Societal Coordination Research Articles

Gene-based COVID-19 vaccines: Australian perspectives in a corporate and global context

Pandemic management requires societal coordination, global orchestration, respect for human rights and defence of ethical principles. Yet some approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by socioeconomic, corporate, and political interests, have undermined key pillars of ethical medical science. We explore significant mistakes that may have occurred in recent pandemic control, in order to better navigate the future. Within corporate and geopolitical infrastructure, we review the COVID-19 pandemic and novel mRNA and viral-vector DNA COVID-19 vaccines, deployed by wealthy western countries. The pandemic, together with rollouts of unconventional, gene-based vaccine technology, has provided experimental opportunity to engineer social control of entire populations. The haste and scale of development, production, and distribution of these new pharmaceuticals is unprecedented in history. Key phase III clinical trials for these products are yet to be fully completed, despite administration to billions of people. Mass vaccination of workforces has been mandated, and vaccine mandates correlate with excess mortality. Many independent data sets concur - we have experienced a pandemic of viral illness, followed by a pandemic of vaccine injury. For Australia, matters have operated the other way around. Vaccination followed later by the main viral wave. Australian excess mortality data correlates with this. Neither risk nor cost can justify these products for the vast majority of people. Lack of efficacy against infection and transmission, and the equivalent benefits of natural immunity, obviate mandatory therapeutics. With the many gene-based pharmaceuticals planned, a new era of pathology lies ahead. We should pause, reflect, and reaffirm essential freedoms, welcome the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, embrace natural immunity, and lift all mandated medical therapy.

Phronesis at the Human-Earth Nexus: Managed Retreat

This study explores how experiences from the current pandemic can inform societal responses to future climate change. To that end, an established philosophical concept of geoscientific insights (geoethics) is utilized to advice on governance under systemic uncertainty that, in turn, is a critical feature of complex-adaptive dynamics. Illustrative examples are the Covid-19 health pandemic and the impact of the global sea-level rise to threatening heights in the early 22nd Century. The term “geoethics” labels an emergent geo-philosophical school of thought rooted in geoscience expertise. When combined with contemporary political philosophies, geoethics leads to a geo-philosophical framework that can support adaptation to complex-adaptive dynamics by favoring multi-agent and context-depending processes (e.g., learning-by-doing). The proposed geo-philosophical framework merges geoethics with the political philosophies of H. Jonas (1903–1993), L. Kohlberg (1927–1987), and M. Bunge (1919–2020). These contemporary philosophies emphasize as relevant for achieving a modern caretaking society, respectively, “the hierarchy of societal coordination processes,” “the intergenerational responsibility of agents of change,” and “the balancing of individual wellbeing (happiness) and duties.” When these philosophies are combined with geoethics, a logical approach can be derived for policy design and decision-making. It emphasizes the “autonomy” (of the human agent) combined with a civic culture that favors “trustworthiness,” “scientific culture.” and a “culture of inclusive justice.” We argue that governance of adaptation to complex-adaptive dynamics (e.g., climate change impact) can be informed by the geo- and society-centric perspectives of the proposed geo-philosophical framework. It can address “Human Earth Nexus” governance issues using the knowledge of both natural and social sciences and applying the lens of geoethical thinking.

Understanding Arab capitalisms: Patrimonialism, HRM and work in Saudi Arabia

This article critiques the scholarship on contemporary Arab societies for according a primacy to state-capital relations and neglecting the significance of capital-labour relations. Both, the comparative capitalism approach, which characterises Arab capitalism as patrimonial, and the literature on HRM in the Middle East pay insufficient attention to the workplace and often write labour out as repressed. They are unable to explain the selective implementation of key labour market and HR policies. Explanations of patrimonial capitalism consider societal coordination modes of co-optation and coercion as central to patrimonial capitalism and its state-capital relations. However, by neglecting labour and the workplace, dynamics of coercion and co-optation is conceived as unified and uncontested; equally policies such as Saudisation and Kafala are perceived as unproblematic and any failure in those policies cannot be explained. This article makes two contributions: first, it shows how key policies within patrimonial capitalism – Saudisation and Kafala – are implemented selectively and circumvented at the workplace. Second, these inconsistencies in co-optation and coercion mechanisms are explained through a focus on contestations at the workplace, bringing to the fore dimensions of power, interests and conflict. The study has implications for institutional analysis and societal change in Arab economies.

Economic coordination in environments with incomplete pricing

Simple observation presents two stylized facts that call for integration into a single explanatory framework. One fact is that societies reflect generally though certainly not perfectly coordinated patterns of activity. The other fact is that only a subset of those activities is coordinated with the direct assistance of market prices. Price-theoretic explanations of how prices serve to secure economic coordination are thus incomplete because contemporary environments feature significant expanses of territory where market pricing has little presence. We refer in this respect to territory occupied both by non-profit enterprises and by political enterprises. In this paper we explore how societal coordination can occur when market pricing covers but a subset of the range of economic activities within a society. A key feature of our explanation is the network architecture of enterprises within a society.

Regional response to climate change and management: an analysis of Africa’s capacity

PurposeThe mainstream climate change community has primarily concerned itself with mitigation and adaptation strategies, both of which require monitoring and prediction. These four inter-connected response actions (mitigation, adaptation, monitoring and prediction) constitute the main strategies for managing climate change. This paper aims to weigh in on policies and societal coordination for effective management of the earth’s climate with respect to these four elements in Africa because of its socioeconomic peculiarities.Design/methodology/approachThe Delphi experts’ method backed by questionnaires was used to obtain relevant data for the study. The questionnaires were distributed to professionals dealing with issues related to climate change response and sustainability in various parts of the world, with a focus on Africa.FindingsWith respect to the strategies that are most needed for effective climate change actions in Africa, government’s policies, activities and decisions rank highest at 1.20 with a p-value of < 0.001, and financing is next at 0.93, mitigation is 0.83, prediction is 0.76 and adaptation is 0.68 (p = 0.048), at the 5 per cent cutoff. Also, for the most appropriate approaches to managing climate change across Africa, regional efforts are at least 8 times more effective than country-wide approaches, followed by continental efforts at 6.51 times, international cooperation at 3.99 times and inaction at 0.00 times.Originality/valueThe paper concludes that a holistic climate change management approach is important in Africa to contain the impacts of climate change in the continent.

Escape FDI and the Varieties of Capitalism: Why History Matters in International Business

This paper addresses the need for a stronger perspective of history in International Business research. In order to illustrate this matter, we will discuss the topic of ‘escape FDI’ as a motive for foreign direct investments (FDIs). While prior research suggests a connection between ‘escape FDI’ and an economy’s degree of societal coordination in a quasi-ahistorical manner, we will argue that ‘escape FDI’ is an issue that liberal and coordinated market economies alike have witnessed. In fact, the relevance of simple dichotomies, such as coordinated and liberal economies, seems to break down in the face of shifting institutional conditions that are bound to very specific periods. Quite consciously, the present paper combines social science and historical methodologies, in an effort to produce a synthesis that will benefit both approaches to understanding international business and its larger context.

Economic Coordination in Environments with Incomplete Pricing

Simple observation presents two stylized facts that call for integration into a single explanatory framework. One fact is that societies reflect generally though certainly not perfectly coordinated patterns of activity. The other fact is that only a subset of those activities is coordinated with the direct assistance of market prices. Price-theoretic explanations of how prices serve to secure economic coordination are incomplete because contemporary environments feature large expanses of territory where market pricing has little presence. We refer in this respect to territory occupied both by nonprofit enterprises and by political enterprises. In this paper we explore how societal coordination can occur when market pricing covers but a subset of the range of economic activities within a society. A key feature of our explanation is the network architecture of enterprises within a society.

Understanding Public Debt Preferences

Surprisingly little is known about voters' public debt preferences on a micro level. This is deplorable, given the importance of the fiscal stability culture in the context of the European public debt crisis. This contribution tests, for a self-designed representative German survey, debt preferences and their determinants. Our results indicate that a Ricardian approach has some importance for explaining individual heterogeneity of consolidation preferences – emphasizing, for example, the importance of individual credit constraints. However, Ricardian reasoning is not able to give a complete picture. Theories of debt determination that point to societal coordination failures or ideology offer additional explanations with empirical backing. The magnitude of these additional effects is substantial; the size of the trust variable is not smaller than the intergenerational dummy for the presence of children.

Changing Japanese capitalism: Societal co-ordination and institutional adjustment

Changing Japanese capitalism: Societal co-ordination and institutional adjustment

Accelerating Japan's Economic Growth: Resolving Japan's Growth Controversy. By F. Gerard Adams, Lawrence R. Klein, Yuzo Kumasaka, and Akihito Shinozaki. New York: Routledge, 2008. xviii, 182 pp. $150.00 (cloth).Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis under Communitarian Capitalism. By Marie Anchordoguy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. xii, 257 pp. $41.95 (cloth).The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan

Accelerating Japan's Economic Growth: Resolving Japan's Growth Controversy. By F. Gerard Adams, Lawrence R. Klein, Yuzo Kumasaka, and Akihito Shinozaki. New York: Routledge, 2008. xviii, 182 pp. $150.00 (cloth).Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis under Communitarian Capitalism. By Marie Anchordoguy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. xii, 257 pp. $41.95 (cloth).The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan

Reframing public relations: The evolution of a reflective paradigm for organizational legitimization

This article endeavors to understand the emergence, diffusion and dynamics of the social processes that activate and constitute public relations. By applying Niklas Luhmann's epistemological sociology, it identifies central problems of late modern society and shows how society deals with these problems through evolutionary learning processes and the development of a reflective paradigm. It concludes that the role of public relations can be seen as organizational legitimization in interrelation to different and changing forms of societal coordination.

War and Welfare: Europe and the United States, 1945 to the Present

Reconstruction and Capitalist Reform Great Britain: Labour's Spoils of War Great Britain: The Socialist Economy in the Free Society Sweden: War and Economic Thinking From the Planned Economy to Societal Coordination Planning the Social Market Economy War, Citizenship, and American Exceptionalism The Postwar State and National Economic Development Bibliography Notes Tables and Graphs

Die brüchigen Zeit-Architekturen der Turing-Gesellschaften

The paper concentrates on three major issues, all closely related to the embeddedness of time in societies, past and present. The first major part of the article is devoted to the problems of time measurements and time-scales and follows the long trajectories from sundials to contemporary atomic clocks or from the divine creation of the earth just 4000 B.C. to the contemporary scale with its initial point at 4.5 billion years ago. The second part of the paper concentrates on the question of basic societal architectures in general and time architectures in particular. Above all, the concept of Turing societies as well as their comparatively new architectures will be laid out in greater detail. Finally, the paper concludes with ten basic propositions which highlight the unusual character of the year 2000-problem. In particular, these propositions point to the unusual type of societal co-ordination challenges, associated with the necessary y2k-adaptations, and conclude with a general theorem from network theory, pointing to the robust sides, but also to the profound and central weaknesses of densely coupled networks.

Note on the Mathematical Formalization of A Measure of Division of Labor

T he division of labor is one of most important concepts in sociology and is almost as old as sociology itself. Durkheim and Weber, fathers of modern sociological theory, considered it to be one of major features of modern society and of bureaucracy, and before them Adam Smith wrote of its significance for industrial systems. It continues to be considered one of major determinants of societal complexity and degree and type of societal coordination and integration. Rarely, however, is conception given an explicit, unambiguous definition. An exception to this is formulation first presented by Jack P. Gibbs and associates (Gibbs and Martin, 1962; Labovitz and Gibbs, 1964; Gibbs and Browning, 1966), which has been shown to be related to several aspects of social structure (Gibbs and Martin, 1962; Labovitz and Gibbs, 1964; Gibbs and Browning, 1966; Rushing, 1967, 1968; Pondy, 1969). The purpose of this paper is to give this formulation even greater clarity by expressing it in mathematical form. Labovitz and Gibbs (1964 :5) define division of labor as the amount of differences among individuals with regard to their sustenance activities. Given large number of specific forms of sustenance activity, determination of all such differences is probably impossible as an operational matter. However, a large proportion of sustenance activities are organized in roles, i.e., occupations. Consequently, amount of occupational differences among individuals is a component of division of labor. Note that this conception refers to occupationally determined individual differences, not differences between occupations themselves. For example, two organizations with two occupations each may differ considerably in number of occupational differences among individuals. Ten individuals may be equally represented in two occupations in one organization, while in another, eight individuals may be in one occupation with two individuals in other. In first pattern, each individual in first occupation differs from each individual in other, making for a total of 25 occupationally relevant individual differences, whereas in second pattern there would be 16 such differences. This conception, therefore, refers to way individuals are distributed in occupational structure; in second pattern, individuals are highly concentrated, whereas in first they are perfectly dispersed. (It will become clear below, however, that differences in dispersion systematically reflect number of individual differences only when number of categories and individuals is constant.) The measure thus concerns property of an N-category distribution, frequencies in different categories being: XI, X2. . . , Xn. By definition, from Gibbs et al.

Societal Coordination by the Educated Minority

The authors have performed field research on some of the problems of societal consensus posed by Louis Kriesberg in PROD III (September, 1959). They find that a high degree of consensus does not exist except on the most abstract principles concerning society and government, and this primarily among the highly educated. They suggest that apathy may be a functional adaptation of modern society to the absence of extended consensus, and that further research may indicate which groups among the educated minority are responsible for the coordination of society.

Societal Coordination by Occupational Leaders

"Leaders of various occupational groups, as compared to the rank-and-file members of the occupational groups, are more likely to accept the legitimacy of other occupational groups and their leaders, and/or are more tolerant in general, and/or are actually more similar to other leaders than the rank-and-file are like their counterparts in other occupational groups." This would seem to conflict with Whyte's " organization man" thesis about leader's conformity. The author suggests leader and ordinary-member comparisons in a number of groups and case studies of policy formation in such groups.