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The shift to the fourth industrial revolution presents new sustainable development challenges. The externalities of the second and third industrial revolutions were related to the degradation of the biosphere. It is suggested that the externalities of the fourth industrial revolution, underpinned by artificial intelligence, are extending the repertoire of externalities to include the degradation and manipulation of cognition and by extension the fabric of society. The implications for South Africa’s transformation within the fourth industrial revolution are highlighted. It is shown that digital nudging and choice architecture are tools that are capable of maximising profit while externalising social value through the algorithmic manipulation of our decision-making processes. The case for an alternative explanatory framework is presented because the limitations of the prevailing conception of physical reality appear unable to adequately resolve these super-wicked problems. Constructor theory is introduced as an alternative explanatory framework, and the constructor-theoretic conception is suggested as an ontological framework that will provide better explanations. Some principles of the theory are introduced.

This chapter shows that the algorithm recently proposed to decompose the Foster and Wolfson bipolarization index by income sources (see Bárcena-Martin, Deutsch, & Silber, forthcoming) may be extended to break down wage bipolarization by its determinants. The chapter gives an empirical illustration comparing the determinants of wage bipolarization and inequality in various European countries in 2011, with a special focus on Portugal. In Portugal higher levels of education are the main source of bipolarization and inequality. Gender and working in the public sector are important determinants of bipolarization while age and having a temporary job are important determinants of inequality.

While recent research has referred to a cognitive view on “business modelling,” it remains unclear in specifying the cognitive foundations of how such modelling happens. This paper proposes building on heuristics as models of individual cognition, which have proved effective foundations of adaptive individual and managerial behaviors. By also drawing on gestalt theory to specify principles of modelling as rule-based form giving, we propose business modelling as a managerial cognitive process of configuring heuristics. The paper makes three contributions. First, we introduce heuristics to the business modelling literature and so provide an established theory of adaptive individual behavior that strengthens the cognitive foundations of business modelling. Second, we conceptualize and theorize on the cognitive activity of business modelling as an iterative process of configuring heuristics by applying gestalt principles. Although the literature on business models has referred to the theories of configurations and gestalt, it has been left to this work to make the theoretical linkages between heuristics, gestalt theory and business modelling explicit. Third, our work contributes to the micro-foundations of the cognitive processes underlying business modelling and thus to broader accounts of adaptive managerial behaviors.

This chapter examines the impoverishment process in three South Caucasian states: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It uses the concept of ‘order of curtailment’ of consumption expenditures to detect the order of curtailment of expenditures in the Caucasus region. It then suggests computing poverty rates on the basis of a threshold corresponding to the curtailment of a certain number of consumption expenditures categories and compares the poverty rates obtained with those derived from more traditional approaches to the unidimensional measurement of poverty. The empirical illustrations are based on the Caucasus Barometer surveys of 2009 and 2013.

Justice rules are standards that serve as criteria for formulating fairness judgments. Though justice rules play a role in the organizational justice literature, they have seldom been the subject of analysis in their own right. To address this limitation, we first consider three meta-theoretical dualities that are highlighted by justice rules – the distinction between justice versus fairness, indirect versus direct measurement, and normative versus descriptive paradigms. Second, we review existing justice rules and organize them into four types of justice: distributive (e.g., equity, equality), procedural (e.g., voice, consistent treatment), interpersonal (e.g., politeness, respectfulness), and informational (e.g., candor, timeliness). We also emphasize emergent rules that have not received sufficient research attention. Third, we consider various computation models purporting to explain how justice rules are assessed and aggregated to form fairness judgments. Fourth and last, we conclude by reviewing research that enriches our understanding of justice rules by showing how they are cognitively processed. We observe that there are a number of influences on fairness judgments, and situations exist in which individuals do not systematically consider justice rules.

The present paper attempts to map the discursive relations between conflict and settlement as reflected in the realms of law and mediation during the second half of the 20th century, offering a 21st century model to combine the mediation drive to settle through reaching inter-subjective transformation with the legal drive to escalate and promote social conflict. Contemporary mediation, according to this model, should involve on the one hand “negotiating for justice,” according to the familiar models of problem solving and transformation, and on the other hand “fighting for law”: acknowledging the self-referential and ideological quality of conflicts, while emphasizing the pragmatic need to end them through an interpretive public act that involves value judgments.

Income polarization is a relatively new concept introduced in the literature of the measurement of income inequality. It has essential properties that may be used to measure relative deprivation and it adds another dimension to the measurement of income inequality concerned mainly with the middle income class (Esteban and Ray, 1994). No study, however, seems to have tried to decompose by population subgroups any of the polarization indices that have appeared in the literature. This study introduces a methodology that decomposes the polarization index recently suggested by Deutsch et al. (2007) by population subgroups. This polarization index is related to the Gini index and its components so that previous results on the decomposition of the Gini index may be applied. Two main cases are examined, that of nonoverlapping groups and overlapping groups. The paper also includes an empirical analysis based on Israeli data for the period 1990–2004, which covers the case of nonoverlapping (income) groups as well as that of overlapping groups, the latter being either Jews of Western and Eastern origin or Jews and Non-Jews. The empirical analysis shows a decrease in polarization over the period 1990–2002 and an increase in polarization during the years 2002–2004. Using the Shapley methodology we analyze the contribution of the different factors to the trend in polarization observed over time.

Looking at the Jewish population in Israel in 1995 this paper compares three multidimensional approaches to poverty measurement and checks to what extent they identify the same households as poor. Logit regressions are then estimated to understand which variables have an impact on poverty. Finally, the so-called Shapley decomposition is introduced to estimate the exact marginal impact of these determinants of poverty.

Of particular interest to this study was the combined effect of the generation to which the head of the household belongs and his/her place of birth. It turns out that the ethnic origin has a significant impact on multidimensional poverty in Israel insofar as being a head of household born in Asia or Africa, whatever the generation to which one belongs, increases, ceteris paribus, the probability of being poor.

In the context of educational segregation by ethnic group, it has been argued that rigorous pairwise segregation comparisons over time or across space should be invariant in two situations: when the ethnic composition of the population changes while the distribution of each ethnic group over the schools remains constant (invariance 1), or when the size distribution of schools changes while the ethnic composition of each school remains constant (invariance 2). This paper makes two contributions to the segregation literature. First, it argues by means of the Mutual Information or M index, which is neither invariant 1 nor 2, that both properties have strong implications, and it provides reasons to defend that the overall segregation index need not satisfy either one. Second, nevertheless, it is shown that in pairwise comparisons this index admits two decompositions into three terms. In the first decomposition, a term is invariant 1 and also satisfies a weak version of invariance 2. In the second decomposition, a term is invariant 2 and also satisfies a weak version of invariance 1. It is shown that these decompositions can be used to reach the analogous ones obtained in Deutsch et al. (2006).