6th International Conference of Sociocybernetics

Citation

(2005), "6th International Conference of Sociocybernetics", Kybernetes, Vol. 34 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2005.06734eac.002

6th International Conference of Sociocybernetics

Maribor, Slovenia 6-10 July 2005

ISA – International Sociological Association, Research committee 51 on Sociocybernetics Honorary Presidents: Walter Buckley, USA; and Felix Geyer, The Netherlands

Theme: Sociocybernetics and Innovation

This conference is an independent part of the 13 World Congress of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics.

Conference theme explanation

• •

  Sociocybernetics is about preconditions, ways, and consequences of impacts in social entities. Innovation is every novelty accepted as beneficial by its users or consumers, be it technological or non-technological. Only 1 percent of patented inventions become innovations. An unknown small percentage of other inventions become suggestions and about 7 percent of those become innovations. Technological development is interdependent with organizational development and they are both interdependent with social development from the local to the global level of world society. Innovation, the chance of success of which is 8 percent, is at the core of all development.

  Different local, regional, and national communities are differently supportive of invention-innovation processes and to the diffusion of their results. Inventions normally become innovations in coalition with entrepreneurship, and they fight routinism as a characteristic of social groups and social actors. Thus innovations lie at the core of the current growing difference between 20 per cent of the affluent and 80 per cent of the poor and relatively poor of humankind of today.

  At all levels, from local to global, it is not clear, to what extent an innovation is indeed beneficial beyond evident short-term benefits. Side-effects and feedbacks across a variety of different social subsystems, long-term effects affecting future generations, and phenomena of synergy and emergency may easily produce unexpected, unrecognized, and unwanted results endangering the sustainability of social systems and society at large. In the same direct or indirect way, however, innovations may indeed provide new solutions to the problems of human beings and society. For example, globalization may be both a progress and neo-colonization at the same time.

  Sociocybernetics as a discipline provides an adequate holistic theoretical and methodological framework to study the complexity of innovation processes and their efforts on sustainability from the local to the global levels.

  The conference will address a wider scientific audience from Slovenia and neighbouring countries, applied studies will be a special interest.

Further information Please consult the RC 51 web site at: www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics or:

National Organizing Committee of 13th World Congress and 6th International Conference 2005

Matjaz Mulej. Tel: +386 2 22 90 262; Fax: +386 2 25 16 681; E-mail: mulej@uni-mb.si

If you do not intend to join the discussion in Maribor, please forward the information to your friends and colleagues.