Autopoietic Nonsense

Autopoietic Nonsense PDF Author: David Kershaw
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Autopoiesis
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description

Autopoietic Nonsense

Autopoietic Nonsense PDF Author: David Kershaw
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Autopoiesis
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description


Fashionable Nonsense

Fashionable Nonsense PDF Author: Alan D. Sokal
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312204075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In 1996, Alan Sokal published an essay in the hip intellectual magazine Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. Here, Sokal teams up with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today's most fashionable postmodern thinkers. From Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard, the authors document the errors made by some postmodernists using science to bolster their arguments and theories. Witty and closely reasoned, Fashionable Nonsense dispels the notion that scientific theories are mere "narratives" or social constructions, and explored the abilities and the limits of science to describe the conditions of existence.

Handbook of Research on Autopoiesis and Self-Sustaining Processes for Organizational Success

Handbook of Research on Autopoiesis and Self-Sustaining Processes for Organizational Success PDF Author: Pa?kowska, Ma?gorzata
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1799867153
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Autopoietic systems show a remarkable property in the way they interact with their environment: on the one hand building blocks and energy (including information) are exchanged with the environment, which characterizes them as open systems; on the other hand, any functional mechanisms—the way the system processes, incorporates building blocks, and responds to information—are totally self-determined and cannot be controlled by interventions from the environment. Information systems in an organization seem to accept the autopoietic system way of development and can help managers to understand the operations of their organizations better. The Handbook of Research on Autopoiesis and Self-Sustaining Processes for Organizational Success is an innovative reference book that presents the meaning of autopoietic organizations for social and information science, examines how autopoietic organizations are information self-producing and self-controlled, and provides a framework for its development in modern organizations. The book focuses on analyzing autopoiesis features such as self-managing, self-sustaining, self-producing, self-regulating, etc. Moreover, as the aforementioned characteristics receive a new interpretation in IT environments, the book also includes an exploration of IT solutions that enable the development of these characteristics. This book is ideal for professionals, academicians, researchers, and students working in the field of information economics and management in various disciplines such as information and communication sciences, administrative sciences and management, education, computer science, and information technology.

Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures, And Spontaneous Social Orders

Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures, And Spontaneous Social Orders PDF Author: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description


Autopoiesis and the Science of (Public) Administration: Essence, Sense and Nonsense

Autopoiesis and the Science of (Public) Administration: Essence, Sense and Nonsense PDF Author: Walter Kickert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages :

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Book Description


The Politics of Orientation

The Politics of Orientation PDF Author: Hannah Richter
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438495072
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The Politics of Orientation provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. The Politics of Orientation breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right.

Theory of Society, Volume 1

Theory of Society, Volume 1 PDF Author: Niklas Luhmann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478647X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
This first volume of Niklas Luhmann's two-part final work was initially published in German in 1997. The culmination of his thirty-year theoretical project to reconceptualize sociology, it offers a comprehensive description of modern society on a scale not attempted since Talcott Parsons. Beginning with an account of the fluidity of meaning and the accordingly high improbability of successful communication, Luhmann analyzes a range of communicative media, including language, writing, the printing press, and electronic media as well as "success media," such as money, power, truth, and love, all of which structure this fluidity and make communication possible. An investigation into the ways in which social systems produce and reproduce themselves, the book asks what gives rise to functionally differentiated social systems, how they evolve, and how social movements, organizations, and patterns of interaction emerge. The advent of the computer and its networks, which trigger potentially far-reaching processes of restructuring, receive particular attention. A concluding chapter on the semantics of modern society's self-description bids farewell to the outdated theoretical approaches of "old Europe," that is, to ontological, holistic, ethical, and critical interpretations of society, and argues that concepts such as "the nation," "the subject," and "postmodernity" are vastly overrated. In their stead, "society"—long considered a suspicious term by sociologists, one open to all kinds of reification—is defined in purely operational terms. It is the always uncertain answer to the question of what comes next in all areas of communication.

Autopoiesis and Cognition

Autopoiesis and Cognition PDF Author: H.R. Maturana
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400989474
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This is a bold, brilliant, provocative and puzzling work. It demands a radical shift in standpoint, an almost paradoxical posture in which living systems are described in terms of what lies outside the domain of descriptions. Professor Humberto Maturana, with his colleague Francisco Varela, have undertaken the construction of a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as they are objects of observation and description, nor even as in teracting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to them selves. Thus, the standpoint of description of such unities from the 'outside', i. e. , by an observer, already seems to violate the fundamental requirement which Maturana and Varela posit for the characterization of such system- namely, that they are autonomous, self-referring and self-constructing closed systems - in short, autopoietic systems in their terms. Yet, on the basis of such a conceptual method, and such a theory of living systems, Maturana goes on to define cognition as a biological phenomenon; as, in effect, the very nature of all living systems. And on this basis, to generate the very domains of interac tion among such systems which constitute language, description and thinking.

How We Became Posthuman

How We Became Posthuman PDF Author: N. Katherine Hayles
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226321398
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

Autopoietic Organization Theory

Autopoietic Organization Theory PDF Author: Tore Bakken
Publisher: Copenhagen Business School Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"In bringing together authors from different European countries and institutions, as well as from different disciplines, this anthology introduces the reader to selected areas of Luhmann's autopoiesis that have bearing on organization theory. It discusses aspects that are of particular interest to both theoretical and empirical organization theory, and in doing so it enables students of organizations to acquire better appreciation of Luhmann's thinking."