STRUCTURES OF EVIL ENCOUNTERED IN PASTORAL COUNSELING

This essay explores some relationships between social structures or systems and the internal psychological structures or systems of individuals. After defining evil, pastoral counseling, and structures or systems, I present examples of persons affected by social systems of power who have sought counseling. I present a form of counseling known as Internal Family System Therapy (IFS) and show with an extended example how I have worked with clients using this approach. In this process the client is guided to use “Self‐leadership” in healing and transforming inner conflict between various subpersonalities or “parts.” I then compare the IFS approach to one used by mediators in community conflict transformation and peacebuilding.     

The dissemination and research of Laszlo's systems philosophy in China

Since the 1980s, the so‐called “new six‐theory” (Dissipative structure theory, Synergetics theory, Catastrophe theory, Chaos theory, Fractal theory, and Hypercycle theory), different from the traditional “systems theory,” “information theory,” and “cybernetics theory” (the “old three theory") has been introduced into China. With it, Laszlo's systems philosophy has been given close attention by Chinese scholars. The main elements of this work are analyzed in terms of the publication and research of Laszlo's work on systems philosophy, and more specifically on systems philosophy and the theory of knowledge, systems philosophy and general evolution theory, systems philosophy and the theory of value, and systems philosophy and metaphysics.     

Discouraging unethicality versus encouraging ethicality: Unraveling the differential effects of prevention‐ and promotion‐focused ethical leadership

Theory on the impact of ethical leadership has traditionally been based on a deontological approach to morality. Underlying this perspective is the assumption that all leader behaviors that encourage “normatively appropriate conduct” will influence followers in a similar fashion. Put differently, the current consensus seems to suggest that actions that focus on preventing unethical behavior—attending to “the wrong”—will have the same impact as actions that focus on promoting ethical behavior—attending to “the right.” Taking a within‐person approach, we draw upon social exchange theory to challenge this consensus and build theory that suggests a follower's felt trust from their leader will be differentially impacted by prevention‐ versus promotion‐focused ethical leadership. We also explore how these different types of ethical leadership may indirectly, through felt trust, impact citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. Finally, we consider how the role of the “moral manager” may interact with the “moral person” by identifying leader moral hypocrisy as an important between‐person moderator of these effects. Given the importance of ethical decision‐making in organizations and the calls for increased ethical leadership, our findings have important implications for both theory and practice.     

Quantum information in an evolutionary perspective

An approach to quantum phenomena is reviewed that deals with the possibility of their realistic interpretation in the sense that they represent manifestations of hermeneutic circles between quantum “objects” and their experimental boundary conditions. Quantum cybernetics provides an evolutionary perspective in that all higher‐level organizations like molecules, cells, living systems, etc., can be discussed under one and the same systemic viewpoint: a hermeneutic circularity between a “core” (or “nucleus") and a relevant “periphery” (or “environment") which constitutes the systems’ organization and information potential.

Generally, in realistic theories, an individual quantum system is analyzable into a local “particle‐like” nonlinearity of a generally nonlocal “wave‐like” mode of some sub‐quantum structure of the vacuum ("Dirac ether"). In this view, a “particle” can be considered as being “guided” along one specific route by the (generally nonlocal) configurations of superimposed waves, which spread along all possible paths of an experimental setup. Moreover, in the approach of Quantum Cybernetics, an additional focus is given on the fact that the energy and momentum of a particle also determine the wave behavior. Thus, “waves” and “particles” are mutually and self‐consistently defined, and Quantum Cybernetics puts particular emphasis on the circular relationship—mediated by plane waves—between a quantum system and its macroscopically defined boundary conditions.     

Fire & Language: The Two-Faced Process of Progress in Deep-Structural Sociocultural Evolution

Abstract

This paper attempts to show how the inherent structure of human becoming is evolutionarily determined to work toward a “meta-system transition” to a higher order of control with a growing risk of extinction as humanity approaches the “event horizon.” The “double helix” of progress technological and social caused manifold cultural surface structures according to the law of increasing entropy, which, however, are mechanically determined to reunite following the same law. Separate individual centers of cybernetic processing thus gradually turn themselves into discursive (“neural”) units, possibly collapsing into a super-conscious single will once information transmission in the network reaches a certain density and noise decreases below a certain threshold.     

Identity Mediators: Leadership and Identity Construction in Campaign Speeches of American Presidential Candidates' Spouses

We explore the nature and evolution of the role of candidates' spouses in U.S. presidential election campaigns through a lens of social psychological theorizing that sees leadership as emerging from activities of identity construction of leaders and followers. Our discursive analysis examines how aspiring First Lady speeches at party national conventions construct both their husbands and the particular national identity construction most presently politically relevant in a way that strategically aligns the two. Building on previous social identity work on leadership, we show how it is not only the leader or their followers who are active participants in leadership construction but that there may also be a role for “third parties” who link prospective leaders with followers. We propose that, as “entrepreneurs” of identity, leaders may use others as “identity mediators” to co‐construct and mediate both the leader's identity and the identity of those they seek to lead.     

Establishing conventional communication systems: Is common knowledge necessary?

How do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by‐product of local interactions among dyads. A set of multi‐agent computer simulations show that a population of “egocentric” agents can establish and maintain symbolic conventions without common knowledge. In the simulations, convergence to a single conventional system was most likely and most efficient when agents updated their behavior on the basis of local rather than global, system‐level information. The massive feedback and parallelism present in the simulations gave rise to phenomena that are often assumed to result from complex strategic processing on the part of individual agents. The implications of these findings for the development of theories of language use are discussed.     

Settling on what we are: The central place of the sense‐of‐self in education,and the implication of the concepts of the teleon and telentropy for the development of the sense‐of‐self

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the centrality of the development of a person's sense‐of‐self in his or her personal growth, and so to justify why educators should deliberately focus the attention of learners on the development of their own senses‐of‐self.

We describe the sense‐of‐self as a person's working hypothesis of what he or she is, as a functioning being. (This is in contrast to the notion of self‐concept, which is composed of the beliefs and evaluations that one has about oneself as a person in a social context.)

To illustrate the centrality of the sense‐of‐self we introduce two associated concepts—the teleon and telentropy. Teleons are “purposeful action patterns,” which may be regarded as the defining characteristic of any living system, including human beings.

Telentropy is similar to entropy (encountered in physics and chemistry), but instead of dealing with the level of disorder in externally described systems, it represents the level of informational confusion existing within an organism regarding its own true nature.

We discuss the implications of the concepts “teleon” and “telentropy” for a person's educability, using examples from daily life and educational institutions.

We provide a number of suggestions for the revising of educational practice to foster the development of the sense‐of‐self in learners. This we demonstrate to have potentially beneficial effects of the general stress levels of society.     

The “Meta” Level of Integrity: Integrity in the Context of Structural Injustice

This essay argues for a new, “meta,” level of integrity that is created by the context of structural injustice. The essay will draw from Margaret Walker to bring out a defining social value of integrity, namely, its ability to facilitate reliable response to harms caused by “moral luck.” The essay will then argue that, when bad luck is caused by complex social‐structural function, traditional advice for maintaining one's integrity fails to provide adequate guidance; following such advice facilitates unjust social‐structural function, and so unreliability in response to harm. The essay will address this problem by arguing that in the context of structural injustice, a “meta‐level” meaning of integrity emerges. This new meta‐level of integrity, unlike the more traditional first‐level integrity, does not instruct an individual to disassociate herself from structural harms; instead, it instructs an individual to manage the way in which she participates in unjust social structures. Meta‐level integrity, unlike first‐level integrity, does not facilitate an end to structural harm, but it does promote a reliable presence of social‐justice movements within unjust structures.     

The topological inventions of life: From the specialization of multicellular colonies to the functioning of the vertebrate brain

The evolution of biological (intermediary) complexity strongly depends upon the information‐processing advantages it confers to cells and organisms. As a matter of fact, highly complex biological structures such as the cellular signaling system and the vertebrate nervous system have been evolved in order to inform the living system about its surround, subsequently orienting the internal, productive activities. The evolutionary success of these types of informational structures ("infostructures") exemplifies that, almost universally, the “bit” may act as a successful substitute for the “joule”. Recent molecular biology research on cellular signaling systems has disclosed their amazing information‐processing sophistication and the crucial role they play in the formation and functioning of the vertebrate brain. In the neurosciences, duality theory has highlighted the way in which the cortical maps and the cerebral substructures of the vertebrate brain are “topologically” integrated in order to perform an adaptive information‐processing. The development of comprehensive conceptualizations relating brain processing and intracellular processing may well be a strategic step in the development of a vertical “information science”.     

“Walking the talk”: the role of frontline supervisors in preventing workplace accidents

ABSTRACT

Most existing safety research focuses on climate and leadership, with most leadership studies investigating transformational leadership, which is likely to be more impactful when exhibited by executives that by frontline supervisors. Therefore, focusing on frontline supervisors, we investigate how leaders who “walk the talk”, by directly modelling safety behaviours, might encourage subordinates to behave more safely. Using a three-level sample consisting of 579 employees and their supervisors working in 161 groups within 53 organizations, we test a multisource multilevel indirect effects model. Results indicate that safety climate and supervisors modelling safety compliance explain unique variance in safety outcomes. We then addressed an unanswered question concerning whether safety climate is best conceptualized as a group or organizational-level phenomenon, finding that the group-level assessment of safety climate explained more variance in safety outcomes than the organizational-level assessment of safety climate. Both sets of results are consistent with social information processing theory and social learning theory, which highlight the immediate social environment’s influence on employees’ behaviour.     

Shaping EU Attitudes Through Identity Leadership: Investigating Pro-EU and EU-Skeptic Identity Narratives

The European Union (EU) faces many challenges. Chief among them are (1) the growing electoral appeal of EU-skeptic parties, (2) the prevalence of negative narratives about the EU, and (3) frequent marginalization of government leaders openly advocating EU membership. It is hence unsurprising that the EU attitude literature focuses heavily on ways in which leaders undermine (rather than bolster) confidence in the EU. The aim of this conceptual article is to fill this void and to shine a spotlight on how leaders seek to restore confidence in the EU. Rather than to merely describe what pro-EU leaders say in public, we propose a conceptual model that combines older EU attitude research (into “nested” social identities and perceived identity compatibility), with more recent social psychology research (into “identity mobilization” and “identity leadership”). By combining insights from both fields, our framework enables us to gain a deeper understanding of why certain pro-EU narratives can be expected to “take hold” and instill faith in the EU among the public at large. The discussion focuses on the implications for EU leadership.     

Religious Involvement and Status-Bridging Social Capital

Is religious involvement positively associated with having influential friends or is religious involvement unrelated to this kind of social capital? Building on the distinction between the “bonding” and “bridging” aspects of social capital, I distinguish two kinds of bridging social capital—identity‐bridging and status‐bridging—that have been a source of terminological confusion. I examine the relationship between religious involvement and status‐bridging social capital by analyzing data from a large nationally representative survey of the U.S. adult population that included questions about friendships with elected public officials, corporation executives, scientists, and persons of wealth. The data show that membership in a religious congregation and holding a congregational leadership position are most consistently associated with greater likelihood of having these kinds of friendships. The data also show that frequency of religious attendance is largely unrelated to these measures of social capital and that there are some significant variations among religious traditions and size of congregation.     

Explanation and Manipulation1

I argue that manipulationist theories of causation fail as accounts of causal structure, and thereby as theories of “actual causation” and causal explanation. I focus on two kinds of problem cases, which I call “Perceived Abnormality Cases” and “Ontological Dependence Cases.” The cases illustrate that basic facts about social systems—that individuals are sensitive to perceived abnormal conditions and that certain actions metaphysically depend on institutional rules—pose a challenge for manipulationist theories and for counterfactual theories more generally. I then show how law‐based accounts of causal structure can answer such challenges. The moral of the story is that the basic manipulationist idea that our interest in causal structure is driven by our interest in manipulating our environment faces decisive problems in a central domain of application, the social sciences.     

Systematic innovation and social philosophy

Corbett's “Europe and the Social Order”; makes two claims: that industrial societies are marked by “systematic innovation”; and that, as a consequence, our inherited social doctrines are obsolete and must be replaced. The first claim is true, but the second is false: it is not the case that social doctrines are “consistent”; only with certain kinds of social order: we cannot therefore say that innovating societies either preclude or compel any particular social doctrines. They do not invalidate a priori doctrine, though they undermine belief in it. It is therefore less important to attack such doctrine than to study innovation empirically.     

A THERMODYNAMIC THEORY OF THE ORIGIN AND HIERARCHICAL EVOLUTION OF LIVING SYSTEMS

Growing interest in the origin of life, the physical foundations of biological theory, and the evolution of animal social systems has led to increasing efforts to understand the processes by which elements or living systems at one level of organizational complexity combine to form stable systems of higher order. J. Bronowski saw the need to extend or reformulate evolutionary theory to deal with the hierarchy problem and to account for the evolution of systems of “stratified stability.” The hierarchy problem has become a matter of great interest also in nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory. An effort is made here to develop an abstract, phenomenological model, based on the laws of thermodynamics, to account for the origin and hierarchical evolution of living systems. It is argued that the principle of minimum entropy production, developed by I. Prigogine, applies generally to all thermodynamic systems and processes and is implicit in an extended and more complete formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. From this are derived a thermodynamic criterion and a principle of thermodynamic selection governing the formation of stable systems of “elements” of various levels of organization. Thermodynamic selection gives rise to the creation of “elements” having increasingly “open” characteristic structures which may combine spontaneously to form “social” or crystalline systems capable of growing and reproducing themselves through processes of fissioning or budding. Such simple, self-reproducing systems are capable of evolving by natural selection, which is seen to be a special case of the more general process of thermodynamic selection. The principle of natural selection, thus formulated, has the character of a fundamental physical law. Self-reproducing systems with suitably open hereditary programs may combine to form stable social systems, which may grow and reproduce as a unit. In this way self-reproducing systems of increasing hierarchical order, size, and organizational complexity may evolve through processes of thermodynamic (natural) selection. Some implications of this open-ended model and opportunities for testing its empirical and theoretical utility are explored.     

Knowledge in the information society

The German Council for Research, Technology and Innovation defines the “information society” as a type of society where the acquirement, storage, processing, exchange, diffusion and utilization of knowledge inclusive of their technological possibilities of interactive communication, here become increasingly important. In this notion, knowledge has become the decisive factor for economic growth and technological advance. As a social scientist I transform the term “information society” into processes of automatization of knowledge, which is called its informatization and computerization. It is argued that these processes affect the societal condition of knowledge in that the part of knowledge relating to the contents diminishes while the importance of the technical and/or formal part increases. In contrast to the claim of many social scientists, this trend does not lead to a superficial or shallow type of knowledge. What is changing is the social requirement of professional skills and qualifications. The great looming question about information society then is: Which knowledge do people need to behave competently, effectively and successfully in a world full of computers? The structure of this article is as follows. First I will have a look at the micro‐level of the composition of knowledge, next I will proceed to the historical shift from subject‐specific knowledge to media‐competence and finally I will talk about the meaning of the evolving dominance of—what I will call “media‐competent experts”.     

Need for cognitive closure and politics: Voting,political attitudes and attributional style

T his paper examines the impact of dispositional Need for Cognitive Closure (NFC) on different political attitudes and on the “person blame” and the “system blame” dimensions. Two hundred and thirty‐four psychology students completed a questionnaire containing the Italian version of the Need for Closure scale, a measure of political and ideological attitudes, a measure of the person‐system blame dimensions, and a measure of past voting. Results showed that high NFC individuals (vs. low NFCs) reported having voted for a right‐wing party and holding more conservative attitudes. High NFCs (vs. low NFCs) turned out to have stronger anti‐immigrant attitudes, to be more nationalistic, to prefer an autocratic leadership and a centralized form of political power. High NFCs also value religiosity more highly than low NFCs. High NFCs (vs. low NFCs) scored lower on pluralism and multiculturalism. Furthermore, high NFCs (vs. low NFCs) revealed a tendency to blame individuals for social problems, but no significant difference was found with regard to the system blame dimension. Results are discussed in the light of the motivated social cognition approach (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003).