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The accounts of moral reform that nineteenth-century convicts offered the officials in charge were frequently characterized by such uniformity that it caused Dickens to mistrust their sincerity and to brand them scornfully as “pattern penitence.” Unlike Dickens, however, prison officials were more willing to credit the questionable authenticity of “patterned” repentance. The paper argues that rather than an effect of personal gullibility, reformers’ attitudes can be seen as an outcome of specific interpretative strategies which, in turn, constituted a response to several institutional challenges facing the nineteenth-century Penitentiary.

The Cassandra Zone is that time period – and the events that occur within it – from the voicing of the first credible warnings of foreseeable future disaster until society either awakens to the threat and proactively mitigates against it, or chooses to ignore such warnings and subsequently suffers the consequences when the foretold disaster comes to pass. Whether or not that society manages to learn from its own history of disaster and use the power of state to mitigate against foretold future ones is one of the definitive criteria for determining whether, in social theorist Phillip Selznick’s terms, such a society can be deemed to constitute a moral community.

The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

Throughout the course of its history, Thailand has thrived on international commerce and interacting with global forces. During the past two centuries, Thailand has faced a progression of events threatening its self-definition requiring very conscious educational and cultural reform policies to offset the advances of globalized movements. The first series of reforms began to take place in the late 19th century and served as a defensive measure to fend off the onslaught of European colonial activity and to unify a disjointed society. This reform was used to primarily centralize the cultural and religious authority and power of the kingdom, while assimilating the local/regional/rural areas through education. The most recent reform in late 20th century was devised to fend off global market forces and to unify a disjointed society through a strategy of decentralization and educational reform. Both these reforms were countered with strong resistance movements that reflect a resistance heritage that aspires to civil society.