Usual management theories focus on phenomenological aspects of organisations and management. Abstract communication systems theory offers a different approach, which can be used to analyze social systems, uncover their internal logic and structure, and to understand their interactions with other social systems. We show in this paper how to apply the abstract communications systems approach to m...

Lately, many multi-agent systems (MAS) are designed as multi-modal systems [9, 15, 23, 22, 26, 28, 18]. Moreover, there are different techniques for combining logics, such as products, fibring, fusion, and modalisation, among others [1, 14, 16]. In this paper we focus on the combination of special-purpose logics for building “on demand” MAS. From these engineering point of view, among the most ...

There can be little doubt that the concept of social systems is central to marketing if we are, as Latour (1993) notes, increasingly enmeshed in hybrid networks of social, ecological, and informational systems. Yet it is surprising to find such a paucity of marketing and consumer research addressing it. This paper advances the idea of social systems in marketing. A social system is what emerges...

About the book: Unlike psychologistic paradigms, the non-atomistic variant of methodological individualism discussed in this book explains society in terms of complex emergent structures that unintentionally result from human actions, and that in turn influence those actions. Friedrich Hayek is an emblematic representative of this approach, the origins of which date back to the Scottish Enlight...

The tendency for the members of a corporation or government to be resistant to change is explored in a model that encompasses two endemic features of such systems. First, the social system is modeled as a hierarchy, and implicit within it is a selection process that determines who advances to higher levels. Second, an agent’s behavior is partially determined by imitating those who have risen in...

The development and usage of complex information systems leads to both technical and human challenges as large numbers of stakeholders with conflicting requirements are involved. Though global consistency must be preserved at the corporate level, software applications have to be adapted to particular needs. However, while individual users have the best knowledge about how to perform their job, ...

How can social epistemology (SE) be characterized so that all of these topics fit under its umbrella? Why does each topic qualify as epistemology and in what respects is it social? This paper begins by proposing a tripartite division of SE. Under this classification scheme the first variety of SE is highly continuous with traditional epistemology, whereas the second and third varieties diverge ...

Due to social change and technological progress, new value is created in this current era of open innovation by linking diff erent systems together. A typical example might be a service for calling a taxi at short notice that works by combining smartphone user location data with a vehicle dispatch system. How this interconnection is achieved is key to the use of system interoperation to create ...

There exist an increasing awareness within the scientific community for the need to deal with the complex dimension of social systems. This paper examines three approaches to incorporate complexity theory into the practice of social sciences. The first approach consists of supplementing the modernist program with chaos theory. The second one proposes a metaphoric application of complexity theor...