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The author attempts to examine the existence and pattern of coalitions in international relations across countries, and investigates whether international relations of coalition partners influence a country's enaction of agricultural non-tariff measures (NTMs).

The author adopts a machine learning technique to identify international relation coalition partnerships and use network analysis to characterize the clustering pattern of coalitions with high-frequent records of global event data. The author then constructs a monthly dataset of agricultural NTMs against China and international relations with China of each importer and its coalition partners, and designs a panel structural vector autoregressive (PSVAR) model to estimate impulse response functions of agricultural NTMs with regard to international relation shocks.

The author finds countries to establish coalition partnerships. Two major clusters of coalitions are noted, with one composed of coalitions primarily among “North” countries and the other of coalitions among “South” countries. The United States is found to play a pivotal role by connecting the two clusters. The PSVAR estimation reveals reductions of NTMs against China following improved international relations with China of both the importer and its coalition partners. NTM responses are more substantial for measures that are trade restrictive. These results confirm that coalitions in international relations lead to coordination of agricultural NTMs.

The author provides international political insights into agricultural trade policymaking by showing interactions of NTM enaction across countries in the same coalition of international relations. These insights offer useful policy implications to predict and cope with hidden barriers to agricultural trade.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the learning and adaptation of those particular human beings that manage modern companies. They are challenged not only by a very high rate of change, which is common to all of us, but by the fact that they are responsible for the viability of organizations that deal with a far larger complexity.

The methodologies used were self‐observation and observation of the actors that constitute a company by means of CLEHES, an ontological tool, and VIPLAN, an epistemic reference. Both together help enabling communications and conversations in different contexts and domains that otherwise would have been cognitively inhibited.

These tools have been used as an enactive management approach that has allowed the effective growth of a small organization, which is the focus of this paper.

The paper contains useful thinking, enaction and reflecting on the awareness to conserve and change structural adjustments.

The paper shows how crisscrossing between an ontological tool – CLEHES and an epistemic tool–VIPLAN permits enacting organizational communications and conversations between human beings as managers to take care of their organizations.

This article examines how spectators describe their expectations of contemporary dance by referring to action. Through discussing a qualitative audience study, the article argues that spectators always have an expectation of being affected by performances they attend. This expectation can guide their interest in attending performances of certain genres instead of other possible ones on offer. Additionally, the article points out how spectators can actively manage their expectations in order to be affected.

The study is based on 21 in-depth interviews with spectators at a dance venue, a company and a festival in Finland. The analysis of the interviews combines thematic analysis with metaphor analysis. Employing the paradigm of enaction and the concept of affordances, this article approaches expectations as embodied and dynamic, created in interactions between artists, producers and spectators.

The analysis shows that when speaking about their expectations of performances, spectators use bodily and spatial metaphors. Focusing on metaphors reveals how, for the spectators, performances afford a possibility for action that affects them. The interviewed spectators describe that contemporary dance is “not set in its ways”, and therefore it keeps them “awake” and their thoughts do “not fossilize”. This way, they understand contemporary dance as a genre that affords a possibility to be affected by allowing a freedom of own interpretation and surprising experiences if they desire such.

Concentration on the metaphors of language offers a deeper understanding of the active nature of spectators' expectations. Understanding how spectators describe their expectations by referring to action that enables the shaping of their emotions and thoughts can help the development of arts marketing and audience engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to work toward more fully conceptualizing literacy practices as social by theorizing the combined relational and intellectual context for learning. This context is created through students’ and their teachers’ uses of language. In particular, the quality of language that creates this intellectual relational context is relational-keys that are inherent to any talk between people. Building upon Hymes (1974) conceptualization of key, relational-keys can be described as the emotional mood or spirit of a conversation, but they are much more than that per se. They are constitutive of the complex, multi-layered relationships that people have with each other, with themselves and with the material environment through their uses of language.

Drawing upon a classroom ethnographic study in a first-grade classroom and using discourse analysis of classroom interactions, the author uses data from instructional conversations to illustrate how students and their teachers collaboratively perform relational-keys.

Findings reveal that students and their teacher perform relational and intellectual stances toward reading and toward each other through relational-keys, that frame the act of reading and their experience of doing it together.

The concept of relational-key provides literacy researchers with another tool to analyze what happens in instructional conversations. It also provides teachers with a curricular resource to identify relational-keys that are enacted. Therefore, teachers are able move away from the enaction of relational-keys that contribute to subtractive schooling, and toward relational-keys that nurture empowering stances in students toward reading and their relationships.

The development of capacities for sustainability thinking by large-scale social systems requires of the skilled practitioner complex abstract logics. There is an intricate complexity of relationships to consider in the observation of the landscape of thought. This paper aims to introduce a matrix as an orientating heuristic to guide this form of praxis and provides reflections on its use in the enactment of social learning.

The signifiers for four different orientations to learning and four abstractions in levels of learning are described. The configurations that result from their conjunction generate a matrix of 16 alternatives. These are combined into a heuristic to guide and inform reflexive praxis.

The conjunction of these two dimensions enables observations of the cybernetic interactions between levels of learning and orientations to learning. This depiction prompts considerations of the ethics and aesthetics of large-scale collaborative learning. In reflecting on the use of the heuristic device in practice, four primary observations are offered as possible considerations to inform ethical practice.

The value of this research is in enabling awareness of the relationship between levels of learning and orientations to learning. The originality is the application of apithology principles to the multi-dimensional learning landscapes found in complex thought-ecologies.

This study aims to explore the serendipitous discovery of integrated reporting (IR) by Alpha, an Italian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Alpha piqued the curiosity when the authors discovered that it experimented with IR alongside other management accounting practices, such as the Balanced Scorecard. As the authors reflected on Alpha’s experiences, the authors had to opportunistically develop a new framework to understand the change that was taking place at Alpha fully. Thus, the authors developed the serendipitous drift framework. This study contributes to addressing the gap between management accounting research that sees change as a planned, ordered process versus research that sees it as an unmanageable drift.

The authors ground the research on a qualitative methodology based on a single case study. This methodology allows us to focus on understanding what has happened at Alpha to discover new themes and provide theoretical generalisations. The authors developed the framework using middle-range thinking and fleshed it out using empirical findings from the case study. Middle-range thinking implies going back and forth between the theory and the empirical material. Therefore, the authors develop the serendipitous drift framework from prior theories and use it to inform the empirical study. In turn, the empirical material collected in Alpha helps refine and flesh out the serendipitous drift framework. The framework explains how Alpha leveraged serendipity to steer change towards favourable outcomes for them.

The authors find that the search for change undertaken by Alpha’s managers was non-specific but purposeful. Their dispositions were sagacious enough to recognise the potential value found in management accounting practices, such as IR and the Balanced Scorecard. They chanced upon new and unforeseen practices through trial and error, iteration, internal engagement and networking.

Overall, the results indicate that Alpha’s managers shaped the disorder of management accounting changes, even though it followed unexpected, uncertain and messy paths. Indeed, appropriate informal controls can act as a frame of reference for choosing, adapting and implementing new management accounting practices to shape the disorder. Informal controls can both guide and bound the experimentation process towards desirable outcomes.

The authors contribute to management accounting change theory by developing a framework rooted in serendipity and drifting theories. The framework identifies how searching, sagacity and chance are essential for making positive, unexpected discoveries. Therefore, the authors provide novel insights on how and why IR and other management accounting practices are eventually translated and adopted in the case company. Moreover, the serendipitous drift framework has the potential to help managers frame cultural controls to actively seek opportunities for valuable serendipitous eureka moments through networking and experimentation.

To outline a philosophical system of inquiry that may be used as a frame‐of‐reference for modelling social systems.

The paper draws on insights from cognitive science, autopoiesis, management cybernetics and non‐linear dynamics.

The outcome of this paper is an outline of a frame‐of‐reference to be used as a starting point (or a frame of orientation) for any problem solving/modelling intent or act. The framework highlights the importance of epistemological reflection and the need to avoid any separation of the process of knowing from that of modelling. It also emphasises the importance of inquiry into the assumptions that underpin the methods, tools and techniques that we employ, and into the tacit beliefs of the human actors who use them.

The presented frame‐of‐reference should be regarded as an evolving system of inquiry, one that seeks to incorporate contemporary human insight.

Exactly, how the frame‐of‐reference presented in this paper should be exploited within an organisational or educational context, is a question to which there is no single “correct” answer. What is primarily important, however, is that it should be used to raise the profile of, and disseminate the benefits that accrue from, inquiry which goes beyond the simple application of tools and methods.

This paper proposes a new framework‐of‐reference for modelling social systems that draws on insights from cognitive science, autopoiesis, management cybernetics and non‐linear dynamics.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the condition of human beings and organizations producing goods and/or services as autopoietic and allopoietic machines, with the aim of establishing a functional homomorphism between the productive system of an organization and the productive system of human beings, a matter that involves reflecting on what human beings do that is distinguished as allopoietic by an observer.

Use is made of Ashby’s concept of functional homomorphism to establish similarities between human beings and organizations. The definitions of autopoietic and allopoietic machine of Maturana and Varela are used to distinguish similarities and differences between what organizations do and what human beings do.

As a result of using the autopoietic/allopoietic viewpoint, it is proposed to homologate the human nervous system with the production system of an organization, defining the latter as a world-creating energy/communication processing system.

A homomorphism is established here between a human nervous system and the production system of an organization; it remains pending the other homomorphisms that can be made between the systems of the human body and the organization.

A proposal is made to understand an organization as a world-creating energy/communication processing system, and it is estimated that this would imply displacing attention, at present strongly centered on the generated products and/or services, toward the sense that they have for both persons and society, restating the question on the world we construct/live in, from the organizational standpoint.

Human beings are seen as allopoietic machines, aiming to contribute to the discussion about what it is that we call human, homologating it with the work of an organization. As a result a new definition of organization is proposed.

Modern organic metaphors for society have run parallel to the very idea of sociology as a science, starting with Comte and Spencer's use of the term “social organism” (Comte, 1830–42; Spencer, 1897). These metaphors provide a self-renewing source of debate, analogies, and disanalogies. Processes of social regulation, conservation, growth, and reproduction provoke an irresistible epistemic resonance and make us lose little time in offering explanations resembling those of biological regulation, conservation, growth, and reproduction. The phenomenon has not been restricted to metaphor-hungry social scientists: the final chapter of W. B. Cannon's The wisdom of the body (1932) is called “Relations of biological and social homeostasis.” Attempts to apply a modern theory of living organisms — the theory of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980) — to social systems are but the latest installment in this saga. Despite the appeal of the organic metaphor, there are good reasons to remain skeptical of these parallels. “Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede,” says G. K. Chesterton (1910) ironically in his essay against the medical fallacy. Doctors may disagree on the diagnosis of an illness, he says, but they know what is the state they are trying to restore: that of a healthy organism (implying, admittedly, a rather unproblematic concept of health). In social systems, a “social illness” confronts us with precisely the opposite situation: the disagreement is about what the healthy state should be.