Suchergebnisse

The following essay begins by outlining the pragmatist link between truth claims and democratic deliberations. To this end, special attention will be paid to Jeffrey Stout&rsquo ; s pragmatist enfranchisement of religious citizens. Stout defends a deliberative notion of democracy that fulfills stringent criteria of inclusion and security against domination. While mitigating secular exclusivity, Stout nonetheless acknowledges the new visibility of religion in populist attempts to dominate political life through mass rule and charismatic authorities. In response, I evaluate recent innovations in deliberative democratic systems theory (DDST). By adding a pragmatist inflection to DDST, I aim to apprehend the complex religious interactions between partisan interest groups as well as the trust-building capacities of minipublics.

Engagement with sociological perspectives can enrich an understanding of medical law and provide a basis for critique of certain of its key premises. Since both law and healthcare are frequently conceptualised and analysed as systems, the theoretical frameworks developed by Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner would seem to offer particular promise in this regard. This article explores a particular area of medical law to which an understanding of the social (and political-economic) context of decision-making is of clear importance – adjudication upon the allocation of scarce resources – in order to identify what insights may be gained from an approach grounded in systems theory.

With the comprehensive term of "Mode 3," we want to draw a conceptual link between systems and systems theory and want to demonstrate further how this can be applied to knowledge in the next steps. Systems can be understood as being composed of "elements", which are tied together by a "self-rationale". For innovation, often innovation clusters and innovation networks are being regarded as important. By leveraging systems theory for innovation concepts, one can implement references between the elements of a system and clusters (innovation clusters) and the selfrationale of a system and that of networks (innovation networks). One advantage of this approach is that it makes the tools of systems theory effectively available for research on innovation. Based on original research about the European Union, also the concept of a multi-level hierarchy promises conceptual opportunities. Further integrating systems theory, we can speak of multi-level systems of knowledge (following different levels of aggregation) and multi-level systems of innovation (also following different levels of aggregation). The popular and powerful concept of the national innovation system is being chronically challenged by continuous and ongoing processes of supranational and global integration. Conceptually unlocking the national innovation systems in favor of a broader multi-level logic implies furthermore to accept the existence of national innovation systems but, at the same time, also to emphasize their global embeddedness. Our suggested catch-phrase of "Mode 3", therefore, integrates several considerations that want to relate systems theory, knowledge, and innovation more directly to each other, and this should be understood as a contribution to a dynamically evolving general discourse on the topics of knowledge and innovation.

I argue that it is time for many feminists to rethink their attitudes towards evolutionary biology, not because feminists have been wrong to be deeply sceptical about many of its claims, both explicit and implicit, but because biology itself has changed. A new appreciation for the importance of development in biology has become mainstream and a new ontology, associated with developmental systems theory (DST), has been introduced over the last two decades. This turn challenges some of the features of evolutionary biology that have most troubled feminists. DST undermines the idea of biologicales sence and challenges both nature /nurture and nature/culture distinctions. Freed from these conceptual constraints, evolutionary biology no longer poses the problems that have justified feminist scepticism. Indeed, feminists have already found useful applications for DST and I argue that they should expand their use of DST to support more radical and wide-ranging political theories. ; Si les féministes n'ont pas eu tort d'être profondément sceptiques face aux nombreuses revendications de la biologie, leur attitude face à cette science doit être remise en question car la biologie s'est transformée au courant des dernières décennies. La «théorie des systèmes de développement» (developmental systems theory-TDS) est une théorie qui s'est considérablement développée et qui a pris beaucoup d'ampleur. Cette théorie n'accepte pas le concept d'essence biologique ce qui pose un défi important à la distinction nature/culture. Une des conséquences de cet apport théorique est que le scepticisme des féministes face à la biologie de l'évolution n'est plus justifié car la biologie ne comporte plus les contraintes essentialistes qui s'avéraient contentieuses. En effet, certaines féministes ont déjà trouvé des applications utiles pour la TDS et nous avançons que les féministes doivent maintenant élargir l'utilisation de la TDS car la porté de celle-ci pourrait être significative dans d'autres domaines tel celui de la théorie politique.

Decree powers are common to presidential systems; they are rarely found in parliamentary ones. We analyze decree powers in one such rare setting: India. We show that bicameral minority governments in India systematically use ordinances to circumvent parliament and prosecute their legislative agendas. They promulgate more ordinances, enact less legislation, and often repromulgate lapsed ordinances. These patterns suggest that, with bicameral minority governments, the locus of lawmaking shifts to the executive branch. While both majority and minority governments invoke ordinances, the latter do so systematically to get around their parliamentary deficit. In the hands of minority governments, then, the mechanism effectively helps to defy the will of the parliamentary majority. This suggests that the ordinance mechanism, originally introduced in the Indian constitution for limited purposes, has blossomed into a distinct source of—and forum for—parliamentary lawmaking.

Networked multi-robot systems have played essential roles in civilian and military domains. The presence of robotic networks can be used to accomplish many tasks with increased efficiency, robustness, and flexibility. Due to their redundant nature, cooperative robots can easily outperform a single advanced robot when completing time-consuming tasks such as disaster response and robotic mapping and navigation. Although other researchers have addressed motion planning, consensus and formation control for multi-robots, previous works present some restrictions. Many distributed methodologies are based on the global information of the robots' coordinates, making them unsuitable for situations in which only local state measurements are available. Further, multiple disturbances (e.g., wind gusts and unmodelled dynamics) acting on real systems pose a significant barrier to outdoor multi-vehicle cooperative operations. Finally, most recent formation-control protocols have not given sufficient attention to obstacle and inter-robot collision-avoidance strategies; although, without them robot movement would be very restrictive and fragile in uncertain environments. Motivated by these research gaps, this thesis tackles the distributed leader-follower (L-F) control problems for heterogeneous mobile robots in cluttered and disturbed environments. To follow a given trajectory while maintaining the desired formation, a novel decentralised consensus-based formation-control law using negative imaginary (NI) systems theory is presented. To facilitate information sharing, each robot only measures its relative position with respect to its neighbours. To then solve the challenging dynamics of uncertain environments, the significant parameters in the proposed controllers are automatically adjusted based on two intelligent approaches: a knowledge-based fuzzy inference system (FIS) and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Their results are compared to the performance of several fixed-gain and conventional PID controllers in the same ...

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inelastic good. Studies in the latter group provide grounds for both low and high application (or pre-grant) fees and renewal (or post-grant) fees, depending on the structural context and on the policy objectives. The paper also presents new stylized facts on patent fees of thirty patent offices worldwide. It is shown that application fees are generally lower than renewal fees, and renewal fees increase more than proportionally with patent age (to the notable exception of Switzerland and the U.S.). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Modern society is a self-organizing system. When resources (population) start to decrease, the system opens for the influx of foreign elements, hoping to adapt them. Migration is an example of this process. However, new items are not always able to assimilate. Sometimes they are so different that they are not compatible with the host system. Such "aliens" either quietly parasitize on the body of a recipient, or organize their own micro-systems, sprawling like a cancer and destroy the algorithm of the host system. A resource-scarce system is able to survive only by choosing items which are more or less similar in nature and then the system redistributes, splits and disposes them in itself. New elements will fuel the system, but in a different way than relative elements. This will change the system, its borders will evolve (mutate) and change. So the migration processes lead to the transformation of language, culture and behavior. As a result, transnational communities are formed. The traditional concept of nation (country) ceases to exist. The role of boundaries is transformed and is reduced to a nominal marking of a territory. Border areas are the bright example of it now. Governments are trying to apply the policy of integration, granting citizenship for migrants, but it is not always successful. The "new" citizens do not share the dominant culture. In opposite, they actively broadcast their way of life in a new territory. Previously, there was an identity between citizenship and belonging to the nation, but nowadays the situation has changed. Cultural and ethnic unity ceases to be an essential characteristic of a nation. These processes are still in the early stages, but they are becoming a world trend. It also Influenced Russia. Forthe last 10 years in Russia "human resources" crisis has been progressing. In 2025 Russia, like many European countries, will feel all the features of the system resource crisis. Searching for ways to resolve it today – is a strategic task, a question of survival. DOI:10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n11p112

Social work builds its identity on social problems. The goal is to generate knowledge about causes, consequences and solutions. However, there is a lack of theory of social problems. We suggest that research on social problems can benefit by 'bringing the observer in': Loseke's constructionist framework and Luhmann's systems theory. According to Loseke, social problems appear differently when constructed by different observers. Constructions vary in terms of morality, conditions, victims/villains and solutions. From Luhmann we learn that modern society consists of a multitude of social systems (e.g. politics, science, economy etc.), each operating with their own communicative codes. Combining both approaches, we hypothesise that any social system constructs its own (version of) social problems. Illustrating with the empirical case 'suicide among mentally ill people', we examine how a phenomenon is constructed differently as a social problem by four different social systems: the disability movement, politics, medicine and social work.

Group decision making is essential in organizations. Group Support Systems (GSS) can aide groups in making decisions by providing tools and process support. GSS is especially useful for geographically or temporally distributed groups. Researchers of GSS have pointed out that convergence processes are hard to accomplish in GSS. Voting tools in GSS can be a valuable asset in alleviating the difficulty of convergence processes because voting is a concise communication of individual preferences with a well defined procedure that is accepted by group members. In addition, voting results can serve as a group memory of the convergence processes. Field observations by researchers have shown that using voting in GSS can lead to many positive outcomes. Researchers also suggest that rather than using voting blindly, voting should be used properly in GSS to achieve desired results. However, there is an insufficiency of theory and experiments in research of voting in GSS. Voting with the computation power and communication capability in GSS can have a pronounced effect on decision processes and outcomes. In order to gain better understanding of voting in GSS, a framework was developed by expanding existing frameworks of GSS with factors related to voting. These factors were scrutinized for their potential effects on processes and outcomes. Several ways of classifying voting methods were also discussed. The framework can be used as a guiding basis for future research and usage of voting in GSS. Functionalities of sophisticated voting tools to support group decision making were explored based on the proposed GSS voting framework, related theories and studies, and review of existing GSS voting tools and practices. Approaches for integration of sophisticated voting tools with existing GSS were also discussed. Data were collected from an exploratory experiment to examine the effects of bandwidth of voting methods. While there is no significant difference in levels of consensus between the two voting method bandwidth conditions, ...

This paper attempted a documentary assessment of human rights violations in Nigeria in the last two decades (1999-2020) given that the period constitutes the lengthiest uninterrupted democratic era since the country's independence in 1960. The study found that human rights violations still persist in both covert and overt forms in the present than as in the past. The paper further attempted gauging these violations within the premises of the presence and absence of functional systems approach to governance within the country and subsumes that a close knit network between the machinery of governance with particular reference to its security operatives and active human rights and civil society groups will go a long way to minimizing cases of human rights abuses in the country.

http://ijlit.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/06/11/ijlit.eau005.full.pdf?keytype=ref&ijkey=EzUAnysUcC5f9xz ; International audience ; The paper explores the mechanisms that led to the current crisis of copyright law in the digital environment (understood as its inability to regulate social dynamics as regards the production, dissemination and access to creative works) by applying the concept of law as an autopoietic system. It analyses how the copyright regime (a subsystem of the legal system) evolved over time, by scrutinizing the interdependencies between copyright law and the other constitutive systems of its environment: the creative system (concerned with the creation, reproduction, distribution, and access to creative works) the political system (comprising both the State and the Church), the economic system (ruled by right holders and intermediaries on the market for creative works), and the technological system. It will be shown that every new development in the technological system irritated the remaining systems, thereby stimulating the evolution of the overall ecosystem. For a long time, copyright law managed to properly adjust to the environmental changes brought by technological developments, so as to successfully regulate the production, dissemination and access to creative works. It is only with the advent of Internet and digital technologies that copyright law's selective response to environmental stimuli resulted in its failure to adapt to the new reality and, consequently, in the loss of its regulative power. Reacting mostly to the pressures of the economic and political systems (i.e. the lobbying of right holders and intermediaries), while neglecting the needs of the creative system, and even failing to adjust to the specificities of the changing technological system, copyright law eventually disrupted the balance of the surrounding environment. Furthering the economic interests of intermediaries (often at the expense of the public and in certain cases of the authors) created a ...

This paper will be consecrated to the problem of unemployment in Spain from the perspective of Systems Theory. But first I would like to emphasize, in a very schematic form, some of the possibilities and advantages of Systems Theory in Political Science. The purpose is only to suggest that the application of some theoretical and methodological principles of Systems Theory could contribute significantly to the development and efficiency of political systems. Let us say for the moment that the endevour requires to fulfill two main prerequisites: first to adopt the basic systemic principle which is to select the essential variablesfor any given piece of research within a polity; and second, to discover the "system of values" that underlines this polity. To ignore these two fundamental prerequisites should be in principle theoretical and methodologically criticized as we hope to show when we study the unemployment problem in Spain. The application of the model could reduce unemployment from the current 17,1 % until some 12% in the period of 4 years.

The work shows that the epistemological difficulties with the incommensurability between discourses and categories of different disciplines, instead of being discussed and overcome, have been –in interdisciplinary practice- displaced by a "leap to the concrete". Thus, the application has taken center stage, in various versions: theoretical / political in Wallerstein, business / pragmatic in Gibbons, and solving complex operational problems in Rolando García. It is the latter who has developed the most conceptually his position, which involves achievements but also problems. ; El trabajo muestra que las dificultades epistemológicas con la inconmensurabilidad entre discursos y categorías de diferentes disciplinas, en vez de ser discutidas y superadas, han sido –en la práctica interdisciplinaria- desplazadas por un "salto a lo concreto". De tal modo, la aplicación ha ocupado el centro del escenario, en diversas versiones: teórico/política en Wallerstein, empresarial/pragmática en Gibbons, y de resolución de problemas operativos complejos en Rolando García. Es este último quien más ha desarrollado conceptualmente su postura, que envuelve logros pero también problemas.

This article takes issue with the longstanding oppositional themes of harmonisation versus regulatory competition in European company law. Instead of embracing one approach over the other in exclusivity, the article draws attention to the persisting mixture of approaches to an emerging European-wide law regulating the business corporation. Against the background of an ongoing struggle over identifying the goals and taboos of the European legislator's mandate in regulating the company, the argument put forward here is that this very struggle is reflective of the nature of the evolution of company law in an 'integrating Europe and a globalising world'. European attempts of developing European company law as part of a larger initiative of improving the Union's potential for innovation and competition are thus likely to meet with the challenges that contemporary Nation States are facing when adapting their modes of regulation and representation to the demands of an increasingly complex and decentralised fields of market activities. Situating the law of the business corporation within the larger theme of European integration on the one hand, and of issues of market regulation, domestic, transnational, and international, on the other, suggests the adoption of a systems theory-based approach to under- standing the boundaries of law in this multilevel and multipolar process