Social Attractors Research Articles

A Complexity-Based Plan for Evaluating Transformation

Abstract This article presents a case for more rigorous application of complexity science in our efforts to evaluate activity that seeks to bring about transformative change. It builds on the work that is already going on in the evaluation community. Three constructs from complexity science are employed – sensitive dependence, emergence, and social attractors. The paper argues that if–then logic is recommended for small-scale change within transformation efforts, but that to evaluate transformation writ large, data from if–then evaluation must be embedded in, and interpreted in terms of, complex behavior. Methodologies for evaluating within this framework are presented. The argument is linked to a definition of transformation that is multidimensional, non-linear, and measurable. The paper is built around a generic model of transformational change and shows how that model can be customized for specific transformation scenarios. It also shows how evaluation with respect to complexity can be accomplished with methodologies that are well known and well-practiced in the evaluation community.

Vertical Cities: Emergent Patterns of Movement and Space Use in Dense Vertically Integrated Urban Built Environments

In high-density, land-scarce cities like Singapore, the successful translation of ground-level urban qualities and benefits into vertical living is crucial for social, economic, environmental, and ecological sustainability. This research introduces a Network science-based spatial analysis framework to evaluate the connectivity and relationships of vertically integrated urban open spaces. Kampung Admiralty (KA), a unique development integrating housing for the elderly with various facilities, serves as a case study. The methodology combines static spatial network measures and real-world movement data to predict movement flows, accessibility, and connectivity. Lift lobbies and elevated garden connectors emerged as critical paths, effectively distributing pedestrian flows. Landscape spaces played a key role in visual and physical connectivity, offering high recreational and social value. Strategic placement of “social attractors” improved space utilization. The study highlights the importance of spatial design parameters in user-space interactions and provides insights into socio-spatial networks at both ground and elevated levels. It identifies key connectors that facilitate effective planning and design of vertically integrated public space networks, promoting social and spatial effectiveness.

Social innovations as a new model of interaction between self-government and self-organization of the populationм

Relevance of the research topic. Social innovations are an effective tool for the introduction of social values that provide a new format of social interaction of social actors of sustainable development. Innovations are studied in various spheres of social practice and are understood as socio-cultural phenomena that come from the economic and technological plane. Problem statement. Despite some developments in the study of social innovation, there is a need to move to a new theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of "social innovation", which arises in response to understanding the role of innovation in the model of interaction of self-government and self-organization, as a tool for prompt resolution and smoothing of the consequences of modern socio-economic problems. Analysis of recent research and publications. The relationship of the phenomenon of innovation with the economic development of society, identified by N. D. Kondratiev and J. A. Schumpeter, encouraged the study of innovation as a complex process structured from the stage of basic research to practical application. Further understanding of the concept of "innovation" was proposed by S. Kuznets, who showed that innovation in addition to the technological aspect, have a social - new technologies cause social change (institutional, ideological, etc.). Modern forms of social innovation in the context of sustainable development strategy was studied by D. Antonyuk, who cites the results of their application in the leading countries of the world in order to ensure qualitative change in society. V. Geets, exploring the role of socialization and social innovation in the interaction of business and the state, focused on ensuring social interaction at the macro level by ensuring cooperation in uniting people in a variety of groups, communities to perform actions conditioned by life. T. Kuz emphasizes the establishment of partnerships through social innovations, constructive dialogue between government, business, self-government and self-organization of the population in order to increase the effectiveness of their cooperation. Selection of unexplored parts of the general problem. To date, there is no single approach in the scientific community to the definition of the term "social innovation", which covers a significant part of society. The role of social innovations in the model of effective interaction of self-government bodies and self-organization of the population, as well as the forms of their manifestation are insufficiently covered. Problem statement, research goals. The above circumstances determine the feasibility of determining the role and effective forms of social innovation in the interaction and cooperation of stakeholders for the development of communities and territories. Method and methodology of research. The set of methods of empirical and theoretical research (analysis and synthesis, abstract-logical, generalization and system analysis) in the process of research was used. Presentation of the main material (results of work). A retrospective analysis of the formation of the phenomenon of social innovation, the author's definition of the term "social innovation", the main tools for the development of social innovation and current areas of their use. It is noted that social innovations as new ways of human interaction in the form of supporting positive initiatives, personal projects, training and skills development of volunteers intensify the development of local communities by establishing a wide network of horizontal and vertical relationships between social attractors. Field of application of results. The obtained results can be used in the self-government bodies of territorial communities in order to increase the effectiveness of stakeholder interaction in the process of achieving sustainable development goals. Conclusions. Today in Ukraine the introduction of social innovations in management processes is in its infancy, there is virtually no experience of self-organized structures and their interaction with self-government bodies, which requires improvement of volunteer management, dissemination and development of fundraising and crowdfunding, creation of social clusters for human innovation, which is focused on sustainable development.

Communication and social interaction in conditions of increasing sociality as a factor in the development of society

Modern society is a multidimensional, multipolar, and fragmented in many constituent aspects, community. The society lacks a unified understanding of historical retrospect and prospects, development strategies, approaches to solving life problems, including global warming, environmental pollution, threats of hunger, and depletion of resources, pandemics and conflicts. However, the most important reason for the imbalance of the world is the inability to agree. The purpose of the article is to present a constructive and conceptual picture of the interconnectedness of social communication and social interaction as medial conditions for achieving integrity and dynamic balance in society. It is noted that systemic violations of public relations and relations between people have formed a global situation of inability to carry out normal interaction in a positive vector. The communication saturation of social interaction is only a consequence of the evolutionary need of society to move to a new level of interaction of social attractors, all elementary and institutional subjects of social action. It is proposed to consider interaction in the social system as a medial factor of integration and development of society and its subsystems in the vector of achieving the necessary integrity and dynamic equilibrium. At the same time, social communication is a systemic tool for achieving the desired state, the possibilities, features and conditions for social interaction to fulfill its evolutionary functional purpose as a medial factor of the functioning and development of the social system are formulated.

The nature of social organization of production: From firms to complex dynamics

The properties of the firm are crucial starting points for developing theories on economy and management. The aim of this study is to propose a general theory of the social organization of production, mapping the essential conditions for its creation, development, and growth. In order to do so, we propose an evolutionary theory in which the relations of the organization's sociotechnical system manifest themselves through a self‐perpetuating dynamic where leaders take on the role of social attractors and their viable outline is defined by their capacity for regeneration and by the flows of resources and information that pass through them. This goes against the finalist conceptions of the firm, in which the scope is to meet external demands. In this type of dynamics, the objective of the structure is to ensure its own organization and the realization of its identity and autonomy.

Urban and Transport Scaling: Northern Mesopotamia in the Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age

Scaling methods have been applied to study modern urban areas and how they create accelerated, feedback growth in some systems while efficient use in others. For ancient cities, results have shown that cities act as social reactors that lead to positive feedback growth in socioeconomic measures. In this paper, we assess the relationship between settlement area expressed through mound area from Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age sites and mean hollow way widths, which are remains of roadways, from the Khabur Triangle in northern Mesopotamia. The intent is to demonstrate the type of scaling and relationship present between sites and hollow ways, where both feature types are relatively well preserved. For modern roadway systems, efficiency in growth relative to population growth suggests roads should show sublinear scaling in relation to site size. In fact, similar to modern systems, such sublinear scaling results are demonstrated for the Khabur Triangle using available data, suggesting ancient efficiency in intensive transport growth relative to population levels. Comparable results are also achieved in other ancient Near East regions. Furthermore, results suggest that there could be a general pattern relevant for some small sites (0–2 ha) and those that have fewer hollow ways, where β, a measure of scaling, is on average low (≈ < 0.2). On the other hand, a second type of result for sites with many hollow ways (11 or more) and that are often larger suggests that β is greater (0.23–0.72), but still sublinear. This result could reflect the scale in which larger settlements acted as greater social attractors or had more intensive economic activity relative to smaller sites. The provided models also allow estimations of past roadway widths in regions where hollow ways are missing.

Formulation and parameter selection of multi-objective deterministic particle swarm for simulation-based optimization

Global derivative-free deterministic algorithms are particularly suitable for simulation-based optimization, where often the existence of multiple local optima cannot be excluded a priori, the derivatives of the objective functions are not available, and the evaluation of the objectives is computationally expensive, thus a statistical analysis of the optimization outcomes is not practicable. Among these algorithms, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is advantageous for the ease of implementation and the capability of providing good approximate solutions to the optimization problem at a reasonable computational cost. PSO has been introduced for single-objective problems and several extension to multi-objective optimization are available in the literature. The objective of the present work is the systematic assessment and selection of the most promising formulation and setup parameters of multi-objective deterministic particle swarm optimization (MODPSO) for simulation-based problems. A comparative study of six formulations (varying the definition of cognitive and social attractors) and three setting parameters (number of particles, initialization method, and coefficient set) is performed using 66 analytical test problems. The number of objective functions range from two to three and the number of variables from two to eight, as often encountered in simulation-based engineering problems. The desired Pareto fronts are convex, concave, continuous, and discontinuous. A full-factorial combination of formulations and parameters is investigated, leading to more than 60,000 optimization runs, and assessed by three performance metrics. The most promising MODPSO formulation/parameter is identified and applied to the hull-form optimization of a high-speed catamaran in realistic ocean conditions. Its performance is finally compared with four stochastic algorithms, namely three versions of multi-objective PSO and the genetic algorithm NSGA-II.

Sizes of Permanent Campsite Communities Reflect Constraints on Natural Human Communities

Both small-scale human societies and personal social networks have a characteristic hierarchical structure with successively inclusive layers of 15, 50, 150, 500, and 1,500 individuals. It has been suggested that these values represent a set of natural social attractors, or “sweet spots,” in organizational terms. We exploited the new phenomenon of permanent (i.e., residential) campsites to ask whether these values are present in the size distribution of the numbers of residents in these naturally small-scale communities. In two separate data sets of different grain, we find consistent evidence for sites with 50, 150, 500, and maybe 1,500 residents. We infer that these reflect numerical sizes at which communities may in some way be socially optimal. Our data do not allow us to say why this pattern emerges, but the consistency of the results and the fact that the predetermined sizes of permanent campsites adhere to this pattern suggest that it may arise from the limits on the number of relationships that ma...

Social Attractors: A Proposal to Enhance “Resilience Thinking” about the Social

This article proposes social attractors as a way of addressing limitations in the functionalist sociology commonly applied to the social when examining ecological-social relations. It focuses on “resilience thinking” to argue the case. Resilience thinking is discussed (1) as an analytical strategy whereby ecological and social attractors perform analogous roles in a coordinated approach to ecosystems and social relations, and (2) as a social movement within the “new ecology” that institutionalized around the notion of resilence. The article begins by describing the institutionalization of resilience thinking. It then argues that functionalist assumptions about equilibrium contradict those of resilience thinking and lead to conflated views of social relations. The theoretical context of the social attractor, which stems from a synthesis of critical realism and Gramscian analysis of power, is outlined. Finally, the qualitative, nonlinear methodology that the social attractor facilitates is illustrated through a hypothetical example involving ecosocial relations.

A cellular automata model on residential migration in response to neighborhood social dynamics

Residential migration patterns result from complex processes involving households and their neighborhoods. Simulation models assist in understanding this relationship by contextualizing residential mobility within a theoretical framework. The objective of this study is to model these migration patterns created by the interaction between changes in the social structure of households and the positive or negative social attractors in the neighborhood. Specifically, this study links residential mobility to the dynamic interplay between the micro-environment existing within a household and the meso-environment that structures a neighborhood. The cellular automata model developed in this study incorporates transition rules which govern households in their decision to move. The results represented by a cellular grid demonstrate that residential mobility is significantly influenced by density rates, individual household factors and neighborhood attractors. Three contrasting scenarios are presented in this paper to illustrate the impact of occupancy, density, neighborhood social influence, and the effect of a conglomeration of negative social attractors in a neighborhood. Future iterations of this model will incorporate census and crime data in order to test whether the rules governing this model are an accurate reflection of residential mobility in a mid-sized Canadian city.

Corporate Social and Environmental Reporting: Another Dimension for Accounting Information

Traditional accounting has lost its instrumental ability of entailing the informational dimensions that are requested in the process of comprehending the phenomenon of identifying and reporting entity’s activity in the context of sustainable development. We would venture to suggest that the financial statements considered under the instruments of traditional accounting must be reconfigured in a larger context under the subtle influence of social and environmental attractors. Therefore, we consider that besides the principles exposed in traditional accounting, a set of principles that underpin the role of the society and of the environment in this context will develop a holistic vision of entity’s reporting. In this article, we analyze the status of development in social and environmental reporting literature and practice and focus on the issues requested for presentation and their implications on shareholders’ information needs. Also, the paper allows new approaches regarding the reporting of high quality information and its implementation into entities’ financial statements, ensuring premises for future research. The data coming from accounting literature, accounting settlers’ requirements and entities’ experience are gathered, analyzed and interpreted in order to bring to light an underlying coherence and sense for the new perspective of reporting: corporate social and environmental reporting.