Functioning Of Social Systems Research Articles

The legal conflictology in constitutional and municipal law

The subject. The article is devoted to integration of conflictology theory in legal science. The purpose of the paper is to confirm or disprove hypothesis that theoretical mechanisms of conflictology may be effectively applied into constitutional legal theory to prevent con‐ stitutional legal conflicts.The methodology of the study includes general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, description) and sociological approach.The main results and scope of their application. The author describes the genesis of legal conflictology theory in different humanitarian sciences and its periodization, including integration of conflictology theory in legal science. The author substantiates necessity and justification of application of theoretical and methodological bases of science of conflictology in the constitutional and municipal law for the purpose of forecasting, identification and the resolution of the corresponding constitutional and legal conflicts.Conflictology of constitutional and municipal law is a research level of legal conflictology. The subject of this kind of conflictology are legal conflicts in constitutional and municipal law, their prediction, identification and resolution. It is necessary to take into account the following postulates of the General theory of conflictology in the study of legal conflicts in constitutional and municipal law:– the conflict is natural, objective and acts as an integral property of social life;– the social conflict at the same time acts as a stabilizing factor of functioning of social system;– social conflict is a complex social phenomenon as well as a process having structural, spatial‐temporal and dynamic characteristics;– the organic connection of law conflict with the law. The legal conflict arises about legal phenomena, it is realized under the influence and with the application of legal norms, it is resolved on the basis of legal regulation;– there is a special kind of political conflict that arises within the existing government, where each of the groups within the ruling class has more private interests and its own vision of the situation.Conflictology of constitutional and municipal law bases on the general theoretical postulates of the science of social conflicts. Constitutional conflict is a political type of social conflict – a disagreement between the subjects of constitutional and municipal legal relations over constitutional values, which can be transformed into legally significant conflict and generate legal consequences.Conclusions. The object of scientific knowledge of legal conflictology in constitutional and municipal law is a constitutional and legal conflict, the study of which should be based on the above postulates of the general theory of conflictology, and can not be limited to purely legal knowledge.

Identification Role Of Teacher In Provide Education Reproductive Health ( KRR ) For Adolescent With Disability Blind In SLB Aisyiyah Ponorogo

Adolescent with disability blind is part of an individual who require special needs. Changes of reproductive organs and hormone influence it well as the teenager included in sexuality.The case has occur to adoledcents with disability blind is the lack of the provision of education sexual and reproductive health. The purpose of this research to identify role of teacher in provide education reproductive health ( KRR ) for adolescent with disability blind in SLB Aisyiyah Ponorogo. The kind of research this descriptive quantitative, the population it is all of it the teachers in SLB Aisyiyah Ponorogo. The sample this is as many as 12 respondent. Data research were analysed with collection data, reduction data and categorization, verification and presentation of data, draw conclusions. Education program of KRR give to prevent health in early adolescence pertaining to physical health which includes the social system functions and the process of reproduction. The topic is about anatomy and the functioning of an organ reproduction, a sign of puberty, and all about diseaseas of reproduction, as well as education reproduction sex and gender given uses the method a braille book, a puppet reproductive health, and daisy format. The delivery of KRR carried out at the time of the subject matter IPA and PAI, teacher was support in the implementation of education services health KRR for adolescent with disability blind

Transitivity Model on Signed Graphs

In this paper, we generalize the already established iterated local transitivity model for online social networks in signed networks. In this model, at each time step t and for already existing vertex x, a new vertex(clone) x′ is added which joins to the neighbors of x. The sign of new edge xx′ is the marking on x. We also discuss the properties such as balance, clusterability, sign-compatibility and consistency. The signed networks focus on the type of relations (friendship and enmity) between the vertices(members of online social network). The ILT model for signed network gives an insight on how the network reacts to the addition of clone vertex. Also the properties like balance and clusterability helps establish a natural balance in society by providing a possible formation of group of vertices in society for a peaceful co-existence and smooth functioning of social system.

Dynamic response and transfer function of social systems: A neuro-inspired model of collective human activity patterns

The interaction of social networks with the external environment gives rise to non-stationary activity patterns reflecting the temporal structure and strength of exogenous influences that drive social dynamical processes far from an equilibrium state. Following a neuro-inspired approach, based on the dynamics of a passive neuronal membrane, and the firing rate dynamics of single neurons and neuronal populations, we build a state-of-the-art model of the collective social response to exogenous interventions. In this regard, we analyze online activity patterns with a view to determining the transfer function of social systems, that is, the dynamic relationship between external influences and the resulting activity. To this end, first we estimate the impulse response (Green’s function) of collective activity, and then we show that the convolution of the impulse response with a time-varying external influence field accurately reproduces empirical activity patterns. To capture the dynamics of collective activity when the generating process is in a state of statistical equilibrium, we incorporate into the model a noisy input convolved with the impulse response function, thus precisely reproducing the fluctuations of stationary collective activity around a resting value. The outstanding goodness-of-fit of the model results to empirical observations, indicates that the model explains human activity patterns generated by time-dependent external influences in various socio-economic contexts. The proposed model can be used for inferring the temporal structure and strength of external influences, as well as the inertia of collective social activity. Furthermore, it can potentially predict social activity patterns.

The neglect of society in the theory of the firm: a systems-theory perspective

The prevailing theories of the firm acknowledge the importance of trust and loyalty but neglect such behaviour in the substance of their analyses. The present paper unravels this paradox by drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s ground-breaking insight that the complexity-reducing function of social systems leads them to neglect their critical environmental dependencies, thereby compromising their own sustainability. If the firm is conceived as a social system, Luhmann’s theory implies that the neglect of social behaviour by the predominant theories of the firm can be explained as reflecting the neglect of society by actual firms. This argument promises to not only furnish the theory of the firm with a concern for sustainability, but also render it more amenable to unconventional institutions, such as cooperatives and non-profit organisations, that help compensate for the damage inflicted by conventional firms on the social environment.

Социальная логистика: инструмент решения социально-общественных проблем

Social, socio-economic, socio-mechanistic systems and social processes, and problems formulated by them
 as a new area of practical application for rules, principles and laws formed in classical logistics’ as the
 science branch have been considered in this paper. The existence of social and public nature problems,
 manageable with the use of logistics has been shown. Social logistics application examples have been given.
 A concept of social logistics as a set of actions that ensures the effective functioning of social systems (as a
 complex of social phenomena, processes, entities) with logistics principles application has been introduced.
 A distinction between the concepts of social and socially-oriented logistics has been given. A foundation for
 scientific research at the intersection of logistics, sociology and social psychology, where logistics is a tool
 for solving problems formulated by social interaction, has been laid. Problems and issues requiring further
 study and research have been specified.

A Biography of Kenneth C. Land: Pioneer in Quality of Life and Social Indicators Research

Kenneth C. Land was born in the small town of Llano, Texas (population 3,000) on August 19, 1942. He earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Sociology and History at Texas Lutheran College in 1964, a Master of Arts degree in Sociology, minoring in Mathematics, from the University of Texas-Austin in 1966, and a Ph. D. in Sociology, minoring in Mathematics, from the University of Texas-Austin in 1969. He was a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University from 1969–1970. And later Ken was successively a member of the faculties of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Duke Sociology Department as Chairman, which he served from January 1986 to August 1997. Ken was named the John Franklin Crowell Professor of Sociology and Demography at Duke University in 1990. Ken’s contributions to social indicators/quality-of-life/well-being studies commenced during his Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship year at Columbia University. Dr. Eleanor Sheldon of the Russell Sage Foundation had initiated the Indicators of Social Change research project at the Foundation. She interviewed Ken and signed him up to work on the project on a part-time basis during the PostDoctoral year and then as a Staff Member of the Foundation for 3 years after that. The first product of Ken’s work at Russell Sage was the article “On the Definition of Social Indicators (1971).” In this article Ken, outlined the characteristics of social indicators, and specified that “... the criterion for classifying a social statistic as a social indicator is its informative value which derives from its empirically verified nexus in a conceptualization of a social process” (p. 323, emphasis in original). Pursuing this line of thought, in the 1970s and 1980s Ken organized a number of conferences and workshops to focus on the use of social indicators, and each resulted in an edited volume of the work presented. He and sociologist Seymour Spilerman coordinated a Russell Sage Foundation-sponsored Conference on Social Indicators Models, to explore models that could be used to form indicators of the functioning of social systems and analyze their interconnections and changes over time. As a member Applied Research Quality Life (2014) 9:1111–1114 DOI 10.1007/s11482-014-9337-z

Conclusion: On Energopolitics

Why add energy to biopolitics? What conceptual openings does such a concatenation or expansion produce, both in how we think about energy and in way we understand contemporary modes and models of power? And if there are conceptual openings produced in this encounter, is there anything that, in process, is also confused or closed down?Taken together, articles in this special collection raise these questions and begin difficult task of providing (at least provisional) answers to them. While they do so through specific lens of discipline of anthropology, problem posed by energy cuts across divisions of epistemology and social ontology into human sciences have been arranged. Energy has emerged as a problem, in part, because despite its now apparent importance and significance to almost everyone, it has not been typically factored into social theory-into broad understandings and conceptualizations of operation and function of social systems and subjects who inhabit them. One might have expected energy to play a key role, for example, in Karl Marx's assessment of operations of capitalism, is dependent on energy like no socio-economic system before it.1 But like others living in early days of capitalism's petroculture (the first volume of Capital appearing less than a decade after 1859 discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania), Marx seemed to imagine energy as an input into system that did not require explicit theorization. The now influential Fragment on Machines in Grundrisse (1993) outlined a world in technological development would eventually reach such an advanced state that labor would no longer be part of production. Instead of wasting one's life embroiled in factory labor, Marx imagined that over time the human being comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to production (1993:705). Through process of technological and scientific progress, we would approach a world in labor time would be reduced to an absolute minimum, which then corresponds to artistic, scientific, etc. development of individuals in time set free, and with means created, for all of (1993:706). This idea of a world without work remains one of most appealing utopian political goals. But even if technology were to be so advanced as to operate all on its own, it would still require energy to function, and energy sources on we have come to depend are in increasingly short supply and generate enormous social and environmental problems as we use them up.2 It is not only our understanding of capitalism that is impeded when we do not factor energy into social theory, but our imaginings of character of social and political emancipation; both require us to better understand that we are subjects who depend on energy as never before.Michel Foucault's theories of social are most rigorous and complete ones with we are working at present time. The influence of his ideas-especially his elaboration of major historical shifts in character of power and his thoroughgoing description of contemporary form that power has taken-has been felt across disciplines. Foucault's concept of biopolitics has been especially important, and has come to constitute a near-universally accepted description of principle mode through states today organize and manage life activity of their populations.3 The concept of biopolitics emerges over course of Foucault's late lectures at College de France, in particular three sets of lectures collected as Society Must Be Defended (1975-1976) (1997), Security, Territory, Population (1977-1978) (2004b), and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979) (2004a). And while it would be wrong to suggest that at any point a single definition of concept emerges out of these works, principle idea of biopolitics is stated bluntly at beginning of Security: the set of mechanisms through basic biological features of human species became object of political strategy (2004b:1). …

Between Equity and Differentiation: An Analytical schema of the social function of education

The educational sphere has an internal function relatively agreed by social scientists. Nonetheless, the contribution that educational systems provide to the society (i.e., their social function) does not have the same degree of consensus. Taking into consideration such theoretical precedent, the current article raises an analytical schema to grasp the social function of education considering a sociological perspective. Starting from the assumption that there is an intrinsic relationship between the internal and social functions of social systems, we suggest there are particular stratification determinants modifying the internal pedagogical function of education, which impact on its social function by creating simultaneous conditions of equity and differentiation. Throughout the paper this social function is considered a paradoxical mechanism. We highlight how this paradoxical dynamic is deployed in different structural levels of the educational sphere. Additionally, we discuss eventual consequences of this paradoxical social function for the inclusion possibilities that educational systems offer to individuals.

“Growing too fast:” Local stakeholders speak out about growth and its consequences for community well-being in the urban–rural interface

Urban growth and development patterns have been implicated in the loss of ecosystem functioning, increased economic burdens on communities, and impacts to residents’ human health. However, the effects of growth and development on the functioning of social systems are less understood. In this paper we present the findings of an interpretive study investigating two primary questions: (1) How do diverse stakeholders living and working in the urban–rural interface describe and characterize change in their communities? and (2) What are stakeholders’ perceptions of urban growth consequences in their communities? 30 key informant interviews were conducted with stakeholders in two communities within the Lower Kaskaskia River watershed, Illinois. Community stakeholders, including business representatives, agricultural producers, community decision-makers, educators and natural resource professionals living and working at the urban–rural interface, provided rich insider perspectives on urban growth and its consequences for quality of life in their communities. Qualitative data analysis uncovered both shared and contested characterizations of change in the communities, such as loss of farmland, a more vital community economy, the decay of a sense of community, and cultural conflict. The study has implications for resource professionals, community planners and local actors by identifying potential urban growth consequences on residents’ sense of place and community identity and offering a framework for monitoring the sociocultural impacts of land use change.

The Evolved Self, Self-regulation, and the Co-evolution of Leadership

Much has been written about the self, yet its evolution and functioning are matters of controversy in evolutionary psychology. The article argues that it is an evolved capacity, essential for co-evolutionary processes, including cultural development, to occur. A model of self-regulation is offered to explain its adaptive functioning, elaborating William James’ I-me distinction, and drawing upon contemporary analyses in social psychology and neuroscience. The model is used to illustrate how adaptive behavior is facilitated by the exercise of self-control, to defer and re-order goals, revise perceptions of the world, modify conceptions of the self, and alter repertoires of learned action sequences, heuristics, and habits. It also identifies potential areas of dysfunction, mediated by self-deception and misperception. Through this lens one can see how leadership is a historically co-evolving function of social systems, changing to meet altered circumstances. The recursive relationship involves interaction between changing leader–follower relationships, within which leaders’ self-regulation is a central process. Individual differences in leaders as agents are thus also critical. The article concludes by considering the need for insight in order to steer these co-evolving functions in directions that help us as a species to master the global challenges and threats we face in our times.

Distributed artificial intelligence, diversity and information literacy

My proposal is based on my doctoral dissertation On the Shoulders of AI-technology : Sociology of Knowledge and Strong Artificial Intelligence which I succesfully defended on May 29th 2009. E-published http://www.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=12588&postid=1389611 The dissertation is concerned with Sociology’s stance in the debate on Strong Artificial Intelligence,.i.e. AI-systems that is able to shape knowledge on their own. There is a need for sociologists to realize the difference between two approaches to constructing AI systems: Symbolic AI (or Classic AI) and Connectionistic AI in a distributed model – DAI. Sociological literature shows a largely critical attitude towards Symbolic AI, an attitude that is justified. The main theme of the dissertation is that DAI is not only compatible with Sociology’s approach to what is social, but also constitutes an apt model of how a social system functions. This is consolidated with help from german sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. A lot of sociologists criticize AI because they think that diversity is important and can only be comprehended in informal circumstances that only humans interacting together can handle. They mean that social intelligence is needed to make something out of diversity and informalism. Luhmann´s systems theory gives the opposite perspective. It tells us that it is social systems that communicate and produce new knowledge structures out of contincency. Psychological systems, i.e. humans, can only think within the circumstances the social system offer. In that way human thoughts are bound by formalism. Diversity is constructed when the social systems interact with complexity in their environments. They reduce the complexity and try to present it as meaningful diversity. Today when most of academic literature is electronically stored and is accessible through the Internet from al over the world, DAI can help social systems to observe and reduce complexity in this global dimension. It is pointed out that human consciousness is limited in handling this global dimension. Therefore is it reasonable to argue that DAI in at least this dimension has a stronger intelligence than humans have. I will argue that Luhmann´s social theory and DAI give a god model to analyze the conditions for diversity in the Internet society. Further, the discussion about strong AI gives a lot of opportunities to discuss what sort of information literacy is needed and it also gives some perspective to discuss the concept of IL I have observed that the concept has evolved from something that coined some formal capacities, to something that has to do with a capacity to observe informal relations. That discussion can easily be compared to a parallel discussion within the debate about strong AI.

Contingent communication in a hybrid multi-media world: Analysing the campaigning strategies of SHAC

Drawing upon Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical work, this article considers the strategic and tactical use of contingent communication within Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty’s (SHAC) communication subsystem network. While acknowledging the importance of system stability to the functioning of social systems, the article pinpoints Luhmann’s underestimation of uncertainties within communication as a significant error in theorizing relationships between systems and their environments. It also considers how new media and information communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled SHAC, a British-based though internationally renowned animal rights protest group, to both reinforce the universal connections existing between all its communicating agents and maintain the operation of communication within the social subsystem. Through a critical examination of the eight stages of SHAC’s communication subsystem network, the article underscores how these communicative forms are constantly displaced by context, user, medium and receiver, because indeterminacies are constitutive of communication.

Test of Time: A Case Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety: Rereading 50 Years On

In this paper I revisit Isabel Menzies's classic 'nursing paper' (I.E.P. Menzies [1960]. A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital. Human Relations, 13, 95-121). I outline the main findings of the paper and connect it to the major theoretical developments made by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and consider the current relevance of the paper in the contemporary field of health and social care.

Recursive politics: prevention, modernity and social systems

The aim of this paper is to connect the recent interest in prevention to recent developments in social theory. It begins by recovering some of prevention's essential features from the realm of common sense, showing that what is taken to be the common sense of prevention is emblematic of modernity. For prevention is built on scientific understandings of cause and effect and the possibility of prediction; on a capacity for controlled intervention by government in social life; on a universal value base; on the authority of professional expertise; on rational, calculating, individual social subjects. As this order develops and changes, many of its constituent elements begin to be threatened by social processes which it has itself set in train. Prevention is affected by (and implicated in) these changes, too. But far from being eclipsed by them it becomes more prominent.Drawing on systems theory, the paper argues that prevention meets the essential purpose of boundary maintenance by which the functioning of social systems is sustained. For reasons both external and internal to welfare agencies, including an increased burden of social risk and increasing organisational complexity, this need to mark and maintain system boundaries is ever more pressing. At the same time, at least part of the problem of the fragility of boundaries is attributable to attempts to maintain them. It is for this reason that preventive policy making can be described as recursive, or self‐propelling. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Work Ethic and Our National Culture

A work ethic is people's attitude to work—imprinted in a complex of moral values and norms, embodied in categories and examples of the culture, and expressed in human behavior, above all in the sphere of labor activity. In my understanding, a work ethic is a component part of the socioeconomic genotype (SEG) of a society. A SEG is a kind of information mechanism of inheritance that ensures the reproduction of the structure and principles of a particular social system's functioning, regulation, and learning process. It comprises a system of values, a set of motivations, and a paradigm of economic management and administration, and in its manifest form it is reflected in the contours of the regulation and administration of socioeconomic processes, including legal, administrative, economic, and moral norms and incentives. A SEG itself is based on the system of social interests and on the particular society's culture.

Theory of Harmony of Proportions and Functions in Social Systems

AbstractThe basic postulates of the theory, which unites proportions in statics and dynamics, explain their ties with the social system functions. Verification of the theory has been carried out. Its value is explained in the concrete examples, not only for forecasting social processes and determining optimal correlations in society, but also for development of the general theory of systems.

Complexity and intersubjectivity: Towards the theory of Niklas Luhmann

go changes ? even radical ones - in the course of its development. This is certainly true in the case of as powerful and original a thinker as Niklas Luhmann.1 Yet despite the unavoidable developments one idea has remained fixed and constant for him as a theme unfying all his studies from the beginning to the present. This idea is expressed as the ultimate function of social systems: the grasping and reduction of complexity.2 Luhmann believes that social systems grasp and reduce complexity in a way that distinguishes them significantly from all other kinds of systems. I should like to explore now certain key con? cepts in his presentation and demonstrate how it, in Burkhard Sievers words, "...requires an a-cybernetic as well as an a-sociological theory of world interpretation."3 In so doing I hope to be able to indicate how, in some of his earlier writings, Luhmann believes that transcen? dental phenomenology is an indispensible means of uncovering this world interpretation. In order to demonstrate this phenomenological investigations, both of the later Husserl and Schutz, will be introduced to form the connection between Luhmann's concept of social com? plexity and the intersubjective constitution of the social world. We can begin with the concept of system itself. It possesses a history of its own, according to Luhmann, which develops in four stages, culminating in a cybernetic interpretation. The first ? "classical" ? concept of system reaches back to antiquity. Both Plato (1964, p. 484) and Aristotle (1963, p. 194) employ the word sy sterna in the sense of a whole compounded of several parts or members.4 And Aristotle (1961, p. 280), for instance, says that a, "'Whole' means...[t] hat which so contains its contents that they form a unity; and this in two ways,

Complexity and intersubjectivity: Towards the theory of Niklas Luhmann

go changes ? even radical ones - in the course of its development. This is certainly true in the case of as powerful and original a thinker as Niklas Luhmann.1 Yet despite the unavoidable developments one idea has remained fixed and constant for him as a theme unfying all his studies from the beginning to the present. This idea is expressed as the ultimate function of social systems: the grasping and reduction of complexity.2 Luhmann believes that social systems grasp and reduce complexity in a way that distinguishes them significantly from all other kinds of systems. I should like to explore now certain key con? cepts in his presentation and demonstrate how it, in Burkhard Sievers words, "...requires an a-cybernetic as well as an a-sociological theory of world interpretation."3 In so doing I hope to be able to indicate how, in some of his earlier writings, Luhmann believes that transcen? dental phenomenology is an indispensible means of uncovering this world interpretation. In order to demonstrate this phenomenological investigations, both of the later Husserl and Schutz, will be introduced to form the connection between Luhmann's concept of social com? plexity and the intersubjective constitution of the social world. We can begin with the concept of system itself. It possesses a history of its own, according to Luhmann, which develops in four stages, culminating in a cybernetic interpretation. The first ? "classical" ? concept of system reaches back to antiquity. Both Plato (1964, p. 484) and Aristotle (1963, p. 194) employ the word sy sterna in the sense of a whole compounded of several parts or members.4 And Aristotle (1961, p. 280), for instance, says that a, "'Whole' means...[t] hat which so contains its contents that they form a unity; and this in two ways,

Le terroir et l'organisation sociale en zone Cèmuhî (Région de Touho, Nouvelle-Calédonie) : quelques questions d'anthropologie économique

This article speaks about the economical organization among the Kanaka of north-center of New Caledonia facing the total modalities of the political and social system functioning. Thus it appears that group competitions which take place in the limits of a political ideology opposing « chiefs » and « individuals » are not grounded on a food wealth accumulation but on : 1) the organization of the goods' trafic in the limits of noncommercial valued exchanges. 2) the control of rites which mark out the horticultural production cycle.