Download or read book Social Self Organization written by Dirk Helbing and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-05-05 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the principles that keep our society together? This question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing question, what are the forces that keep our world together. However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization, require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of social interactions, one can already gain some surprising insights into the social, ``macro-level'' outcomes and dynamics that is implied by individual, ``micro-level'' interactions. Depending on the nature of these interactions, they may imply the spontaneous formation of social conventions or the birth of social cooperation, but also their sudden breakdown. This can end in deadly crowd disasters or tragedies of the commons (such as financial crises or environmental destruction). Furthermore, we demonstrate that classical modeling approaches (such as representative agent models) do not provide a sufficient understanding of the self-organization in social systems resulting from individual interactions. The consideration of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies, and nonlinear feedback effects turns out to be crucial to get fundamental insights into how social patterns and dynamics emerge. Given the explanation of sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena resulting from these features and their combination, our evolutionary modeling approach appears to be powerful and insightful. The chapters of this book range from a discussion of the modeling strategy for socio-economic systems over experimental issues up the right way of doing agent-based modeling. We furthermore discuss applications ranging from pedestrian and crowd dynamics over opinion formation, coordination, and cooperation up to conflict, and also address the response to information, issues of systemic risks in society and economics, and new approaches to manage complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected parts of this book had been previously published in peer reviewed journals.
Download or read book A Sociological Theory of Communication written by Loet Leydesdorff and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Networks of communication evolve in terms of reflexive exchanges. The codification of these reflections in language, that is, at the social level, can be considered as the operating system of society. Under sociologically specifiable conditions, the discursive reconstructions can be expected to make the systems under reflection increasingly knowledge-intensive. This sociological theory of communication is founded in a tradition that includes Giddens' (1979) structuration theory, Habermas' (1981) theory of communicative action, and Luhmann's (1984) proposal to consider social systems as self-organizing. The study also elaborates on Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication for the formalization and operationalization of the non-linear dynamics. The development of scientific communications can be studied using citation analysis. The exchange media at the interfaces of knowledge production provide us with the evolutionary model of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. The construction of the European Information Society can then be analyzed in terms of interacting networks of communication. The issues of sustainable development and the expectation of social change are discussed in relation to the possibility of a general theory of communication. REVIEW In this book, LoetLeydesdorff sets out to answer the question, "Can society be considered as a self-organizing (autopoietic) system. In the process, Leydesdorff, develops a general sociological theory of communication, as well as a special theory of scientific communication designed to analyze complex systems such as the Euroean Information Society. (from review in JASIST 53[1], 2002, 62-63)
Download or read book Self Organization in Biological Systems written by Scott Camazine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The synchronized flashing of fireflies at night. The spiraling patterns of an aggregating slime mold. The anastomosing network of army-ant trails. The coordinated movements of a school of fish. Researchers are finding in such patterns--phenomena that have fascinated naturalists for centuries--a fertile new approach to understanding biological systems: the study of self-organization. This book, a primer on self-organization in biological systems for students and other enthusiasts, introduces readers to the basic concepts and tools for studying self-organization and then examines numerous examples of self-organization in the natural world. Self-organization refers to diverse pattern formation processes in the physical and biological world, from sand grains assembling into rippled dunes to cells combining to create highly structured tissues to individual insects working to create sophisticated societies. What these diverse systems hold in common is the proximate means by which they acquire order and structure. In self-organizing systems, pattern at the global level emerges solely from interactions among lower-level components. Remarkably, even very complex structures result from the iteration of surprisingly simple behaviors performed by individuals relying on only local information. This striking conclusion suggests important lines of inquiry: To what degree is environmental rather than individual complexity responsible for group complexity? To what extent have widely differing organisms adopted similar, convergent strategies of pattern formation? How, specifically, has natural selection determined the rules governing interactions within biological systems? Broad in scope, thorough yet accessible, this book is a self-contained introduction to self-organization and complexity in biology--a field of study at the forefront of life sciences research.
Download or read book Self Organization and Society written by Takatoshi Imada and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-organization is a generic term describing the capacity of a system to change its own structure by itself while interacting with the environment. In this sense, self-organization is not environment-determined or environment-adaptive, but is self-determined and self-adaptive. The concept of self-organization was born in the 1960s, and attempts were made to establish a theory based on the logic of a system and its control. In contrast, the 1980s introduced a view based on the logic of creative individuals and on fluctuations. Antithetical differences exist between the two. The former regards the system of aggregated individuals as the object of consideration, where self-organization is the sum of the practices of a system led by control, or self-control in particular. The latter focuses on the practices of individuals deviating from the logic of a system, making the existing system fluctuate and transforming its structure. This volume attempts to integrate these viewpoints through inquiry into the structure of the self and through self-reflexion. A new horizon thus opens for the synthesis of planning/control action theory and spontaneous/performative action theory.
Download or read book Self organisation Counter economic Strategies written by Will Bradley and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative, "bottom-up" models for social or economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book The Emergence of Leadership written by Douglas Griffin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complexity perspective on leadership, this book considers factors such as risk and conflict, spontaneity and motivation, bullying and the use/abuse of power to express a new view of business ethics.
Download or read book Engineering Self Organising Systems written by Sven A. Brueckner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-organisation, self-regulation, self-repair, and self-maintenance are promising conceptual approaches to deal with the ever increasing complexity of distributed interacting software and information handling systems. Self-organising applications are able to dynamically change their functionality and structure without direct user intervention to respond to changes in requirements and the environment. This book comprises revised and extended papers presented at the International Workshop on Engineering Self-Organising Applications, ESOA 2004, held in New York, NY, USA in July 2004 at AAMAS as well as invited papers from leading researchers. The papers are organized in topical sections on state of the art, synthesis and design methods, self-assembly and robots, stigmergy and related topics, and industrial applications.
Download or read book Self organising Multi agent Systems Algorithmic Foundations Of Cyber anarcho socialism written by Jeremy Pitt and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paradigm of self-organisation is fundamental to theories of collective action in economic science and democratic governance in political science. Self-organisation in these social systems critically depends on voluntary compliance with conventional rules: that is, rules which are made up, mutually agreed, and modifiable 'on the fly'. How, then, can we use the self-organisation observed in such social systems as an inspiration for decentralised computer systems, which can face similar problems of coordination, cooperation and collaboration between autonomous peers?Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems presents an innovative and systematic approach to transforming theories of economics and politics (and elements of philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence) into an executable logical specification of conventional rules. It shows how sets of such rules, called institutions, provide an algorithmic basis for designing and implementing cyber-physical systems, enabling intelligent software processes (called agents) to manage themselves in the face of competition for scarce resources. It also provides a basis for implementing socio-technical systems with interacting human and computational intelligences in a way that is sustainable, fair and legitimate.This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for anyone interested in the 'planned emergence' of global properties, commonly-shared values or successful collective action, especially as a product of social construction, knowledge management and political arrangements. For those studying both computer science and social sciences, this book offers a radically new gateway to a transformative understanding of complex system development and social system modelling.Understanding how a computational representation of qualitative values like justice and democracy can lead to stability and legitimacy of socio-technical systems is among the most pressing software engineering challenges of modern times. This book can be read as an invitation to make the Digital Society better.Related Link(s)
Download or read book Dynamic Patterns written by J. A. Scott Kelso and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: foreword by Hermann Haken For the past twenty years Scott Kelso's research has focused on extending the physical concepts of self- organization and the mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics to understand how human beings (and human brains) perceive, intend, learn, control, and coordinate complex behaviors. In this book Kelso proposes a new, general framework within which to connect brain, mind, and behavior.Kelso's prescription for mental life breaks dramatically with the classical computational approach that is still the operative framework for many newer psychological and neurophysiological studies. His core thesis is that the creation and evolution of patterned behavior at all levels--from neurons to mind--is governed by the generic processes of self-organization. Both human brain and behavior are shown to exhibit features of pattern-forming dynamical systems, including multistability, abrupt phase transitions, crises, and intermittency. Dynamic Patterns brings together different aspects of this approach to the study of human behavior, using simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics. Kelso begins with a general account of dynamic pattern formation. He then takes up behavior, focusing initially on identifying pattern-forming instabilities in human sensorimotor coordination. Moving back and forth between theory and experiment, he establishes the notion that the same pattern-forming mechanisms apply regardless of the component parts involved (parts of the body, parts of the nervous system, parts of society) and the medium through which the parts are coupled. Finally, employing the latest techniques to observe spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity, Kelso shows that the human brain is fundamentally a pattern forming dynamical system, poised on the brink of instability. Self-organization thus underlies the cooperative action of neurons that produces human behavior in all its forms.
Download or read book Self Organization and Management of Social Systems written by H. Ulrich and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-organization of systems belonging to quite different discipl ines has been a central topic of synergetics since its beginning. I am therefore particularly plea sed that Hans Ulrich and Gilbert Probst have not only undertaken to organize an interdisciplinary meeting on Self-Organization and Management of Social Systems, but have also edited these articles written by leading scientists after and based upon that symposium. While the previous volumes of the Springer Series in Synergetics were mainly de voted to physical, chemical and biological systems, with only the book by W. Weidlich and G. Haag deal i ng with "Quant i tat i ve Soc i 01 ogy" (Spri nger Ser. Syn., Vo 1. 14), the present volume opens a new perspective. As the reader will notice, the multitude of facets of self-organization is well reflected by various authors belonging to different discipl ines and representing different schools of thought. When such a wide scope of fields - ranging from phy sics to sociology - is covered, it is not surprising that the existence of a "hiatus" between sociology and the natural sciences was felt by some participants.
Download or read book The Eighth Day written by Richard Newbold Adams and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1988-03-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can human social evolution be described in terms common to other sciences, most specifically, as an energy process? The Eighth Day reflects a conviction that the human trajectory, for all its uniqueness and indeterminism, will never be satisfactorily understood until it is framed in dynamics that are common to all of nature. The problem in doing this, however, lies in ourselves. The major social theories have failed to treat human social evolution as a component of broader natural processes. The Eighth Day argues that the energy process provides a basis for explaining, comparing, and measuring complex social evolution. Using traditional ecological energy flow studies as background, society is conceived as a self-organization of energy. This perspective enables Adams to analyze society in term of the natural selection of self-organizing energy forms and the trigger processes basic to it. Domestication, civilization, socioeconomic development, and the regulation of contemporary industrial nation-states serve to illustrate the approach. A principal aim is to explore the limitation that energy process imposes on human social evolution as well as to clarify the alternatives that it allows. Richly informed by contemporary anthropological historicism, sociobiology, and Marxism, The Eighth Day avoids simple reductionism and denies facile ideological categorization. Adams builds on work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics and theoretical biology and brings three decades of his own work to an analysis of human society that demands an extreme materialism in which human thought and action find a central place.
Download or read book The Self Organizing Social Mind written by John Bolender and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal that the basic mental models used to structure social interaction result from self-organization in brain activity. In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty—in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry. Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our social relationships. Bolender's primary claim is that there exists a social pattern generator analogous to the central pattern generators associated with locomotion in many animal species. Spontaneous symmetry breaking structures the activity of the social pattern generator just as it does in central pattern generators. Bolender's hypothesis that relational cognition results from self-organization is entirely novel, distinct from other theories that describe sociality in terms of evolution or environment. It presents a picture of social-relational cognition as resembling something inorganic. In doing so it reveals deep connections among cognition, biology, and the inorganic world. One can go too far, he acknowledges, in taking a solely dynamical view of the mind; the mind's innate functional complexity must be due to natural selection. But this does not mean that every simple mental feature is the result of natural selection. By noting a descending symmetry subgroup chain at the core of relational cognition, Bolender takes the first step in an important investigation. Bradford Books imprint
Download or read book Invisible Hands written by Jonathan Sheehan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency. Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.
Download or read book International Encyclopedia of Civil Society written by Helmut K. Anheier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 1722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently the topic of civil society has generated a wave of interest, and a wealth of new information. Until now no publication has attempted to organize and consolidate this knowledge. The International Encyclopedia of Civil Society fills this gap, establishing a common set of understandings and terminology, and an analytical starting point for future research. Global in scope and authoritative in content, the Encyclopedia offers succinct summaries of core concepts and theories; definitions of terms; biographical entries on important figures and organizational profiles. In addition, it serves as a reliable and up-to-date guide to additional sources of information. In sum, the Encyclopedia provides an overview of the contours of civil society, social capital, philanthropy and nonprofits across cultures and historical periods. For researchers in nonprofit and civil society studies, political science, economics, management and social enterprise, this is the most systematic appraisal of a rapidly growing field.
Download or read book Impact Networks written by David Ehrlichman and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect. By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks. Given the increasing complexity of our society and the issues we face, our ability to form, grow, and work through networks has never been more essential.
Download or read book Society in the Self written by H. J. M. Hermans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: the democratic organization of self and identity -- The dynamics of society-in-the-self -- Positioning and democracy in the self -- Positioning and democracy in teams and organizations -- The positioning brain -- Social and societal over-positioning: the emergence of I-prisons -- Heterogenizing and enriching the self -- Dialogue as generative form of positioning -- Dialogical democracy in a boundary-crossing world: practical implications
Download or read book Advances in Artificial Life written by Wolfgang Banzhaf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 922 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2003, held in Dortmund, Germany in September 2003. The 96 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 140 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial chemistries, self-organization, and self-replication; artificial societies; cellular and neural systems; evolution and development; evolutionary and adaptive dynamics; languages and communication; methodologies and applications; and robotics and autonomous agents.
