Societal Event Research Articles

Control in Knowledge Economies

The problem of proper control in society is a complicated issue. It is complicated by the fact that three different types of control exist in a society: control in socio-technical systems, control in managed systems, and control in self-organizing systems. We apply the theory of societal dynamics to address this complication and to understand the issues about societal control in knowledge-based economies. As witnessed in the disruptions of the twentieth century, all industrial societies can be plunged into instability—due to economic problems when socio-technical systems fail to provide proper functionality for a society—and this was dramatically illustrated in the twenty-first century by the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis. Then the world’s financial socio-technology system stopped functioning—banks stopped lending to each other and all financial transactions ceased. This triggered economic recession in different nations of the world. Thus it is important to understand the factors for societal stability or instability in the evolution of technology in knowledge-based economies. This paper is divided into three parts: (a) summary of the history of a disruptive societal event, (b) analysis of the event in a societal perceptual space, and (c) analysis of the event as issues of societal control.

Fear of Home Birth in Doctors and Obstetric Iatrogenesis

Home births are physiological births and form part of the social model of birth. Doctors, traditionally, have been very fearful of out-of-hospital birth, and physiological births happen less frequently in obstetric units. Normal/physiological birth contributes to improving public health, and doctors are often not aware of the extent of this benefit. Normal birth leads to adaptive physiological function in the baby (endocrine, immune system, thyroid function, respiration, neurology, temperature regulation), more mother and baby bonding, and promotes higher breastfeeding rates, which in turn lead to better lifelong emotional and physical health in babies. Normal birth affirms health, promotes empowerment in mothers, and is a societal event that has been linked to promoting positive emotional qualities in society via the birthing hormone, oxytocin. Training within the medical model constrains doctors’ appreciation of normal birth. Experience of complications, a lack of awareness of the evidence surrounding home birth, compounded by failure to understand the concept of iatrogenesis, perpetuates fear of home birth among doctors.

Natural population movement and marriage restrictions and hindrances in Styria in the 17th to 19th centuries

To marry has never been an egalitarian option or everybody's wish. There have always been calculations or considerations, structural or individual hindrances and even societal restrictions for individuals to get married despite wishing to do so. Without any doubt and apart from the debate on determination or love and free choice in former times, to marry has always been a societal event, a mutual relationship between personal wishes and societal environmental expectations. And apart from all the debates on paradoxes in modernization processes, it is clear that in pre-modern times societal marriage restrictions were widespread. It is very unlikely that people should have been forbidden to marry because they should not have sexual contacts, just for morality reasons. The keys have been considerations and calculations on reproductivity, economic and social resources, social and human capital. This paper deals with aggregated vital data from four parishes in Styria, Austria, covering the outgoing 17th century until the end of the 19th century, in order to detect hints of marriage restrictions. The paper proves the well-known variety of marriage systems in pre-industrial and pre-modern times. It supports the idea that the presence of marriage restrictions hindered population growth, but the absence of such restrictions did not automatically foster more societal transparency and developmental chances in a modern sense, as mortality and inequality were very strong factors in pre-modern agrarian societies. In the end, the question of marriage restrictions was apparently posed and answered by privileged groups.

Kill Me If I Have Alzheimer's: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Dementia

To date, the discussion surrounding physician assisted suicide has centered around those succumbing to terminal illnesses such as cancer or ALS. Yet lurking in the background is a far larger population ready to ascend the twin ethical pillars currently justifying physician assisted suicide, death with dignity and the avoidance of great suffering, i.e., sufferers of Dementia. Four and a half million are currently afflicted with Alzheimer Disease, accounting for roughly half the cases of adult dementia, with fourteen million cases projected by mid century. Assessing how society should consider this population literally requires traversing cultural, philosophical, and psychological fault lines as to the nature of personhood. Thus, those in our society characterizing the seriously demented as empty shells are met by those claiming that the capacity of the demented to make meaning and to communicate to the outside has been undermined by what they term malignant positioning, while in the philosophical realm, modern Lockeans locating personhood and personal identity in the cognitive capacity for self reflection and awareness of self over time contend with phenomenologist and those espousing the social construction of meaning in intersubjectivity. At the same time, medical disciplines have entered the fray. In this conflict, cognitive psychologist grapple with proponents of discursive psychology, and even interceptive stances in neurophysiology face off against each other. On top of it all, in the legal regime one encounters a seeming logical paradox as to the capacity of the person to meaningfully choose assisted suicide: when the person is competent, they do not have full information, once they have full information, they are no longer competent. This article analyzes these competing positions, and then using the narrative of the author's mother and her life with Alzheimer Disease as a concrete context, incorporates those analyses into proposals for resolution of what portends a significant societal event.

The 8200 cal BP abrupt environmental change and the Neolithic transition: A Mediterranean perspective

A major environmental and societal event struck the Mediterranean basin during the 9th millennium cal BP. A sudden and major climatic crisis occurred in the Northern Hemisphere around 8200 cal BP leading to hyper arid conditions along a tropical zone between 15° and 40° North (Near and Middle East), cooler and wetter conditions in western and central Europe, and marked climatic irregularity in the northern Mediterranean basin. At the same time, frequent cultural gaps are observed in cave infillings from Greece to the Spanish peninsula between 8500 and 8000 cal BP, making the vision of the European Mesolithic–Neolithic transition more complex. Furthermore, a stratigraphic and socio-economic rupture associated with a spatial redistribution of sites characterizes the PPNB-NC/Yarmoukian transition in the Near East. The impact of these climatic and environmental changes in the first centuries of the neolithisation of Mediterranean Europe is discussed, using the socio-cultural, economic, stratigraphic and chronological evidence for the first farmers and last hunter-gatherers. This evidence is compared to recent paleoclimatic and geo-archaeological data obtained from prehistoric contexts, in order to measure the hydro-morphological impact on activities in valleys and karstic rockshelters.