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Positive behaviour support has been positioned by current government policy as an important intervention for people with intellectual disabilities who display behaviours that challenge services. However, little is known about service user or carer opinions towards the use of this kind of model. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Opinions and experiences of 25 carers and six service users were collected through semi-structured interview as part of the evaluation of an enhanced service, Complex Behaviour Service, based on positive behaviour support principles.

Content analysis indicated that the service was seen as acceptable and useful and that positive experiences of the service linked to: frequency and availability of the service; talking about behaviour and being listened to; understanding, and change in, the service user, carer and behaviour.

This adds to the small but growing literature on service user and carer opinions towards specific interventions and highlights themes that future services could consider in delivering evidence-based care.

Current First-year Writing research seeks to address the need to help students meet the Council of Writing Program Administrators objectives on source evaluation while also changing current pedagogy methods. This chapter seeks to compare two different source evaluation pedagogies, YSearch and decision-based learning, taught by Brigham Young University’s library, to determine which one-shot library instruction session module is more effective at teaching students source evaluation skills. To answer these questions, this study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, utilizing a quasi-experimental, pre-test/post-test design by conducting an open comparison between the two pedagogy modules. Students scored significantly higher on the post-test in both designs and differences between the two increases weren’t statistically significant, showing that both treatments are effective. Follow-up interviews explored the differences between treatments.

The purpose of this research is to systematically review the properties of supply chains demonstrating that they are complex systems, and that the management of supply chains is best achieved by steering rather than controlling these systems toward desired outcomes.

The research study was designed as both exploratory and explanatory. Data were collected from secondary sources using a comprehensive literature review process. In parallel with data collection, data were analyzed and synthesized.

The main finding is the introduction of an inductive framework for steering supply chains from a complex systems perspective by explaining why supply chains have properties of complex systems and how to deal with their complexity while steering them toward desired outcomes. Complexity properties are summarized in four inter-dependent categories: Structural, Dynamic, Behavioral and Decision making, which together enable the assessment of supply chains as complex systems. Furthermore, five mechanisms emerged for dealing with the complexity of supply chains: classification, modeling, measurement, relational analysis and handling.

Recognizing that supply chains are complex systems allows for a better grasp of the effect of positive feedback on change and transformation, and also interactions leading to dynamic equilibria, nonlinearity and the role of inter-organizational learning, as well as emerging capabilities, and existing trade-offs and paradoxical tensions in decision-making. It recognizes changing dynamics and the co-evolution of supply chain phenomena in different scales and contexts.

Behaviours occur across complex, dynamic timelines. Research methods to analyse these complex timelines have repeatedly used behaviour sequence analysis (BSA) as a primary method. Traditional BSA outputs, however, are limited in that they do not show how prevalent a behaviour sequence is throughout a sample or group. Until now, how many people in a sample showed the sequence was not analysed and reported. This paper aims to provide a new metric to calculate prevalence scores in BSA data sets.

Open access recorded responses including nonverbal communication of deceptive and truthful individuals were analysed initially with a standard BSA approach and then the prevalence scores of transitions were calculated.

Prevalence scores offered new insights into the distribution of sequences across groups. The prevalence score showed differences in which transitions were seen across the truthful and guilty samples. This offers new approaches to analysing nonverbal communication.

This is the first paper to provide a prevalence score for BSA research and show how it can be used in applied research. The current prevalence score metric is provided and suggested for all future research into sequences.

Crowdfunding (CF) is a digital-financial innovation that, bypassing credit crisis, bank system rigidities and constraints of the capital market, is allowing new ventures and established companies to get the needed funds to support innovations. After one decade of research, mainly focused on relations between variables and outcomes of the CF campaign, the literature shows methodological lacks about the study of its overall behavior. These reflect into a weak theoretical understanding and inconsistent managerial guidance, leading to a 27% success ratio of campaigns. To bridge this gap, this paper embraces a “complex system” perspective of the CF campaign, able to explore the system's behavior of a campaign over time, in light of its causal loop structure.

By adopting and following the document model building (DMB) methodology, a set of 26 variables and mutual causal relations modeled the system “Crowdfunding campaign” and a data set based on them and crafted to model the “Crowdfunding campaign” with a causal loop diagram. Finally, system archetypes have been used to link the causal loop structure with qualitative trends of CF's behavior (i.e. the raised capital over time).

The research brought to 26 variables making the system a “Crowdfunding campaign.” The variables influence each other, thus showing a set of feedback loops, whose structure determines the behavior of the CF campaign. The causal loop structure is traced back to three system archetypes, presiding the behavior in three stages of the campaign.

The value of this paper is both methodological and theoretical. First, the DMB methodology has been expanded and reinforced concerning previous applications; second, we carried out a causation analysis, unlike the common correlation analysis; further, we created a theoretical model of a “Crowdfunding Campaign” unlike the common empirical models built on CF platform's data.

This article addresses issues associated with applications of ideas from “chaos theory” to educational administration and leadership as found in the literature. Implications are considered in relation to claims concerning the behaviour of non‐linear dynamic systems, and to the nature of the interpretations and recommendations that are made. To aid the analysis a simple non‐linear model is constructed and its behaviour simulated. Questions emerging from the analysis are used to focus on issues deemed significant, both for evaluating arguments presented on behalf of chaos, and for furthering insights aimed at enhancing the understanding and practice of leadership in organisations.

Smallholder value chains are dynamic, changing over time in sudden, unpredictable ways as they adapt to shocks. Understanding these dynamics and adaptation is essential for these chains to remain competitive in turbulent markets. Many guides to value chain development, though they focus welcome attention on snapshots of current structure and performance, pay limited attention to the dynamic forces affecting these chains or to adaptation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper develops an expanded conceptual framework to understand value chain performance based on the theory of complex adaptive systems. The framework combines seven common properties of complex systems: time, uncertainty, sensitivity to initial conditions, endogenous shocks, sudden change, interacting agents and adaptation.

The authors outline how the framework can be used to ask new research questions and analyze case studies in order to improve our understanding of the development of smallholder value chains and their capacity for adaptation.

The framework highlights the need for greater attention to value chain dynamics.

The framework offers a new perspective on the dynamics of smallholder value chains.

This paper aims to initiate a new, formal theory of sociocultural physics.

Its intended scope is limited to predicting either long‐term, large‐scale or short‐term, small‐scale sociocultural events. The theory that the authors develop, called sociohistory, links three independent but relatable approaches: part of Sorokin's epistemological theory of sociocultural dynamics, Frieden's epistemological theory of extreme physical information (EPI), and Yolles's social viable systems (SVS) theory.

Although not all of Sorokin's ideas are universally accepted, a subset of them is found to be extremely useful for describing the conceptual context of complex systems. This includes how sociocultural processes link closely into political processes.

The theory that develops helps explain how opposing, cultural enantiomers or yin‐yang forces (represented, for instance, by the polar mindsets represented in Islamic fundamentalism and global enterprise) can result in violent conflict, or in either viable or non‐viable social communities. The informations I and J of EPI theory are regarded, respectively, as sensate and ideational enantiomers.

While the resulting sociocultural physics is in its infancy, an illustrative application to the developmental dynamics of post‐colonial Iran demonstrates its potential utility.

Innovation is the lifeblood of companies, while simultaneously being one of the most difficult and elusive processes to manage. Failure rates are high – varying between six out of ten to nine out of ten – while the need to innovate is high. Departing from a real‐life case of a company, Sara Lee/Douwe Egberts, that has set learning within and from innovation projects high on the agenda, the main ideas about learning and innovation will be unfolded in the course of this article. It will be argued that most learning theories rest on a sender‐receiver model of knowledge transmission and this affects how people learn within innovation projects. A complex adaptive approach offers an alternative perspective from which one can evaluate and analyze learning and innovation processes. The most important characteristics of complex adaptive systems are non‐linearity, dynamic behavior, emergence and self‐organization. The implications of these phenomena for learning in innovation projects will be explained. The article finalizes with the preliminary findings of a multi‐agent simulation model, which explores what the underlying forces are beneath learning in innovation projects.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the decision-making process in the management of the complex adaptive systems (CAS), particularly focusing on the dimensions that affect the individual decision maker (DM) when passing from decision to behavior in fitting processes. Although the importance of the general process of fitting in terms of organizational design has been highlighted in earlier studies, a closer focus on the DM perspective is required.

Starting from the theoretical frameworks of viable systems approach (vSa) and addressing the evolving concepts of change and adaptation in CAS, the work takes the DM perspective and investigates the dimensions involved in the paths that lead complex decisions into behaviors, when referring to fitting processes. The paper reviews the vSa and the concept of CAS, deepening the decision making in fitting processes. Then, the paper proceeds to discuss the schemes and the categories that affect, at different levels, the decision and behavioral choices by proposing an interpretative framework.

The paper proposes a general framework useful to recognize/identify which are the elements/dimensions that have to be considered when organizations change in pursuing survival. The findings of the paper also show how adopting a vSa as a meta-model can be insightful to the understanding of service systems and useful in fully comprehending decision-making processes and behavior in complex adaptive system.

The originality of this paper lies in exploring the decision making process in CAS, adopting a closer perspective on the single DM through the lens of the vSa.