding Eigenforms (Michael R Lissack)

Eigenforms, Coherence, and the Imaginal (Arthur M Collings)

Conserving the Disposition for Wonder (Kathleen Forsythe)

Author’s Response: Distinction, Eigenform and the Epistemology of the Imagination (Louis H Kauffman)

Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology (Bernard Scott)

Wielding the Cybernetic Scythe in the Blunting Undergrowth of Psychological Confusion (Vincent Kenny)

To What Extent Can Second-Order Cybernetics Be a Foundation for Psychology? (Marcelo Arnold-Cathalifaud & Daniela Thumala-Dockendorff)

The Importance — and the Difficulty — of Moving Beyond Linear Causality (Robert J Martin)

Obstacles to Cybernetics Becoming a Conceptual Framework and Metanarrative in the Psychologies (Philip Baron)

The Social and the Psychological: Conceptual Cybernetic Unification vs Disciplinary Analysis? (Eva Buchinger)

Second Thoughts on Cybernetic Unifications (Tilia Stingl de Vasconcelos Guedes)

Cybernetics and Synergetics as Foundations for Complex Approach Towards Complexities of Life (Lea Šugman Bohinc)

Author’s Response: On Becoming and Being a Cybernetician (Bernard Scott)

Consciousness as Self-Description in Differences (Diana Gasparyan)

On the Too Often Overlooked Complexity of the Tension between Subject and Object (Yochai Ataria)

Where Is Consciousness? (Urban Kordeš)

Theorizing Agents: Their Games, Hermeneutical Tools and Epistemic Resources (Konstantin Pavlov-Pinus)

How Can Meaning be Grounded within a Closed Self-Referential System? (Bryony Pierce)

Self-Description Alone Will not Account for Qualia (John Pickering)

Consciousness as Self-Description and the Inescapability of Reduction (Sergei Levin)

The Non-Relationality of Consciousness (Adriana Schetz)

Author’s Response: Phenomenology of the System: Intentionality, Differences, Understanding, and the Unity of Consciousness (Diana Gasparyan)

Design Research as a Variety of Second-Order Cybernetic Practice (Ben Sweeting)

Design Cycles: Conversing with Lawrence Halprin (Tom Scholte)

Understanding Design from a Second-Order Cybernetics Perspective: Is There a Place for Material Agency? (David Griffiths)

What Can Cybernetics Learn from Design? (Christiane M Herr)

Rigor in Research, Honesty and Values (Michael Hohl)

Digital Design Research and Second-Order Cybernetics (Mateus de Sousa van Stralen)

Cybernetics Is the Answer, but What Was the Conversation About? (Jose dos Santos Cabral Filho)

(Architectural) Design Research in the Age of Neuroscience: The Value of the Second-Order Cybernetic Practice Perspective (Andrea Jelić)

Author’s Response: Beyond Application (Ben Sweeting)

“Black Box” Theatre: Second-Order Cybernetics and Naturalism in Rehearsal and Performance (Tom Scholte)

Audience and Autopoiesis (Bruce Clarke & Dorothy Chansky)

“Truthful” Acting Emerges Through Forward Model Development (Bernd Porr)

Naturalism in Improvisation and Embodiment (Edgar Landgraf)

Opening the Black Box of Minds: Theatre as a Laboratory of System Unknowns (Lowell F Christy Jr)

Does Second-Order Cybernetics Provide a Framework for Theatre Studies? (Albert Müller)

A Theatre for Exploring the Cybernetic (Ben Sweeting)

The Many Varieties of Experimentation in Second-Order Cybernetics: Art, Science, Craft (Laurence D Richards)

Author’s Response: “Playing With Dynamics”: Procedures and Possibilities for a Theatre of Cybernetics (Tom Scholte)

Part II: Reflecting on the Perspectives for a Fivefold Agenda of Second-Order Cybernetics:

Remarks of a Philosopher of Mathematics and Science (Michèle Friend)

The Past and the Future of Second-Order Cybernetics (Ronald R Kline)

Embracing Realists Without Embracing Realism: The Future of Second-Order Cybernetics (Robert J Martin)

Some Implications of Second-Order Cybernetics (Anthony Hodgson)

New Directions in Second-Order Cybernetics (Larry Richards)

Epilogue:

Possible Futures for Cybernetics (Karl H Müller, Stuart A Umpleby & Alexander Riegler)

http://attainable-utopias.org/tiki/ThirdOrderCybernetics

Third Order Cybernetics

See First Order Cybernetics
See Second Order Cybernetics
See Fourth Order Cybernetics

When a whole system acknowledges its surroundings

First Order Cybernetics emerged from engineering, therefore tended to see systems as objects.

Second Order Cybernetics started explored the internal dynamics of the system.

Third Order Cybernetics regards a system more as an active-interactive element in a circuit.

It acknowledged the way that a whole system may redirect itself in order to adapt to its context.

Therefore, the observer and the system co-evolve together.

This mean that the observer can see himself as part of the system under examination.

Each player in a musical ensemble, for example, listens to each other player, and to his, or her, own instrument.

The whole ensemble may then play as a unified, emergent sound, as though all the instruments play as one.

This is a kind of System Transformation.

Wittgenstein’s language games may help to explain the complexity of this.

It will be evident that in this case the System itself is regarded from the perspective of a Loop in First Order Cybernetics.

From RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CYBERNETICS,
A THEORY FOR UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL SYSTEMS

https://journal.emergentpublications.com/article/guest-editors-introduction-7-3-4/

Authors

David Boje

Ken Baskin

Emergence of third order cybernetics

Much to the surprise and delight of the co-editors, this special issue of Emergence: Complexity & Organization on complexity and storytelling appears to mark more a beginning than an ending. For, while the publication of any journal is the end of a discrete project, what we are learning from it suggests the opening moves in a game of exploration pursuing a fascinating question: Are the studies of storytelling, in its widest sense, and of complex human systems largely the same thing? At first, that seemed an obvious overstatement. Yet, in the process of developing this special issue, both of us have concluded that it is a question that is, at least, worth exploring. In this way, we offer you this special issue as an introduction to the possibility that the dynamics that arise as people tell stories, to themselves as well as to others, and then enact those stories, create the dynamic human systems – families and neighborhoods; workgroups, organizations, and economies – that Ralph Stacey’s (2001) conception of complex responsive processes seems to deny.

Some readers may say that this exploration is hardly new. In fact, nearly 30 years ago, Louis R. Pondy’s essay “Beyond open system models of organization,” included as a classic complexity article in this issue (see pp. 119-137), lays out the challenge to launch into just such an exploration as the co-editors believe this issue represents. Basing his argument on Boulding’s nine levels of system complexity, Pondy insists that organizational theorists are locked into analysis based on the lower levels of complexity. Given the then-current understanding of organizations, analysts should think of them less as ‘input-output’ machines and more as ‘language-using, sensemaking cultures’. What is needed, as a result, is “radical methodological departures [such as] ethnographic techniques more suitable for studying meaning and belief systems.” The theme articles in this issue play with a variety of such departures.

Moreover, mostly over the last five years, a significant amount of work has been compiled applying complexity and storytelling to organizations, answering Pondy’s challenge after only a quarter century. Already, three practitioners – Carl Weick (1995), Dave Snowden (see Kurtz & Snowden, 2003), and David Boje (2001) – have developed sophisticated approaches to this study. What makes this issue of E:CO new and exciting is an explosion of interest in this developing area of study. Previously, the intersection of complexity and storytelling studies had been applied largely to organizations. However, among the more than 40 proposals we received were abstracts whose subject ranged from economics and law to disaster control, healthcare, and oriental literature. As a result, we began to suspect that this evolving hybrid field could suggest a powerful approach to the application of complexity thinking to all human systems. Nor are we the first to suggest this. One contributor to this issue, anthropologist Michael Agar, has observed elsewhere (Agar, 2005), that the most effective methodology to complexity-based social studies is ethnography.

In some ways, it seems odd that the intersection between complexity and storytelling has been so little examined. For one thing, the two studies have grown on remarkably parallel tracks for the last 15 years or so. During this time, both studies have been adapted from their origins – complexity in the natural sciences and narrative/storytelling in literature – and applied increasingly to organizations, but in a somewhat limited way. Complexity studies of organizations have been largely limited to considering organizations as (narratively) coherent entities in market ecosystems, ignoring what complexity thinking suggests about the dynamics of organizations as ecosystems for the people working in them. Some work on organizations as ecosystems has begun to appear in, for example, the work of Brenda Dervin, et al. (2003) or Ken Baskin (2005b). Similarly, the vast majority of the work on narrative in organizations has explored its function on the level of the organization and in its function for managers. It’s only in recent years, as writers such as Weick, Snowden and Boje have applied the double lens of complexity and storytelling, that attention has begun to focus also on how people within organizations use narrative and storytelling quite differently. Here, a thaw of sorts is occurring, as those studying the field move from narrative, with its implications as a complete linear-construction (with beginning, middle and end), to storytelling, with its suggestion that some stories are emergent attempts to formulate and negotiate the understandings held as finished in narrative study.

In addition to these historical similarities, the two studies (story-emergence and complexity) seem an almost ideal fit for each other. On one hand, some writers on storytelling are beginning to recognize it as an emergent phenomenon, sensitive to initial states, that groups negotiate in their interactions. On the other, some writers about complex human systems are beginning to recognize that storytelling drives the human equivalent of attractors at several levels – personality, group dynamics, and culture. As a result, the principles of complexity and storytelling come together as a series of strands that, like a rope, when woven together, form a more powerful tool than either alone.

Given all that, it seems only fitting that the co-editors of this issue approach this intersection of studies from opposite directions. David Boje (2001) came to it through his study of storytelling organizations. In his studies, he has focused on the difference between ‘antenarrative’, the preliminary stories people tell as they begin to understand what might be happening around them, and the more fixed (whole, linear) narratives, which are explanations of what people believe actually happened. Along with this view of storytelling, Boje (1995) had developed the idea of the organization as ‘Tamara’, a house with many rooms in which people in different rooms simultaneously tell different stories about the same events, experienced from their differing points of view, networking with one another to make sense of the divergent storylines. Much of the dynamics of any organization, he suggests, arises in the negotiation that occur as people enact these different stories about common events in distributed locations.

On the other hand, Ken Baskin approached this intersection from his work in applying complexity thinking to organizations. His 2001 research study on workgroup cultures in three American hospitals, funded by ISCE, brought him to the conclusion that the stories people tell, to themselves as well as others, create the human equivalent of attractors – personality in the individual, group dynamics, and culture in organizations and other larger entities (2005a). His most recent work (2005b) suggests that, in addition to being coherent units existing in market ecosystems, organizations can be examined as ecosystems of storytelling groups, a concept with much in common with Boje’s Tamara.

When we first issued the call for abstracts on complexity and storytelling, we had no idea that so many people had begun thinking about the function of storytelling and complexity in the various fields in which they worked. We quickly discovered that interweaving the principles of these areas of study was proving absolutely as illuminating as we had suspected from our own work. The nine topical articles published in this issue will give the reader an idea of the variety and excitement of thought among those combining the insights of complexity thinking and storytelling:

Theodore Taptiklis’s “After managerialism,” for instance, contrasts managerialism’s tendency to reduce complexity with the approach supported by this journal, among others, to confront the complexity of contemporary markets. He examines his work with organizations to record and share the narrative experience of professionals in order to foster emergence and creativity.

In “Narrative processes in organizational discourse,” John Luhman discusses organizational discourse as a complex system that includes three processes – storying coercion, story weaving, and story betting, the last of which reflects Boje’s antenarrative theory. For him, narratives provide a “field of choices in which meaning takes place.” In organizations managed as complex systems, these choices can create the rich diversity from which innovation emerges.

Michael Agar’s essay, “Telling it like you think it might be,” explores a methodology for analyzing organizational storytelling. At a time when so many organizations are trying to transform management style from the traditional mechanical model to a more complex one, Agar offers a way of measuring the degree of complexity recognized in any organization’s operations, through examining five elements of the storytelling.

Taking a different tack in “The use of narrative to understand and respond to complexity,” Larry Browning and Thierry Boudés compare two of the major models for using “narrative as a sensemaking response to complexity.” In examining David Snowden’s Cynefin model and that of Carl Weick, Browning and Boudés conclude that, in spite of the many differences in these models, they are remarkably similar, especially in their emphasis on widespread participation and “management by exclusion.”

In “Wanted for breaking and entering organizational systems in complexity,” Adrian Carr and Cheryl Lapp take a Freudian approach to the function of narrative in organizations transforming from a traditional model to a more complex one. Introducing the principles of complexity into such an organization, they note, demands that people in the organization co-create stories that cannot help but cause anxiety. It is through the pain created in the destruction of old certainties, which the authors insist people cling to as an expression of Freud’s ‘Thanatos’, that the creative energies of ‘Eros’ emerge.

Doug Smith’s “Order (for free) in the court” examines the legal system as a complex system that has evolved as a result of what he has called “full-contract storytelling.” Rather than the traditional view that law is a system governed by rules, Smith insists that it depends on a self-reinforcing cycle of learning and retelling stories in law school and then anticipating and countering the stories of others in practice. In court lawyers use stories to reduce the complexity of life in order to win judges and juries to their clients’ points of view. Ironically, this central role of storytelling in the legal system remains unacknowledged.

Similarly, Michelle Shumate, Alison Bryant and Peter Monge argue, in “Storytelling and globalization,” that networked global organizations engage in “narrative netwar” in order to affect the ideological landscape. Using the Direct Action network’s protest of the World Trade Organization’s 1999 meeting in Seattle as an example, they explore how people in both networks use narrative to simplify an issue as complex as global trade in order to persuade people to support their positions. The world is much more complex than any one story can communicate; by reducing that complexity with narrative, they can make their cases, suggesting that those narratives are the reality.

Finally, Check Teck Foo’s essay, “Three kingdoms, sense making and complexity theory,” examines the famous Chinese novel, Romance of three kingdoms, as a narrative about the phase transition between the Han and Jin dynasties. Rather than a monolithic narrative, the story is presented as a collection of short stories with interlocking characters, whose interactions eventually result in the reemergence of orderly government. As a novel about social phase transition, he notes, this work offers insights into how today’s leaders and approach the chaotic developments of our own period.

If, in fact, this intersection between the study of complexity and of storytelling is as powerful as the co-editors suspect, an enormous amount of work remains. Those exploring it are only beginning to develop methodologies and a vocabulary.

We would like to offer a bold conclusion, one that is an answer to Boulding (1968), as well as Pondy’s (1976) challenge to system/complexity theory. We think that the difference between coherence-narrative and the more emergence-storytelling theories is the dawn of the ‘Third Cybernetics’ of dynamic complexity. Boulding made it clear that for systems theory to theorize and study higher orders of complexity, we need to differentiate between sign-representations (e.g., narratives as the ‘mirror’ of experience). First and Second Cybernetics has been dominated by master-narratives, each with a particular metaphorization: level 1 (frameworks of narrative types); level 2 (mechanistic narrative); level 3 (thermostat-control narrative); level 4 (cell of the ‘open system’); and level 5 (tree as ‘organic’ narrative). First cybernetics is the mechanistic-narrative of deviation-counteraction through the input-output-feedback sign-comparison model of communication. Second cybernetics is the open (cell) system narrative of deviation-counteracting (comparing narratives of the environment, systemically-organizing more variety to process them).

We think the articles point to a Third Cybernetics, where what Boulding calls image (managed in story, level 6), symbol (self-reflexion in story, level 7), societal discourse (social organization shaped by story, a domain of discourse, level 8), and transcendental (stories of unknowable and knowable, level 9). For Pondy, these upper levels are where language, story, and symbol, exceed the theory of ‘open system’ modeling. The problem is that narrative (conceived as linear metaphorization), does not come to grips with the needs of Third Order Cybernetics[1].

References

Agar, M. (2005). “We have met the other and we’re all nonlinear: Ethnography as a nonlinear dynamic system,” Complexity, ISSN 1076-2787, 10(2): 16-24.

Baskin, K. (2005a). “Storytelling and the complex epistemology of organizations,” in K. A. Richardson (ed.), Managing organizational complexity: Philosophy, theory, application, Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, ISBN 1593113188, pp. 331-344.

Baskin, K. (2005b). “Complexity, stories and knowing,” Emergence: Complexity & Organization, ISSN 1521-3250, 7(2): 32-40.

Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational and communication research, London, UK: Sage Publications, ISBN 0761965874.

Boje, D. M. (1995). “Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as ‘Tamara-land’,” Academy of Management Journal, ISSN 0001-4273, 38(4): 997-1035, http://cbae.nmsu.edu/∼dboje/papers/DisneyTamaraland.html.

Boulding, K. (1968). “General systems theory: The skeleton of science,” in Walter Buckley (ed.), Modern systems research for the behavioral scientist, Chicago: Adeline, ISBN 0202300110, pp. 3-10. More recently reprinted in K. A. Richardson, J. A. Goldstein, P. M. Allen and D. Snowden (eds.) (2004). E:CO Annual Volume 6, Mansfield, MA: ISCE Publishing, ISBN 0976681404, pp. 252-264.

Dervin, B., Foreman-Wernet, L. and Lauterback, Eric (eds.) (2003). Sense-making methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, ISBN 1572735090.

Kurtz, C. F. and Snowden, D. J. (2003). “The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world,” IBM Systems Journal, ISSN 0018-8670, 42(3): 462-483.

Pondy, L. R. (1976). “Beyond open systems models of organization,” Annual meeting of the Academy of Management, August 12, reprinted in this issue of E:CO, pp. 122-139.

Stacey, R.D. (2001). Complex responsive processes in organizations, London, UK: Routledge, ISBN 0415249198.

Weick, K. E. (1995), Sensemaking in organizations, London, UK: Sage Publications, ISBN 080397177X.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Fourth_Order_Cybernetics

http://attainable-utopias.org/tiki/FourthOrderCybernetics

Fourth Order Cybernetics

M. C. Escher’s pictures illustrate some relevant issues…

See First Order Cybernetics
See Second Order Cybernetics
See Third Order Cybernetics

Can we Define a Fourth Order System?

Fourth Order Cybernetics considers what happens when a system redefines itself.

It focuses on the integration of a system within its larger, co-defining context.

Ultimately, Fourth Order Cybernetics is difficult or, perhaps, impossible to conceive.

It unavoidably defies certain principles that make sense at the ‘lower Orders’ .

Fourth Order Cybernetics acknowledges the complex system’s emergent properties.

Emergence entails a greater complexity that reduces knowability and predictability.

It also implies that a system will ‘immerge’ into its environment, of which it is part.

Immergence means ‘submergence’ or ‘disappearance in, or as if in, a liquid’.

The Distributed Nature of 4th Order Cybernetics

Who (or what) is capable of seeing a Fourth Order system in its full complexity?

At the Fourth Order, the discrete observer’s boundaries become problematic.

Who is sufficiently mercurial to notice all relevant changes as, and when they occur?

A single agent is unable to see enough – its standpoint is too fixed, partial or out of date.

In First Order Cybernetics the idea of a Network makes sense.

So could a network be described as an ‘observer’ of a Fourth Order system?

Yes, in theory, but we may not be able to learn what it ‘knows’ in any depth. (see neural networks)

Consider a musical ensemble, and how it attunes itself to audience responses (e.g. cheering).

This raises complex issues of consciousness – where, when, and how it emerges.

We can discuss this by describing how the body manages many levels of knowing.

Fourth Order Systems Integrate the Inner with the Outer

It is difficult to focus on the dark birds at the same time as the light ones

Some human knowledge is tacit rather than descriptive or declarative.

Embodied knowledge is an example of knowledge distributed within, and across a network

It is something we may say we ‘know’, but it exists at a level that cannot be described.

Saying that we know how to ride a bicycle is not saying the ‘knowing’ itself.

When I am riding, my body uses knowledge that cannot be described in words.

Nevertheless I may sit quietly and meditate on what it was like to ride a bicycle.

When I do so my attention focuses inwards and distracts me from events around me.

Conversely, when in a difficult task (e.g. winning a cycle race) I soon forget the ‘inner’ me.

This illustrates that systems appear to have distinct ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ realities.

Fourth Order Systems are Holarchic

How can we view a system as though from the outside and the inside, simultaneously?

To do this would mean combining two (categorically) opposite descriptions.

In Fourth Order Systems, anything we notice can also be seen as the system.

The system can therefore seem to become its own inverse

This cannot be conceived in terms of classical science

The ethical system needed to sustain a 4th Order system is likely to be eudaimonic

Fourth Order Cybernetics can only be understood and described in terms if the inverse of First Order Cybernetics.

Yet by understanding the underlying principle of system inversion, this makes it possible to describe the Open System.

The 4th Order system is contextualised, embedded and integrated into the context

It can thereby become representative for the integrated context.

It therefore operates at two levels simultaneously.

It is no longer a system, but a meta-system.

It operates both as a system in its context, and as a system that is part of the context.

It thereby has the capacity to integrate and disintegrate the contact between both.

It is an active, interactive, reactive and ideally representative agent in/for/with/of that context.

This requires a different level of description: not in relationship to the system, but to the relationship between systems.

The Interface is now the system of reference, instead of the system.

This relationship is the basis of the interaction.

The transformation is the basis of the processing.

The integration is the basis of integrity.

The significant feature of the meta-system is its duality.

The essence is the same, but the relevance brings inversion.

The metasystem is an object; the meta-system is a subject.

Whereas a system can normally be described, a meta-system can only be experienced

The â€˜pillarsâ€™ in this transition are the relationships (Second Order) and the interactions (Third Order).

Fourth Order Design would integrate all activities in an inverted, contextualised form

It would be embedded in its context and responsible in, and for, its actions

The system would act as meta-system and design would act as meta-design.

This represents the level of self-awareness.

It is where the system reflects upon itself and steers itself (i.e. is autopoietic).

These attributes facilitate self-regeneration, thus self-healing.

They can therefore be managed to enable a healing process.

http://attainable-utopias.org/tiki/FourthOrderCybernetics

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Fourth_Order_Cybernetics

Fourth Order Cybernetics

Description

Can we Define a Fourth Order System?

Fourth Order Cybernetics considers what happens when a system redefines itself.

It focuses on the integration of a system within its larger, co-defining context.

* The 4th Order system is contextualised, embedded and integrated into the context
* It can thereby become representative for the integrated context.
* It therefore operates at two levels simultaneously.
* It is no longer a system, but a meta-system.
* It operates both as a system in its context, and as a system that is part of the context.
* It thereby has the capacity to integrate and disintegrate the contact between both.
* It is an active, interactive, reactive and ideally representative agent in/for/with/of that context.
* This requires a different level of description: not in relationship to the system, but to the relationship between systems.
* The Interface is now the system of reference, instead of the system.
* This relationship is the basis of the interaction.
* The transformation is the basis of the processing.
* The integration is the basis of integrity.
* The significant feature of the meta-system is its duality.
* The essence is the same, but the relevance brings inversion.
* The metasystem is an object; the meta-system is a subject.
* Whereas a system can normally be described, a meta-system can only be experienced
* The ‘pillars’ in this transition are the relationships (Second Order) and the interactions (Third Order).
* Fourth Order Design would integrate all activities in an inverted, contextualised form
* It would be embedded in its context and responsible in, and for, its actions
* The system would act as meta-system and design would act as meta-design.
* This represents the level of self-awareness.
* It is where the system reflects upon itself and steers itself (i.e. is autopoietic).
* These attributes facilitate self-regeneration, thus self-healing.
* They can therefore be managed to enable a healing process.

(http://attainable-utopias.org/tiki/FourthOrderCybernetics)

More Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics: interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems.

Please see my related posts:

Cybernetics Group: A Brief History of American Cybernetics

Ratio Club: A Brief History of British Cyberneticians

Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, and Social Systems Theory

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Recursive Vision of Gregory Bateson