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It is proposed to see society as epiphenomenal to a process, the political process. Various actors contribute, with different aims, resources, constraints—and usually without control over the overall effect of their contributions. Organized research is one of the actors. The question is what type of organizational or paradigmatic design will empower the research actor to direct social change in a direction with improvements for many or all other actors. The control paradigm turns out not to be helpful for research to become a strong actor in this respect. A paradigm able to become more supportive is described.

Various devices have been identified to support research as a way of improving on observations; those in the social sciences appearing to be less effective than those in the physical sciences. To make the former more effective, it often is tried to “involve” the user ‐ as a participant observer, as a co‐researcher, as a commissioner. A clarification of the multiplicity of such attempts seems in order. Formulates a framework to summarize the most important aspects of research. Explores instances of this framework with regard to their ability to include users. One instance is applied in a “practical” situation, the improvement of a social service. This instance distinguishes sharply between two kinds of users, each using a different language to promote transfer and interaction: users inside a collective and users outside that collective.

Knowledge is defined as the result of successful attempts to transfer expected effort in the future to effort spent in the present. The less effort remains to be spent in the future, the more knowledge is exhaustive and complete. It is shown that some efforts remain necessary in the future for accidental reasons, e.g. to correct mistakes, to estimate parameters, to act. Some efforts will also be required for fundamental reasons. They are needed to compensate as and when testing for exhaustiveness proves ineffective. It is argued that the need for such additional effort may be met by starting collectives as a form of pre‐containment. Such collectives may include non‐ordered experiences. They will maintain themselves by striving to serve as equivalents to knowledge. They help in two ways: they indicate what is needed to create which knowledge. The design of collectives serving as knowledge is linked to second‐order cybernetics.

What deliverables did Stafford Beer envision when he developed his “science of effective organisation”? This paper answers this question as: the organisations that use the distinctions of Beer's viable system model. Such organisations are part of daily life, but develop to become knowledge by continuously striving to identify experiences that falsify their existence. They will be irreducible in the sense that any acceptable model of the organisation will be the organisation itself. The notion of knowledge involved is made explicit in the paper as a tribute to Stafford Beer's pioneering work. It allowed Stafford Beer to introduce and develop insights that began to be developed by others only much later.

This paper aims to celebrate Felix Geyer's many contributions to the systems movement. He participated from the beginning, with the energy that has become his hallmark. The area of systems studies was introduced in The Netherlands in about 1970, mainly through the activities of the Systeemgroep Nederland or Dutch Systems Group, initiated by Ab Hanken. The paper aims to unearth the original message that made the field of systems attractive.

The aim is achieved on the basis of a re‐analysis of von Bertalanffy's systems papers, which he published under the title of “General System Theory”.

von Bertalanffy's message was not what is usually thought – that many political leaders treat their problems incompetently and hence make them less solvable or even create messes. He answered a general question about knowledge acquisition, in an area where an answer was sorely needed.

von Bertalanffy's answer inspired hope that one day one would be able to acquire the knowledge needed to solve the politicians' problems. He even identified a number of methods to do so.

The claim of the paper is that von Bertalanffy intended systems thinking to extend methods of knowing. This intention has been obscured by the limited methods he introduced. This claim is argued in an original way.

Gordon Pask developed not only a conversation theory, but also a (less well‐known) interaction of actors theory, partly in response to demands during the time he worked in Amsterdam. The paper aims to clarify how this theory intended to minimise the effects of use on scientific results, while maximising the help of such results to improve on actions. This would facilitate empirical study of what changes user values, as well as the preferred design of (computer supported) support systems. Results include the material and communicative support of collective and social activities. Three examples are presented.

Stories and the telling of stories constitute a major part of our daily life, yet how this happens is not clearly understood. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the ways in which stories challenge the notions of knowledge that are common in the “classical” scientific tradition. It also aims to focus on the function of stories in the collaborative, interpersonal and inter‐organisational dynamics of the way knowledge is built up in daily life.

The paper explores changes in the notion of knowledge (and what is considered scientific method). Firstly, it identifies various genealogies in which previous limitations on the experiences to be included as knowledge have been extended. Secondly, the paper will look at experiences that link to the telling of stories, and explore the way they challenge as well as link to previous notions and extensions of knowledge in collaborative contexts.

A core characteristic of stories and their telling is an increase in people's awareness both of others as sources of intentional variation as well as of their cultural and human heritage.

The paper initiates a much‐needed discussion of the nature of knowledge as it relates to story telling. It links the experiences elicited by story telling to a genealogy of knowledge that identifies the difficulties of including experiences other than observations (e.g. uncertainty, intentionality). To study stories one needs to search for constraints on how individuals link to other individuals. The paper proposes how one might study stories by considering how they contribute to an extension of existing concepts of knowledge.