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This paper aims to develop the role of autonomy in the emergence of the design process. It shows how the design process is facilitated by autonomy, how autonomy is enhanced through the design process and how the emergence of anticipatory and future‐oriented representational content in an autonomous cognitive system provides the functionality needed for the strengthening of both its autonomy and the design process, in which the autonomous cognitive system purposefully engages.

Initially, the essential characteristics of the design process and of the cognitive systems participating in it will be identified. Then, an attempt to demonstrate the ability of an enhanced second‐order cybernetic framework to satisfy these characteristics will be made. Next, an analytic description of the design process under this framework is presented and the respective implications are critically discussed.

The role of autonomy is crucial for the design process, as it seems that autonomy is both the primary motive and the goal for a cognitive system to engage in a design process. A second‐order cybernetic framework is suitable for the analysis of such a complex process, as long as both the constructive and the interactive aspects of a self‐organising system are taken under consideration.

The modelling of the complex design process under the framework of second‐order cybernetics and the indication of the fundamental characteristics of an autonomous cognitive system as well as their interrelations may provide useful insights in multiple levels, from the purely theoretical (i.e. better understanding of the design process and the conditions for each creative fostering), to the purely technical (i.e. the design of artificial agents with design capabilities).

The innovative aspect of the paper is that it attempts an analysis of the design process under a framework of second‐order cybernetics, by attempting to analyse and explain the emergence of such a process from the point of view of an autonomous cognitive system. This results in some interesting implications regarding the nature of the design process, as well as regarding its “mechanisms” of emergence and evolution, with respect to the characteristics of the participating autonomous systems.

The paper aims to discuss the importance of considering both the physical and cognitive automation when aiming for a flexible or reconfigurable assembly system. This is done in order to handle the increased demand for mass customized production and to maintain or improve the social sustainability within the company.

The methodologies used in this paper are a theoretical review about task allocation and levels of automation and a methodology called DYNAMO++ for the industrial case studies.

The paper provides both theoretical and empirical insights about the importance of considering both the cognitive and physical automation when aiming for a reconfigurable assembly system.

The paper will only discuss the cognitive strategy from a social sustainability perspective and not from an economical or environmental angle.

The paper presents data from three industrial case studies, mostly in the automotive industry. The result points towards a need for a more structured and quantitative method when choosing automation solutions, furthermore an increased use of cognitive automation solution.

The results from the case studies show that when the complexity and variety of products increases, a cognitive support for the operators is needed. This strengthens the theory of a need for a cognitive automation strategy within companies.

The paper demonstrates an advance in the state of the art in task allocation. The concept model and the DYNAMO++ method can be seen as a step closer towards quantitative measures of task allocation (i.e. changes in both physical and cognitive LoA) and dynamic changes over time.

While emotions and feelings arise in the singular personality, they may also develop a normative dimensionality in a plural agency. The authors identify the cybernetic systemic principles of how emotions might be normatively regulated and affect plural agency performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a generic cultural socio-cognitive trait theory of plural affective agency (the emotional organization), involving interactive cognitive and affective traits, and these play a role within the contexts of Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A).

The authors integrate James Gross’ model of emotion regulation with the earlier work on normative personality in the context of Mindset Agency Theory. The agency is a socio-cognitive entity with attitude, and operates through traits that control thinking and decision making. These traits are epistemically independent and operate on a bipolar scale; with the alternate poles having an auxiliary function to each other – where the traits may take intermediary “balanced” states between the poles.

Processes of affect regulation are supposed to go through three stages: first, identification (affective situation awareness); second, elaboration of affect is constituted through schemas of emotional feeling, which include emotion ideologies generating emotional responses to distinct contextual situations; third, execution: in the operative system primary emotions are assessed through operative intelligence for any adaptive information and the capacity to organize action; and turned into action, i.e. responses, through cultural feeling rules and socio-cultural display rules, conforming to emotion ideologies.

This new theory provides guidance for framing multilevel interaction where smaller collectives (as social systems) are embedded into larger social systems with a culture, an emotional climate and institutions. Thus, it is providing a generic theoretical frame for M & A analyses, where a smaller social unit (the acquired) is to be integrated into a larger social unit (the acquirer).

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion regulation is a prerequisite of managerial intelligence, which is at demand during M & A processes. While managerial intelligence may be grossly defined as the capacity of management to find an appropriate and fruitful balance between action and learning orientation of an organization, its affective equivalent is the capacity of management to find a fruitful balance between established emotion expression and learning alternate forms of emotion expression.

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion is a prerequisite of social, cultural and emotional intelligence. The provided theory can be easily linked with empirical work on the emergence of a cultural climate of fear within societies. Thus, “Affective Agency Theory” also has a bearing for political systems’ analysis, what, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper builds on the recently developed Mindset Agency Theory, elaborating it through the introduction of the dimension of affect, where cognitive and affective traits interact and become responsible for patterns of behaviour. The model is providing a framework which links emotion expression and emotion regulation with cognitive analysis.

In response to recent calls to better understand the brain’s role in organizational behavior, we propose a series of theoretical tests to examine the question “can brains manage?” Our tests ask whether brains can manage without bodies and without extracranial resources, whether they can manage in social isolation, and whether brains are the ultimate controllers of emotional and cognitive aspects of organizational behavior. Our analysis shows that, to accomplish work-related tasks in organizations, the brain relies on and closely interfaces with the body, interpersonal and social dynamics, and cognitive and emotional processes that are distributed across persons and artifacts. The results of this “thought experiment” suggest that the brain is more appropriately conceived as a regulatory organ that integrates top-down (i.e., social, artifactual and environmental) and bottom-up (i.e., neural) influences on organizational behavior, rather than the sole cause of that behavior. Drawing on a socially situated perspective, our analysis develops a framework that connects brain, body and mind to social, cultural, and environmental forces, as significant components of complex emotional and cognitive organizational systems. We discuss the implications for the emerging field of organizational cognitive neuroscience and for conceptualizing the interaction between the brain, cognition and emotion in organizations.

The paper aims to clarify the influence of different picture contents on consumer's willingness to click pictures when shopping for agricultural products online and examine the intermediary mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact.

The paper opted for an empirical study based on the cue utilization theory and information processing theory, including three experiments to test the existence, intermediary mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of online picture contents of agricultural products on consumers' clicking intention.

The paper provides empirical insights about the influence of picture contents on consumer's willingness to click when shopping for agricultural products online. The picture of product's production environment or grower on the search result page can effectively improve consumer's willingness to click the product under dual systemic information processing modes. Compared with product pictures, pictures displaying products and production environment can stimulate more cognitive system processing, and pictures displaying products and its growers can stimulate more emotional system processing, both resulting in higher click intention. However, the above effects only exist in the context of non-branded agricultural products.

The research results not only provide practical guidance for merchants, but also fill the gap in the research on the impact of picture contents on consumers in the field of agricultural products in online marketing.

The paper aims to clarify the influence of different picture contents on consumer's willingness to click pictures when shopping for agricultural products online and examine the intermediary mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact.

The paper opted for an empirical study based on the cue utilization theory and information processing theory, including 3 experiments to test the existence, intermediary mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of online picture contents of agricultural products on consumers' clicking intention.

The paper provides empirical insights about the influence of picture contents on consumer's willingness to click when shopping for agricultural products online. The picture of product's production environment or grower on the search result page can effectively improve consumer's willingness to click the product under dual-systemic information processing modes. Compared with product pictures, pictures displaying products and production environment can stimulate more cognitive system processing, and pictures displaying products and its growers can stimulate more emotional system processing, both resulting in higher click intention. However, the above effects only exist in the context of non-branded agricultural products.

The research results can not only provide practical guidance for merchants, but also fill the gap in the research on the impact of picture contents on consumers in the field of agricultural products in online marketing.

In line with the cognitive viewpoint on the phenomenon of information, the constructivist tradition based on Maturana and Varela's theory of knowing, and some aspects of Shannon's theory of communication, the purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the role of information, data, and knowledge in the cognitive system (domain) of the observer.

In addition to the literature review, a proposed description of the communication and knowledge acquisition processes within the observer's cognitive system/domain is elaborated.

The paper recognizes communication and knowledge acquisition as separate processes based on two roles of information within the observer's cognitive system, which are emphasized. The first role is connected with the appropriate communication aspects of Shannon's theory related to encoding cognitive entities in the cognitive domain as data representations for calculating their informativeness. The second role involves establishing relations between cognitive entities encoded as data representations through the knowledge acquisition process in the observer's cognitive domain.

In this way, according to the cognitive viewpoint, communication and knowledge acquisition processes are recognized as important aspects of the cognitive process as a whole. In line with such a theoretical approach, the paper seeks to provide an extension of Shannon's original idea, intending to involve the observer's knowledge structure as an important framework for the deepening of information theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of cognitive style on navigating a large digital library of cultural heritage information; specifically, the paper focus on the wholist/analytic dimension as experienced in the field of educational informatics. The hypothesis is that wholist and analytic users have characteristically different approaches when they explore, search and interact with digital libraries, which may have implications for system design.

A detailed interactive IR evaluation of a large cultural heritage digital library was undertaken, along with the Riding CSA test. Participants carried out a range of information tasks, and the authors analysed their task performance, interactions and attitudes.

The hypothesis on the differences in performance and behaviour between wholist and analytic users is supported. However, the authors also find that user attitudes towards the system are opposite to expectations and that users give positive feedback for functionality that supports activities in which they are cognitively weaker.

There is scope for testing results in a larger scale study, and/or with different systems. In particular, the findings on user attitudes warrant further investigation.

Findings on user attitudes suggest that systems which support areas of weakness in users’ cognitive abilities are valued, indicating an opportunity to offer diverse functionality to support different cognitive weaknesses.

A model is proposed suggesting a converse relationship between behaviour and attitudes; to support individual users displaying search/navigation behaviour mapped onto the strengths of their cognitive style, but placing greater value on interface features that support aspects in which they are weaker.

This article is a contribution to the development of a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of LIS in the hope of giving a more precise evaluation of its current problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary framework for lis, especially information retrieval (IR), in a way that goes beyond the cognitivist ‘information processing paradigm’. The main problem of this paradigm is that its concept of information and language does not deal in a systematic way with how social and cultural dynamics set the contexts that determine the meaning of those signs and words that are the basic tools for the organisation and retrieving of documents in LIS. The paradigm does not distinguish clearly enough between how the computer manipulates signs and how librarians work with meaning in practice when they design and run document mediating systems. The ‘cognitive viewpoint’ of Ingwersen and Belkin makes clear that information is not objective, but rather only potential, until it is interpreted by an individual mind with its own internal mental world view and purposes. It facilitates further study of the social pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of concepts. This approach is not yet fully developed. The domain analytic paradigm of Hjørland and Albrechtsen is a conceptual realisation of an important aspect of this area. In the present paper we make a further development of a non‐reductionistic and interdisciplinary view of information and human social communication by texts in the light of second‐order cybernetics, where information is seen as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ for a living autopoietic (self‐organised, self‐creating) system. Other key ideas are from the semiotics of Peirce and also Warner. This is the understanding of signs as a triadic relation between an object, a representation and an interpretant. Information is the interpretation of signs by living, feeling, self‐organising, biological, psychological and social systems. Signification is created and con‐trolled in a cybernetic way within social systems and is communicated through what Luhmann calls generalised media, such as science and art. The modern socio‐linguistic concept ‘discourse communities’ and Wittgenstein's ‘language game’ concept give a further pragmatic description of the self‐organising system's dynamic that determines the meaning of words in a social context. As Blair and Liebenau and Backhouse point out in their work it is these semantic fields of signification that are the true pragmatic tools of knowledge organ‐isation and document retrieval. Methodologically they are the first systems to be analysed when designing document mediating systems as they set the context for the meaning of concepts. Several practical and analytical methods from linguistics and the sociology of knowledge can be used in combination with standard methodology to reveal the significant language games behind document mediation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the simultaneous effect of management control system (MCS) designs (belief vs boundary) and cognitive orientations (individualism vs collectivism) on performance misreporting by combining accounting and psychology literature.

This paper is based on a laboratory experiment with 67 postgraduate students.

Results show that an individualist cognitive orientation increased performance misreporting. The results also showed that a boundary design of MCS intensified the relationship between individualist orientation and performance misreporting.

This paper shed some light about the role of non-pecuniary control system for reducing managerial performance misreporting. The findings support that the tendency of individuals to avoid misreporting depends not only on the MCS design but also on the match between it and individual’s cognitive orientations.

Managers in organizations should consider the predominant cognitive orientation of individuals when they design MCS. They should consider that control systems, which impose coercive constraints to individuals, may encourage feelings of psychological reactance and then increase performance misreporting.

This study is among the first to combine psychology and accounting literature to analyze how the design of MCS influences individuals’ motivation to misreport their performance. It provided evidence about the effect of non-monetary control systems on individual’s behavior in organizations.