Performance Of Social Systems Research Articles

Community music therapy with asylum-seeking and refugee children in Norway

Abstract The article examines how community music therapy (CoMT) can be a support in the everyday life of asylum-seeking and refugee children living in a municipality in Norway. It presents the central aspects of CoMT, with emphasis on performative issues. Self-performance and performance of social systems are discussed in relation to three case examples. It is argued that these performative issues can contribute to fulfilling relevant needs in the lives of asylum-seeking and refugee children.

Monitoring the Vital Signs in a Complex Social System

It has been conjectured that “Culture is an optimizing process”. That is, the social structures that emerge in a given organization support the efficient solution of problems that the organization must deal with. Here we will present an escalating sequence of static problems to our system. Our goal will be to study how the social network infrastructure affects the overall performance of social system of a given complexity. We develop a Cultural Engine metaphor in terms of measures used to describe the entropy of each of the Cultural Algorithm components. The influence function worked analogous to Maxwell's Demon in order to inject new entropy into the system so as to counteract the effect of the second law of thermodynamics. We then applied the system to the solution of a 150 randomly generated problems of varying complexity produced by a problem generation system based upon complexity theory.

The biological determinants of long-wave behavior in socioeconomic growth and development

In this paper, it is claimed that the effective causality of long-term macroeconomic rhythms, most commonly referred to as long waves or Kondratieff waves, is founded in our biological realm. The observed patterns of regularity in human affairs, manifest as socioeconomic rhythms and recurrent phenomena, are constrained and codetermined by our natural human biological clocks, themselves the result of instructions impressed in the human genome and human cognitive capacity by the physical regularity of fixed cosmic cycles. Considering that a long wave can be conceived as an evolving learning dissipative structure consisting of two successive logistic structural cycles, an innovation cycle and a consolidation cycle, and applying considerations from population dynamics, chaos theory and logistic growth dynamics, a Generational-Learning Model is proposed that permits comprehension of the unfolding and time duration of the phenomenon. The proposed model is based on two kinds of biological constraints that impose the rhythm of collective human behavior — generational and cognitive. The generational consist of biologically based rhythms, namely, the Aggregate Virtual Working Life Tenure and the Aggregate Female Fecundity Interval, both subsets of the normative human life span or human life cycle. The cognitive consist of a limiting learning growth rate, manifest in the alternating sequence of two succeeding learning phases, a new knowledge phase and a consolidation phase. It is proposed that the syncopated beats of succeeding effective generational waves and the dynamics of the learning processes determine the long-wave behavior of socioeconomic growth and development. From the relationship between the differential and the discrete logistic equations, it is demonstrated that the unfolding of each structural cycle of a long wave is controlled by two parameters: the diffusion-learning rate δ and the aggregate effective generation t G, whose product maintained in the interval 3< δt G<4 (deterministic chaos) grants the evolution and performance of social systems. Moreover, it is speculated that the triggering mechanism of this long-term swinging behavior may result from the cohesion loss of a given technoeconomic system in consequence of reaching a threshold value of informational entropy production.