Social systems

Has a world-wide database of federal and non-profit environmental research organizations that focus on the multiple aspects of global environmental change, including the regional effects on natural ecosystems, environments and resources as well as on human health, culture and social systems. 

Any system whose top-level behavior is a consequence of the aggregate behavior of lower-level entities - biological systems, neural systems, social systems, economic systems, among many others - can, in principle, be simulated by an agent-based model. 

Ecosystem services can be considered as being the goods and services provided by coupled ecological and social systems. They provide our material needs and quality of life, and we all depend on the sustainable use of ecosystems services. The Millennium Ecosystems Assessment has brought the continual capacity for coupled ecological-social systems to deliver eco-systems services into public attention. It states that the ability of many systems to deliver valuable services has been compromised by over-exploitation of several resources and environmental degradation. 

The majority of vomerolfactory effects discussed relate to intra-specific patterns, most concerned with social discriminations. Individual and or group membership, hierarchical status —often aggression-related, are among many non-sexual but socially indispensable elements. Social systems with evident female dominance are not infrequent among... 

Armando Aranda What you say is actually deadly serious indeed, and I wonder whether the problem comes from the science and the scientists or is it the political and social system that then takes the science that is useful for its purposes Or is it an interactive situation, a certain attitude or ideology breeds a certain kind of science or do they feed back each other ... 

Dunbar, R.I.M. (1988). Primate Social Systems. Chapman Hall, London. 

W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New Haven Yale University Press, 1945), pp. 286, 290-291. 

And at each point, the lawn was as much a vehicle for the creation and maintenance of social systems as it was a product of those systems. In every period it served to mediate broader ideologies of citizenship and property, interpellating urban subjects as it went. In the process, it became normalized into a predictable kind of aesthetic, one that is inherently cultural in that it came to be normal, expected, and desirable. A lawn, distinct simply from a grassy yard, was established specifically as smooth, unbroken, and homogeneous ecology. 

TNC.47.1. Prigogine, L ordre par fluctuations et le systeme social (Order through fluctuations and the social system), Rhein. Westf. Akad. Wiss., Vortrdge, no. 260, pp. 1-74, 1976. 

GEN.36.1. Prigogine, Order through fluctuation Self-organization and social system, in Evolution and Consciousness, Human Systems in Transition, E. Jantsch and C. Waddington, eds., Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1976, pp. 93-133. 

All these features parallel those found in eusocial insects, and the naked mole-rat has been recognized as the only eusocial vertebrate (Jarvis, 1981). Naked mole-rats resemble termites more than hymenopterans they are diploid, male and females form the worker castes, the young contribute to the colony labor, some workers reproduce if the breeding female is removed, and theyoung obtain food by coprophagy (Jarvis, 1981). A similar social system exists in the Damara-land mole-rat, Cryptomys damarensis (Bennett and Jarvis, 1988). 

Understanding of social systems—Engineering decisions are made in the context of societal systems (e.g., le-... 

As noted in Chapter 2, the medical literature on patient compliance with medication is enormous. The assumption underlying much of the discussion is that if only doctors could better communicate to patients the necessity of following a medication regimen, compliance would increase. This may be so. However, medical treatment built on the presumption of a two-person social system-doctor and patient—misses the way each of us is embedded in a network of significant others. As the accounts in this section demonstrate, people s attitudes toward psychotropic drug use are inseparable from the perspectives and concerns of those with whom they wish to build... 

It is imlikely that any single event or policy was solely responsible for the fall. With the vast and intricate political and social system of the... 

A quite different example, that was considered in Table 5.1, is the formation of an anthill the design of the anthill is not imposed externally it is the result of the internal structure of the ant social system. It is self-organization, if we consider the ants themselves and their genome as part of the internal rules of the system. 

Social systems (human enterprises that form out of self-imposed rules), such as business companies, political parties, families, tribes etc. armies, churches. 

Point number four, about social systems, has not been considered here. This simple classification conveys well the complexity of the held of self-organization. The question of whether the human social organizahonal systems are genetically determined - sociobiology, as in the case of social insects - or induced by social and educational constraints is quite intereshng, but again out of the limits of this chapter. 

We go back now to basic autopoiesis, in order to consider what came as an interesting, and unexpected, development of this theory. By unexpected, I mean that even the authors of the Santiago school had not foreseen it. This is social autopoiesis. The main feature of autopoiesis is self-maintenance due to a process of self-generation from within. Although this concept came from the analysis of a living cell, it can be metaphorically applied to social systems. 

Figure 8.9 Towards social autopoiesis the cyclic logic of autopoiesis applied to social systems. Notice the analogy with Figure 8.2. The transfer from biology to social science assumes that human relationships substitute for the chemical interactions among the cell constituents and that the definition rules of the social community substitute for the membrane boundary.

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