Source: International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) 2020

Recommended by Sharon Zivkovic who is co-chairing the Complexity stream: https://isircconference2020.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ISIRC2020_Stream_Social_Innovation_and_Complexity.pdf

International Social Innovation Research Conference 2020 (ISIRC)

Conference theme: Social innovation and enterprise for more prosperous, fair and sustainable societies

Sheffield welcomes you to the 12th International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) in September 2020

• Registration
• Programme
• Keynotes
• Streams & Submission
• Venue & Travel

ISIRC is the world’s leading interdisciplinary social innovation research conference. The conference brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss social innovation from varied perspectives.

​ISIRC 2020 will be hosted by The Centre for Regional Economic and Enterprise Development (CREED) @CREED_Research, Sheffield University Management School, The University of Sheffield from Tuesday 1st to Thursday 3^rd September 2020.

Twitter: @isirc2020

​The conference will take place at the Crowne Plaza Royal Victoria Sheffield City Centre.

ISIRC participants are encouraged to extend their stay in Sheffield.

Further information

Sheffield welcomes you to the 12th International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) in September 2020.

Source: International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) 2020

via Dove è la complessità? – Gen Maitland Hudson – Medium

Dove è la complessità?

Gen Maitland Hudson

Jun 14, 2018 · 4 min read

In positioning themselves as intellectual leaders of the social sector, it’s important for Lankelly Chase to kick the tyres of their theory.

This is a quick blog in response to a more considered one from Lankelly Chase’s Julian Corner. It is written on a plane, after two intensive days at a conference conducted in multiple languages, only two of which I speak fluently. Code switching of that kind is useful, I find, as a reminder that even in the absence of a fully shared language, you can still achieve a good deal of useful communication. Even complex communication.

Sometimes though, all the same, you lose clarity.

As a good student of Ian Hacking, I think clarity matters. I think it matters particularly when theory is abstracted from its home in academic departments to guide the practice of social programmes. This has been the curious destiny of ‘complexity’, which has slipped out of university departments to become romantically entangled with ‘systems’, cavorting and arousing the passions of social sector leaders.

As a sector we are proudly pro-passion, but we oughtn’t to let it cloud our thinking.

In the case of complexity, the weather can quickly turn foggy. There’s a thundery patch early on in the Lankelly blog when frameworks and processes are contrasted with a ‘complex reality’ that is presented as underlying our attempts to act upon it (for good or ill).

There’s an awful lot going on in that kind of presentation of ‘reality’, and none of it is uncontroversial. Its particular attraction to a new school of philanthropy needs a bit of contextual unpicking.

Complexity is a new kind of idea for philanthropy. Traditional philanthropic endeavour has its roots in well-intentioned patronage. It tends to exaggerate its own importance, and circulate, even impose, its own particular worldview on, say, hygiene, or housing, or the appropriate education of girls. It has often done this driven by values rather than evidence. With that background, which has been vigorously contested, complexity appears as a moderating influence that puts the ambitions of the wealthy and socially inclined into a humbling perspective. How important can you really be in a complex world that resists your meddling?

In the philanthropic context, that can be a helpful kind of framing.

What it gives with one hand, however, it takes away with the other. Complexity may put the wealthy in their place, but as it does so, it disempowers us all. It does that because it is not a theory of power, it is a realist theory.

Realist theories can be usefully contrasted with nominalist ones. The questions both sets of theories raise are relevant to a lot of the work of policy makers and change makers because they concern the nature of our world, our understanding of it, and the effects of our descriptions and actions. In recent intellectual history, these questions have opposed social constructionists and the natural sciences. They have been played out in different ways, but nominalism and constructionism broadly assume that our descriptions have an important role in how we apprehend the world around us. Realism, however, downplays the effect of human agency in world-making.

Complexity theory is very much the heir of the science wars that were waged around social construction in the 1980s and 90s. It describes a world in which causality is probabilistic rather than linear, but still knowable; an ‘underlying’ world if you like, that operates according to rules that we — largely — do not make. It is realist, and it needs to be understood as such. It does not make space for human agency. It is a strong cocktail of Hegelian flavour, mixed with a splash of determinism.

When that cocktail is served, as it is in Lankelly Chase’s description of their new approach, alongside the lentils and wholemeal bread of social constructionist theories of power, it makes for a meal that is hard to digest.

To say this isn’t to make a pedantic point about understanding theory in its context, or with its roots in longstanding traditions of scholarship. It is to highlight why complexity theory is a bad basis for social programmes that seek to empower. It is difficult to find forms of intervention that create agency, when you embed them within a theory that doesn’t accept that agency really exists, or matters, or plays any significant part at all. This is an important part of the reason, I would argue, that Lankelly Chase have ended up with a new approach that is, well, impersonal. An approach that is centred on the ‘health of systems’, rather than the health of people. An approach that leaves no place for collective approaches to arguing for any — bounded, negotiated and always imperfect — rights, rights that describe, and make, a better world for which we can actively strive.

That is not to criticise Lankelly’s work on power structures. On the contrary. But it is to say that this part of their practice sits very uncomfortably within a set of theoretical premises that are inimical to human agency, and human action, as the basis for bringing about social change.

Theory is a hard language to master. It does a lot of useful work, even in the absence of fluency, but a bit like my Italian and Spanish, it can also let us down if we aren’t attentive to its nuances. When it is used to influence how grant making is delivered, we all have a duty to check we are using it accurately.

Comments etc in source: Dove è la complessità? – Gen Maitland Hudson – Medium

I linked to https://stream.syscoi.com/2018/06/04/lankelly-chases-approach-to-working-with-complexity-with-comments/

• Sociology, Computer Science
• Published in STPIS@ECIS 2019

Linking Autopoiesis to Homeostasis in Socio-Technical Systems

• Ilia Bider, Gil Regev, Erik Perjons

The paper considers two seemingly different fundamental theoretical concepts of autopoiesis and homeostasis and tries to apply them to the realm of socio-technical systems. The paper uses a so-called Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM) to explain how autopoiesis – a system constantly reproducing itself and homeostasis – a system constantly maintaining an approximate identity while adapting to changes in its internal and external environment – works, and how they are connected to each other. The work presented in this paper is in its initial stage, and more efforts are required to convert the ideas presented in the paper to something that can be used in practice.

via [PDF] Linking Autopoiesis to Homeostasis in Socio-Technical Systems | Semantic Scholar

Also: related powerpoint https://www.slideshare.net/ilia12/linking-autopoiesis-to-homeostasis-in-sociotechnical-systems

via Why we get complexity wrong and why it matters | Social Investment Business

Why we get complexity wrong and why it matters

18 February 2020

Genevieve Maitland Hudson

There is much talk in the social investment sector around systems change and behaviours. Our Director of Learning and Influence Genevieve Maitland Hudson questions how the sector uses these analyses currently, and outlines the different approach that we’re taking at SIB. 

I’m going to have a go in a few hundred words at linking up some abstract questions about what constitutes an entity with some very practical questions about how to deploy capital to achieve social ends. My intention in doing that is to contribute – I hope helpfully – to the sector’s discussions of systems change, and to say a little more about how SIB is thinking about new forms of social investment.  

1. 1. Why do we need to talk about entities at all? 

I find much of the talk about systems change confusing when it comes to understanding organising and organisations. I’m picking on Lankelly Chase (again) because they are so open with their approach to systems change and they hosted a seminar last Wednesday that spurred me to write this blog, but they aren’t alone: their wording seems fairly representative of other organisations in the sector too. This quote comes from their work on systems behaviours:

Systems are complex and often messy webs that are constantly shifting. They consist of tangible things like people and organisations, connected by intangible things like history, worldviews, context and culture. 

I think this begs questions, and the one I want to talk about first is the implied status of systems themselves. This quote defines one set of entities as tangible, and another as intangible, and leaves the status of a system itself indeterminate. How tangible are systems? Is, say, the system that determines the fate of refugees a tangible thing, or an intangible one? It is instantiated in passports, migration law and detention centres and must feel very tangible to a woman in Yarl’s Wood.  

Is it less tangible than an organisation?  

Take the example of Open Ownership. Open Ownership brings together more than 70 countries who share data on the beneficial ownership of companies worldwide. It is a distributed organisation, with a small office, and staff working in different time zones. It is instantiated in passports, company law, and open government conferences from London to Abuja.  

How tangible is Open Ownership?  

One of the most important things that Open Ownership does is to help uncover corruption by identifying companies and the owners behind them. Some major corruption involves the use of shell companies. Shell companies have no offices and no staff, they can be little more than a correspondence address in a nondescript building in a tax haven.  

Are shell companies tangible?  

Ironically an analytical system that leaves these things very imprecise can make it more difficult to design and deliver work that…changes systems.  

1. 2. Assemblages against totalities 

The section heading above is taken from Manuel DeLanda’s ‘New Philosophy of Society’. DeLanda’s new philosophy is an exploration of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattarri’s work on systems, with some amendments and additions. Its subtitle is ‘assemblage theory and social complexity’, so it takes us into that other set of ideas that often goes hand in hand with systems change: complexity theory.  

DeLanda has helpful things to say about what constitutes an entity, or what he prefers to call an assemblage, and what he says takes us away from the binary opposition between tangible and intangible things as distinct kinds. He introduces two dimensions. I’ll save the first one for another blog, but the second helps us to see how a shell company might relate to the status of refugees.  

This second dimension involves the components of an assemblage in processes that either make it more homogenous and recognisable, or conversely make it more varied and indistinct. That already sounds a little abstruse, but the processes themselves should be familiar. The kinds of process that stabilise an assemblage might include having a spatial boundary, like an office, introducing sorting that selects particular people, like recruitment, and identifiable clothing, like a uniform. Conversely there are processes that destabilise an assemblage. DeLanda highlights the destabilising effects of technologies that allow people to communicate from a distance, avoiding face-to-face interaction.  

Being able to pick out and understand these processes shows the ways in which assemblages function, the mechanisms that firm up an entity so that it has a clear and distinct identity, and the mechanisms that undermine that identity and make it more indistinct. Any single assemblage may contain components that are doing the work of firming up and the work of breaking down at one and the same time; you would expect these processes to coexist in any social assemblage. An organisation can have a head office in one city and a distributed workforce in other places, like Open Ownership, and indeed like SIB.  

More generally some assemblages are small, fixed, highly stable and easily defined, and some are large, dispersed, unstable and their boundaries more porous (and vice versa), but in all cases you have sets of components working together productively in the same ways.  Looked at in this way, ‘systems’ are not a special sort of something made up of tangible and intangible things in a way that is fundamentally different to an organisation, the two are only different in scale.  

3. Markets, towns and market towns

“One advantage of the present approach is that it allows the replacement of vaguely defined general entities (like ‘the market’ or ‘the state’) with concrete assemblages,” says DeLanda. Focusing on the dimensions of assembly, and the mechanisms by which they form, recur and create populations, gives a frame for connecting individual people to entities as large as nation states. It also helps to explain the mechanisms that create stability, something that often seems to be missing from systems change manuals and toolkits.  
DeLanda gives an example taken from the work of the French historian Fernand Braudel. Braudel was interested in the history of everyday people and merged geography, economics and sociology in his research and writing. Like Michel Foucault, he liked detail and wrote fine grained accounts of the past between the 15th and 18th centuries. You could certainly argue that he was a systems thinker, as much interested in the material as the expressive manifestations of human activity, and the ways in which those activities act together to create clusters, that recur in stable and predictable ways. Braudel and DeLanda identify the smallest economic assemblage as: 

…a complex consisting of a small market town, perhaps the site of a fair, with a cluster of dependent villages around it. Each village had to be close enough to the town for it to be possible to go to the market and back in a day. But the actual dimensions of the unit would equally depend on the available means of transport, the density of settlement and the fertility of the area in question. 

Braudel finds that the size of each one of these market town complexes is very stable. Before the arrival of the steam train it varies on average between 160 and 170 square kilometres. That is a small variation, and one that is unerringly predictable for several hundred years. As industrialisation grows, market towns interlink and form regional markets, with a dominant city, and a recognisable cultural identity, and up again to provincial markets, bigger, less distinct, more varied, until finally you have a national market stitching together the provinces, regions and market towns with even greater anonymity and heterogeneity.  
You could use complexity type language to describe that small market town. You could say it was an emergent property of a system of interdependent components: the villages, transport, population density and land fertility (amongst other things). That would not be wrong and might be interesting if you are in the business of doing analytics. It’s not so useful if you want to think about expanding its economy, altering its employment structure or opening it up to migrant populations. Or if you wanted it to ‘level up’.  
If you want not only to represent, but to intervene, you need to understand the mechanisms that give each market town its identity, and the stable features of the population of market towns. You need to know how market towns are productively linked together into regions, how Preston relates to the North West, not only how Preston emerges.   
The default tendency of much systems change thinking seems to be, instead, to underline variety and unpredictability, as in the Lankelly quote above, but complex systems are as remarkable for their stable features as they are for their capacity to adapt. Stability is, in fact, more remarkable than change, given the enormous number of interactions of molecules, proteins, enzymes, pistons, turbines, compressors, schools, factories, shops, hypertext, protocols, applications, governments and social sector unconferences that go into them. It’s their recurrent features that stabilise them and give them an identity.  
It is also often the breakdown of recurrence that creates the most far-reaching kind of disruption.   

1. 4. What does this mean for social investment? 

The Braudel market town may be a distant model of stability, but it was not so very different to the commercial unit that long defined post war towns: the high street. High streets were built of the same kinds of components, density of settlement, modes of transport and means of exchange. They were small, fixed, highly stable and easily defined. They had spatial boundaries and relied on face-to-face interaction. Now those boundaries and that interaction are being broken down by communications technologies that encourage different kinds of economic assemblage to emerge.  It is no stretch at all to think that DeLanda’s analytics can help us to better understand what is under threat in the decline of the UK’s high streets, and how we might respond to that breakdown. Emergence in itself does not help us much. High streets as functional entities are just as emergent as their decline. More useful is to think about the components of the system and the mechanisms that operate within it to bring about different states: thriving high streets or empty shops.  
That is why we are interested at SIB in understanding, and defining the component parts of, the economic assemblage that makes up a thriving high street.  What flows, where to, and in what amounts to contribute to firming up its borders and maintaining spatial boundaries and face-to-face interaction against competing methods of consumption that don’t require either? These kinds of questions are influencing our uses of data analysis as part of our investment strategy (how many people, coming from how far, shopping where, for what, and staying how long?) and our interest in data that looks across the high street, rather than at individual organisations on it. 
 

We can better support our investees with this kind of contextual information to hand. We can also encourage profit-making businesses to contribute to community-led ventures if we can demonstrate their economic interdependence (more footfall for the high street from community events leads to more purchases in the shops).  
It is also why we are interested in investment models that support networks of organisations in high streets and towns. We have in the past individually funded and invested in social businesses in the same place – 10 plus organisations in 10 of the towns in the government’s New Deal for Towns – but we have not done so in an intentional way that takes account of the economic and demographic linkages between them and around them. Doing so through data use, comparative models and informed design could help to provide stability to those organisations who usually have too little of it. It could help the whole town to level up.  

Finally, we are interested in the forms of investment structure that could play a more transformative role by virtue of their size and scope, and their blend of private capital with social investment. Here too we want to use the insights provided by robust theoretical underpinnings and live data flows to support the structure of stable local economies through patient capital that does not seek to extract a capital gain.  

In looking at systems change analyses in this way we are breaking with approaches that have become – somewhat – established within our sector. We are more interested in stability and recurrence than messy webs, and as interested in economic units of analysis as we are in services. We are also interested in the objective features of assemblages, not only the subjective views of people caught up in them. We would argue, after Braudel, that some boundaries are clear cut, measurable and important not only analytically, but practically and in very ordinary ways. Transport networks determine important limits for job-seeking, for instance, and flood plains matter to social housing. That last is not a throwaway point in the light of the last fortnight’s storms. DeLanda helps us to gain an analytical purchase on our work and to focus on tangible change for which we can hold ourselves accountable, despite complexity.  

Photo: “West Bromwich High St 7” by ahisgett is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

Genevieve Maitland Hudson

Director of Learning and Influence

Gen has spent the last ten years working with social programmes that are committed to the informed use of information and data to improve their work. She began her career in academia with a doctorate in politics and philosophy. She has lectured at Oxford University, Roehampton University, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Birkbeck College London and Cambridge University.

via Why we get complexity wrong and why it matters | Social Investment Business

Sadly I can’t get to this yet, but it looks like a very interesting paper – recently covered by the General Intellect Unity podcast (see link below)

The necessity of extended autopoiesis
Nathaniel VirgoFirst Published April 16, 2019 Research Article
https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712319841557
Article information

Abstract
The theory of autopoiesis holds that an organism can be defined as a network of processes. However, an organism also has a physical body. The relationship between these two things—network and body—has been raised in this issue of Adaptive Behaviour, with reference to an extended interpretation of autopoiesis. This perspective holds that the network and the body are distinct things, and that the network should be thought of as extending beyond the boundaries of the body. The relationship between body and network is subtle, and I revisit it here from the extended perspective. I conclude that from an organism = network perspective, the body is a biological solution to the problem of maintaining both the distinctness of an organism, separate from but engaged with its environment and other organisms, and its distinctiveness as a particular individual.

Keywords Autopoiesis, embodiment, extended autopoiesis, origins of life, organism = network

via The necessity of extended autopoiesis – Nathaniel Virgo, 2020

via C:ADM2010 International Conference » Blog Archive » Ernst von Glasersfeld’s C:ADM2010 dinner speech

Ernst von Glasersfeld’s C:ADM2010 dinner speech

via C:ADM2010 International Conference » Blog Archive » Ernst von Glasersfeld’s C:ADM2010 dinner speech

2010: It is with great sorrow that we have to report to members the death of Ernst von Glasersfeld. Ernst died 12 November 2010, at 7am US east coast time. Here is an obituary on the Constructivist Psychology Network. Another obituary by AP in the Washington Post. A recent Special Issue of Constructivist foundations dedicated to the work and memory of Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Well, Mark Johnson knows what he knows deeply – and has the distinction of knowing what he doesn’t know. I’m itchy about this because I think there’s a rich explorative and performative side to cybernetics and – at best – humility is central to it.

(And in anticipation of those who will use this to ‘bash’ cybernetics – obviously not Mark’s point – I would say that Cummings is ‘into’ and similarly misuses post-rationality, complexity, yadayadayada…)

via Improvisation Blog: From Radical Constructivism to Dominic Cummings: What’s wrong with Cybernetics?

via Transdisciplinary action research: A guiding framework for collaboration | Integration and Implementation Insights

By Steven Lam, Michelle Thompson, Kathleen Johnson, Cameron Fioret and Sarah Hargreaves

How can graduate students work productively with each other and community partners? Many researchers and practitioners are engaging in transdisciplinarity, yet there is surprisingly little critical reflection about the processes and outcomes of transdisciplinarity, particularly from the perspectives of graduate students and community partners who are increasingly involved.

Our group of four graduate students from the University of Guelph and one community partner from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, reflect on our experiences of working together toward community food security in Canada, especially producing a guidebook for farmer-led research (Fioret et al. 2018). As none of us had previously worked together, nor shared any disciplines in common, we found it essential to first develop a guiding framework for collaboration. Our thinking combined the following key principles from action research and transdisciplinarity:

• reflexivity,
• participation and partnership,
• methods and process, and
• integration.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity was designed to support the on-going scrutiny of the choices made during the research process; this occurred in the form of reflexive journaling and weekly meetings for collective reflection and sense-making. The self-reflections helped ensure that our goals, needs and expectations were met through the decisions made.

Participation and partnership plus methods and processes

Partnership and participation refer to the quality of the relationship formed with stakeholders and the extent to which stakeholders are appropriately involved in the project. Methods and processes refer to the extent to which the action research process and related methods are clearly articulated and illustrated.

In practice, we found that these two principles were inseparable. Because we four students didn’t know each other before this project started, we invested the first two-months of the project in relationship building, attending workshops and meeting weekly to talk about motivations, previous experiences and expectations for the project. It was not until after that process that the collaboration with the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario started. That involved similar conversations around expectations and priorities, as well as new conversations around community needs and potential solutions. By month four, a clear workplan was co-designed.

The last four months of the project focused on co-developing the farmer-led research guidebook. Roles and responsibilities based on our strengths and interests were assigned. The students contributed to data collection and analysis, while the community partner shared local knowledge, relevant reports and a guidebook outline, as well as connecting the students with farmers and other farmer-led organizations. Co-authorship was achieved through all of us contributing equally to the conceptualization, writing and dissemination of the guidebook.

Integration
Sharing responsibility for the project design, implementation and outcomes created strong avenues for partnership, participation, and knowledge integration within different aspects of the project. In particular, we experienced strong collaboration in the joint designing of the project, its methods, technical content and delegation of tasks. Since the project dealt with the need for supporting farmers in research, the community partner (as a farmer herself) was more familiar with the problem context and the actors involved than the students. Her expertise was helpful in framing the report in a way that is useful, relevant and accessible to farmers and farmer-led organizations. The guidebook is considered to be a success and an important document.

Nevertheless, most of us expressed frustration with different aspects of co-generating the farmer-led research guidebook and our expectations for integration were not entirely met. For example, Steven felt uncertain about “the relevant tools or paradigms from different disciplines and how to integrate them to address a shared problem in the context of food security.”

Conclusion
Based on our reflections, we note that the success of this joint inquiry depended on certain conditions, such as individual team member’s reflexive ability, sense of mutual responsibility, humility and deep respect for one another. Furthermore, the time invested in dynamic weekly exchanges between students and community partners was essential to build relationships and led to an enhanced understanding of community partner needs and solutions. Early delegation of roles and tasks led to high levels of efficiency and prevented the risk of one perspective taking over the research process. Finally, we found early efforts of “opening communicative space” to be helpful, whereby issues were opened up for discussion, experiences were shared and we all strived toward “mutual understanding, intersubjective agreement and unforced consensus about what to do in any given practical situation.”

Overall the framework helped us, to a ‘good enough’ extent, integrate our work which led to the co-publication of the Farmer-led Research Guidebook.

For us, engaging in reflection has made a substantial difference in the quality of our work. If you have worked in transdisciplinary teams, especially as (or with) graduate students, what framework or guiding principles did you follow? What did you achieve and what felt missing?

To find out more:
Lam, S., Thompson, M., Johnston, K., Fioret, C. and Hargreaves, S. K. (2019). Toward community food security through transdisciplinary action research. Action Research (OnlineFirst, Open Access): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1476750319889390

Reference:
Fioret, C., Johnston, K., Lam, S., Thompson, M. and Hargreaves, S. (2018). Towards farmer-led research: A guidebook. Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario: Guelph, Canada.

Biography: Steven Lam is a PhD student in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph in Canada. His research focuses on how evaluation can better support efforts toward food security, climate change adaptation and gender equity. He also works as an independent evaluation consultant.

Biography: Michelle Thompson is a PhD student in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph in Canada. She is currently researching endophytes (beneficial microbes) in corn that provide a natural immune system-like defense against disease.

Biography: Kathleen Johnson is a Master of Applied Science student in the School of Engineering at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her research is conducted through the G360 Institute for Groundwater Research and focuses on understanding the flow and fate of contaminants in the fractured bedrock aquifer beneath the city of Guelph.

Biography: Cameron Fioret is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Guelph in Canada. His research focuses on property, political philosophy and environmental philosophy.

Biography: Sarah Hargreaves PhD is currently research director with the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (EFAO), where she launched Canada’s first Farmer-Led Research Program to help farmers combine their curiosity with scientific rigour to answer their most challenging on-farm questions.

via Transdisciplinary action research: A guiding framework for collaboration | Integration and Implementation Insights

Source: Understanding Society: Generativity and emergence

Understanding Society

Innovative thinking about a global world

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Generativity and emergence

Social entities and structures have properties that exercise causal influence over all of us, and over the continuing development of the society in which we live. Schools, corporations, armies, terror networks, transport networks, markets, churches, and cities all fall in this range — they are social compounds or entities that shape the behavior of the individuals who live and work within them, and they have substantial effects on the broader society as well.

So it is unsurprising that sociologists and ordinary observers alike refer to social structures, organizations, and practices as real components of the social world. Social entities have properties that make a difference, at the individual level and at the social and historical level. Individuals are influenced by the rules and practices of the organizations that employ them; and political movements are influenced by the competition that exists among various religious organizations. Putting the point simply, social entities have real causal properties that influence daily life and the course of history.

What is less clear in the social sciences, and in the areas of philosophy that take an interest in such things, is where those causal properties come from. We know from physics that the causal properties of metallic silver derive from the quantum-level properties of the atoms that make it up. Is something parallel to this true in the social realm as well? Do the causal properties of a corporation derive from the properties of the individual human beings who make it up? Are social properties reducible to individual-level facts?

John Stuart Mill was an early advocate for methodological individualism. In 1843 he wrote his System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, which contained his view of the relationships that exist between the social world and the world of individual thought and action:
All phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature, generated by the action of outward circumstances upon masses of human beings; and if, therefore, the phenomena of human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed laws, the phenomena of society can not but conform to fixed laws. (Book VI, chap. VI, sect. 2)With this position he set the stage for much of the thinking in social science disciplines like economics and political science, with the philosophical theory of methodological individualism.

About sixty years later Emile Durkheim took the opposite view. He believed that social properties were autonomous with respect to the individuals that underlie them. In 1901 he wrote in the preface to the second edition of Rules of Sociological Method:
Whenever certain elements combine and thereby produce, by the fact of their combination, new phenomena, it is plain that these new phenomena reside not in the original elements but in the totality formed by their union. The living cell contains nothing but mineral particles, as society contains nothing but individuals. Yet it is patently impossible for the phenomena characteristic of life to reside in the atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen…. Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as we may say, this synthesis constituting every society yields new phenomena, differing from those which take place in individual consciousness, we must, indeed, admit that these facts reside exclusively in the very society itself which produces them, and not in its parts, i.e., its members…. These new phenomena cannot be reduced to their elements. (preface to the 2nd edition)These ideas provided the basis for what we can call “methodological holism”.

So the issue between Mill and Durkheim is the question of whether the properties of the higher-level social entity can be derived from the properties of the individuals who make up that entity. Mill believed yes, and Durkheim believed no.

This debate persists to the current day, and the positions are both more developed, more nuanced, and more directly relevant to social-science research. Consider first what we might call “generativist social-science modeling”. This approach holds that methodological individualism is obviously true, and the central task for the social sciences is to actually perform the reduction of social properties to the actions of individuals by providing computational models that reproduce the social property based on a model of the interacting individuals. These models are called “agent-based models” (ABM). Computational social scientist Joshua Epstein is a recognized leader in this field, and his book Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up provides developed examples of ABMs designed to explain well-known social phenomena from the disappearance of the Anasazi in the American Southwest to the occurrence of social unrest. Here is his summary statement of the approach:
To the generativist, explaining macroscopic social regularities, such as norms, spatial patterns, contagion dynamics, or institutions requires that one answer the following question: How could the autonomous local interactions of heterogeneous boundedly rational agents generate the given regularity?Accordingly, to explain macroscopic social patterns, we generate—or “grow”—them in agent models. 

Continues in source: Understanding Society: Generativity and emergence

I think “VSM is a logic framework, initially developed to help the guidance systems of high-speed missiles adapt to external conditions” is cross-pollution from Systems Dynamics (or IIRC there’s yet another systems approach from that sort of context), but otherwise an extremely interesting piece from a ‘local’ press.

via Want to stop digital failures? Try complexity absorption and VSM | ITWeb

By James Francis for Axiz
Johannesburg, 14 Feb 2020

VISIT OUR COMPANY ZONE

Read time 5min 20sec

Sekhwela Moses Mokgala, CGEIT, Senior Digital Systems Manager, Axiz

Different priorities and demands drive our daily lives. Understandably, convenience has become a central hallmark to modern services. A successful service or product must work as intended, respond seamlessly to user interactions and operate across different scenarios.

When you order a car on a ride-hailing app, you do a few simple things: you point to where you want to go, confirm where you will be, and the system does the rest. It co-ordinates with potential drivers, queries your payment choice, and assigns the most efficient route, including arrival estimates.

At face value, the transaction is elegant and straightforward. But behind the scenes, a complex orchestration of different systems, processes and services collaborate to deliver on your expectations. Apply this dichotomy to any digital service – whether for external customers or internal users – and you can see why many technology projects don’t deliver on their anticipated value.

“The big challenge today is that you have one customer-facing identity that you need to align with many integrated background services,” said Sekhwela Moses Mokgala, Senior Digital Systems Manager at Axiz. “People want seamless experiences. But to do that, you have to mask the complexity of transactions with the customer.”

Mokgala would know – he wrote his engineering masters, which was awarded best track paper at IEOM 2018 South Africa, and currently his PhD research at Wits University, on this subject. The paper: A Complexity Management Approach for Designing Viable IT Service Systems in South Africa, is a technical deep-dive into the nature of complexity and what to do about it. But the conclusions are not difficult to wrap one’s head around. His research uncovers solutions to a significant issue that continues to sabotage digital transformation projects.

Silos vs integration

If you follow the debate around digital transformation, you’ll hear silos mentioned many times. Silos help separate and manage functions within a complex system such as a business. But they are also frequently at odds with modern technology.

When services such as mapping, payment, rider identity and driver availability can’t co-ordinate with each other efficiently, the results are frustration and a sense of failure. Silos are not compatible with rich integration. So when the two meet, their results often fall short.

Business experts have wrestled with this problem, conceiving several different strategies. One is spinning off a business unit not to be influenced by the larger company’s culture. Another is pursuing high-level transformation projects within a company, with leading executives championing and protecting it from interference.

There are several more, but their successes vary. The type of company has as much to do with success as its digital strategy.

“Every company is unique, so their approach to digital often also has to be unique. You can’t just copy one strategy and apply it elsewhere. That’s because the challenge isn’t just to adopt new services or technologies. You have to re-engineer the entire business, both internally and across the supply chain. You have to look at fundamental things like the org chart or compensation structure. This is often much more than what the company is prepared for.”

But companies don’t have a choice. Digitally savvy customers expect a lot, and the benchmark is being set by digitally native companies that didn’t have to transform from silos to integration. Even business-as-usual practices, such as devops work and project teams comprising different departments, reflect digital’s influence.

Absorbing complexity

Companies that want to succeed must mask the complexity of transactions to users and that means background integration of services both inside the business and from different partners. How can they do that?

Mokgala’s research highlights the Viable System Model (VSM) as a prime way to achieve the above. VSM is a logic framework, initially developed to help the guidance systems of high-speed missiles adapt to external conditions. Then, operations and management theorist Prof Stafford Beer adapted VSM to a business context.

VSM is a framework based around cybernetics, which is the art and science of building machines that adapt to their environments. Yet when applied to a business situation that needs guidance around complexity, VSM is incredibly powerful.

“Humans struggle to articulate complexity. If I asked you how complex one thing is to another, it’s not easy to answer. Is it twice as complex? Five times? What does that even mean? So you need a model that everyone can follow.”

The absence of such a model or framework is frequently at the heart of digital transformation failures. It explains why buy-in is often lacking, why competing interests can sabotage the outcomes, and why companies usually don’t fundamentally change when they should.

Mokgala noted that being able to control complexity isn’t an IT problem or even a business problem. It’s a structural problem – if you want to get value from digital, you need to align the organisation’s culture and structure with the integration required by digital systems.

“VSM lets you define the structures in your environments,” he explained. “Then you can see how different parts can work together in different ways.”

The catch-all for this approach is complexity absorption. As you discover new dimensions and relationships in your company, complex environments become a catalogue of choices for the business. Soon enough, agile combinations and integrations of those choices are what deliver the value you expect from digital investments.

It’s good practice for a company to familiarise itself with VSM and complexity absorption. But it is even more critical that its technology partner understands and can apply this framework.

Many can’t, which helps explain so many digital shortfalls. But it’s no longer a mystery how to evolve from silos to integration.

Source: Want to stop digital failures? Try complexity absorption and VSM | ITWeb

Very exciting stuff. In SW London, with the Wandsworth Community Empowerment Network central, there is a whole-system approach to mental health care which is seeking to ameliorate historical inequitable racial outcomes not justified by extrinsic factors (massively higher number of BME people in coercive and other high-impact care, failure to address drivers behind this), through an approach which is both community and institution led, focused on prioritising access to trained, qualified mental health support in the community, by the community.

Quotes below and I recommend the very short article (registration but no fee required).

via Ethnicity and mental health: a new beginning – The Lancet Psychiatry

My comments are in the original link below the article.

Is total football a myth? Is total management an unachievable aspiration?

Source: Total Management: What We Can Learn From Dutch Football

Total Management: What We Can Learn From Dutch Football

Written by JonBarnes

6 min read

A long time ago, in a country called the Netherlands… long before two Dutch guys started a corporate rebellion… and long before Jos De Blok started a revolution in nursing and self-management… perhaps even slightly before Gerard Endenburg developed Sociocracy, there was another revolution happening in the way we organise ourselves. This pioneering work in organisational philosophy, was happening at Ajax Football Club and in the Dutch National Football Team. Let me explain…

In the 1960s, the Dutch Football Team were a reasonably obscure and small football team, but things were about to change thanks to the help of a man called Rinus Michels. Michels, had successfully managed Ajax to league titles and a number of European Cup victories, and was pioneering a method now known as Total Football. This method has been described as a ‘systems thinking’ approach to football and hypothesised that it was possible to change the perceived size of the pitch during the game. When the opposition had the ball, they would be circled, making the pitch feel very small. When their team regained possession of the ball, players would spread far and wide, thus making the pitch feel huge and the opposition’s job of regain possession like a long struggle.

Total Football

At the time, the English method was static and firmly rooted to playing with 4 defenders, 4 midfielders and 2 strikers, and the Italian method (Catenaccio) was all about having a strong immovable defence. Total Football however, was the antithesis to these rigid structures. This revolutionary organisational method asked for a more fluid approach to football, one which was relative rather than absolute. In Total Football, all players could play the role of any other player on the field and were immediately replaced in their position by one of their teammates. One way of explaining this I’ve heard is that whilst 4-4-2 more or less asks everybody to stay in position, in Total Football, the pitch is seen as a grid. Players have a kind of ‘home box’ on the grid. When they leave their box, the system adjusts, each player moving to ensure each box is taken. The team shape shifts as needed, allowing for the kind of emergence and creativity needed to unsettle static teams.

Of course, this method asked for a different type of player. It wasn’t enough anymore to be a right back. A defender had to have skills on the ball. And a striker needed to be able to do their bit at the back. Players needed to be ‘T-Shaped’, that is to say great at one thing and good at many. Or as a friend once said to me: “We need to be jacks of all trades and masters of some”. Total Football players needed to be adaptable and intelligent in order to adapt with the system.

Let me pause for a second… Does any of this ring a bell?

 

Continues in source: Total Management: What We Can Learn From Dutch Football