Kybernetes: Volume 48 Issue 4

Guest editorial: resilience and ethics in social systems

Philip Baron, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, David (Dai) Griffiths, Ben Sweeting

The soul of resilience

Pille Bunnell

Rather than an attempt to define or clarify resilience in terms of its characteristics, or its correspondence to reality, this paper is a series of reflections that leads to the…

An evolutionary phenomenology of resilience

Robert M. Cutler, Alexander von Lingen

The purpose of the paper is to set out an evolutionary schema for organizational resilience using the established emergent autopoiesis coherence (EAC) framework, with empirical…

Ethically resilient teachers, what might that be?: A comparison across two educational levels: pre-school and university in South Africa

Philip Baron, Anne Catherine Baron

When comparing pre-school teachers with university lecturers, society generally acknowledges the latter as a highly skilled professional, while the former does not achieve such…

Resilience and transparency in social systems

Dai Griffiths

This paper draws on the literature of cybernetics to argue that the resilience of organizations can be diminished by an unconsidered maximization of transparency and…

Cybernetically informed pedagogy in two tertiary educational contexts: China and South Africa

Philip Baron, Christiane M. Herr

Discussing cybernetics as an enacted practice within specific contexts, this paper aims to identify key similarities and differences of two cybernetically informed approaches to…

Rehearsing resilience(and beyond): Facilitating second-order observation of conflict in the university workplace through forum theatre

Megan Ryland, Tom Scholte

This paper aims to demonstrate the value of forum theatre as a means to promote second-order awareness of workplace conflict and to further pragmatise cyber-systemic awareness to…

Too resilient for anyone’s good: “Infant psychophysics” viewed through second-order cybernetics, part 1 (background and problems)

Lance Nizami

This study aims to examine the observer’s role in “infant psychophysics”. Infant psychophysics was developed because the diagnosis of perceptual deficits should be done as early…

Too resilient for anyone’s good: “Infant psychophysics” viewed through second-order cybernetics, part 2 (re-interpretation)

Lance Nizami

This paper aims to extend the companion paper on “infant psychophysics”, which concentrated on the role of in-lab observers (watchers). Infants cannot report their own…

Are all observations measurements?

Faisal L. Kadri

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of soft science measurement of motivation under strict hard science criteria from observations of individual animals…

Transcomputability, (Glanville’s corollary of) Ashby’s law of requisite variety and epistemic processes

Thomas Fischer

Ranulph Glanville has argued that ambitions of strict control are misplaced in epistemic processes such as learning and designing. Among other reasons, he has presented…

Applying ethics to itself: recursive ethical questioning in architecture and second-order cybernetics

Ben Sweeting

The purpose of this paper is to put forward a way that ethics may be applied recursively to itself, in the sense that how we speak and reason about ethics is an activity to which…