Behavioral science最新文献

In the early stages of project initiation, it is especially important to be able to represent at a high level of abstraction the functional requirements of a system being designed. This makes it possible for a design team to arrange and rearrange the essential functional components rapidly. This offers a means to explore the feasibility of different system configurations and to pose and answer “what-if” questions before the design is frozen. Similarly, if we are able to model processes associated with manufacture, then in a like manner we can explore the feasibility of different manufacturing systems. If the tools for modeling function and processes are compatible at a high level of abstraction, then we can also pose and answer “what-if” questions to understand the interaction between the design and its manufacturability. In this paper, we put forward some ideas that stem from living systems theory that could facilitate the development of these tools.

Living systems theory provides an elegant and elaborate conceptual framework for studying the behavior of human organisms, groups, and organizations. It facilitates cross-level comparisons and analysis of interaction between systems at different levels. Miller (1978) generated many cross-level hypotheses that could be useful to management and organizational behavior theorists and researchers. Practitioners can gain much from a clearer understanding of the “living” nature of groups and organizations. This article reviews the literature of applications of living systems theory to the fields of management and organizational behavior, and provides many examples of benefits to researchers and managers.

Recent developments in the physical and biological sciences suggest that the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is sufficiently high as to justify a $100 million radio telescope search. The present paper suggests that despite the limits of our current knowledge we can still formulate useful working hypotheses about extraterrestrial intelligence. As we develop such hypotheses, we should remain within the framework of science and view the evolution of life and civilizations as orderly processes which proceed within broad natural limits. James G. Miller's Living System Theory (LST) provides a simple framework for disassembling and analyzing, in identical terms, systems of different sizes and complexity. A simplified version of LST involving three systems levels (organism, society, supranational system) and two basic processes (matter-energy processing and information processing) is applied to organize current thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence. It is concluded that LST's categories and principles will prove useful for comparative studies of terrestrial and extraterrestrial life forms and civilizations.

An index of power is proposed, based on the concept of the entropy of information, which measures the distribution of power among decision makers who commit themselves at distinctive stages in the hierarchical decision systems. The index is tested and is shown to work well with a model of public decision-making in an indirect democracy. Moreover, it is shown that the entropy decreases monotonically in hierarchical and sequential decision systems. This property indicates support for the applicability of the index.

The paper deals with living systems at the social and individual levels of analysis. We examine the individual's perception of membership in an ethnically defined social group, in particular the hypotheses regarding the implicit definitions of one's own social group elicited from the negatives of perceived differences from members of other groups. The specific hypotheses concern the relationship between the perceived differences and the geographical distance to the group. These hypotheses were tested on the material collected from evaluations of Lithuanian folk songs from various regions by Lithuanian minority in Poland. In addition to the results being generalizable to other ethnic groups, and to perception not restricted to songs but also concerning other aspects of culture (allowing mostly categorical judgments), the results are of interest because of the statistical methodology used, which involves resampling techniques for categorical data.