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The assumption of ecological thinking as a main ideology for social systems implies many relevant changes concerning the relation between social and ecological systems. Changes meaning a deep redefinition of goals and strategies pursued for centuries by human communities, like the uncertainty reduction in relation to resources' availability and management, defence respect to variance in ecological system's as well as its constraint within social systems themselves. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An analysis of literature and critic perspectives allows to highlight different aspects of the imagined transition toward an ecologically informed social organisation. Some considerations will be presented about obstacles to change in social systems as well as about the different levels of response to solicitations coming from ecological thinking and ecological issues.

Many of the considered theoretical proposals lead to assume that those solicitations and the subsequent responses would impact directly on fundamental sets of rights and freedoms, today considered as untouchable.

The establishment of an ecological state – at least as described here – even if it appears as a desirable perspective, it would pass through a re-design of the concept of citizenship as well as of the relation between individuals and social institutions.

The paper tries a definition of the main theoretical topics to be assessed, hoping they may be a useful base for future search.

Based in the discipline of applied consultancy‐research, this paper seeks to present a synthesis‐review of the social dynamics underlying the stalled negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its aim is to enhance understanding of the processes involved, to offer a working agenda to the organizational learning community, and to act as a dynamic and interpretive intervention in the negotiation process.

The methodological approach draws on a wide range of tools from the consultancy‐research domain including force‐field analysis of complex social behaviour, informal interviews, direct participation, existential reflection and process analysis, delineation of power dynamics, literature survey and psychoanalytic exploration of the irrational and unconscious factors involved.

Several findings emerged from the consultancy research. The force‐field analysis revealed the intensity of polarisation experienced at every point of the negotiation. Economic vested interests and political dynamics blocked all possibility of effective decision making and drove irrational attacks on the validity of climate science as a way of manipulating public opinion. The influence of unconscious factors was paramount, rooted in the re‐stimulation of collective pre‐traumatic‐stress disorder, and mediated via a set of social defences against anxiety.

Significant limitations in the methodology concern the level of subjectivity involved. The development of working hypotheses was exposed to constant review to check for researcher‐specific projection and selectivity of significant data.

The practical implications of the paper for the development and application of organizational learning are spelled out in the final section. Particular attention is drawn to the need to take account of irrational and unconscious phenomena driving social psychodynamics.

The paper represents profoundly original work, emanating from the author's wide‐ranging involvement in the content and process of the international climate‐change negotiations.

In much of philosophy and social theory since classical antiquity, human belief and reason have been placed in the driving seat of individual action. In particular, social theory has often taken it for granted, or even by definition, that action is motivated by reasons based on beliefs. In contrast, a minority has criticized the adoption of this ‘folk psychology’ that explains human action wholly in such ‘mind first’ terms. Critics point out that such explanations are a mere gloss on a much more complex neurophysiological reality. These dualistic and ‘mind-first’ explanations of human behavior are unable to explain adequately such phenomena as sleep, memory, learning, mental illness, or the effects of chemicals or drugs on our perceptions or actions (Bunge, 1980; Churchland, 1984, 1989; Churchland, 1986; Rosenberg, 1995, 1998; Kilpinen, 2000).

Ever since our cognitive make-up allowed it, human beings have used their information behaviour abilities to help them survive. Information behaviour evolved in response to the need by early humans to benefit from information that could not be immediately accessible in the nearby environment or obtained through communication. Humans developed an information behaviour ability, including processes of information sense making, foraging, seeking, organising and using. Information behaviour brought several benefits to early humans, including greater influence and control over their environment, and the degree in which they could use the environment for their own gain and survival. Information behaviour thus brought several advantages for the survival of early humans, and consequently emerged as a genetically favoured trait (Spink, 2010).

The concept of trust suffers from conceptual confusion. The current perspectives on trust within the B2B marketing domain could be visualised as a big box of which the borders are defined by the disciplines marketing, economics, psychology and sociology. The purpose of this paper is to enlarge the box by introducing neuroscientific insights on trust to the B2B marketing domain.

By a literature study on neuroscientific insights on trust, this paper examines how neuroscience can help to solve existing problems within trust research and how it can address problems that otherwise might not be considered.

The neural coordinates of trust not only show that trust entails cognitive and affective elements, but also that these elements are so intertwined that they cannot be completely separated. What can and should be separated are the concepts of trust and distrust: the neural coordinates of trust are clearly different from the neural coordinates of distrust. Furthermore, there are personal differences in the ease of trusting others, which are not only caused by previous experiences but also by differences in resting patterns of frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and by differences in hormonal state.

Specifically, the neural difference between trust and distrust might shape the future research agenda for trust research within industrial marketing. It is likely that the process of distrust goes quick, whereas trust comes more slow. This is reflected in the dual processing theory, which is seen as a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning.

New perspectives and directions for trust research are presented. The distinction between trust and distrust is connected to approach- and avoidance-motivated behaviour, which is highly relevant for deepening the studies on trust within industrial marketing.

So far, the simplicity of heuristics has been mostly studied at the rule level. However, actors' bounded rationality implies that small bundles of rules drive behavior. This study thus conducts a conceptual elaboration around such bundling. This leads to reflections on the various processes of heuristic emergence and to qualifications of the respective characteristics of basic heuristic classes.

Determining which rules – out of many possible ones – to select in one's small bundle constitutes a difficult combinatorial problem. Fortunately, past research has demonstrated that solutions can be found in evolutionary mechanisms. Those converge toward bundles that are somewhat imperfect yet cannot be easily improved, a.k.a., locally optimal bundles. This paper therefore identifies that heuristic bundles can efficiently emerge by social evolutionary mechanisms whereby actors recursively exchange, adopt and perform bundles of rules constitute processes of heuristic emergence.

Such evolutionary emergence of socially calculated small bundles of heuristics differs from the agentic process by which some simple rule heuristics emerge or from the biological calculation process by which some behavioral biology heuristics emerge. The paper subsequently proceeds by classifying heuristics depending on their emergence process, distinguishing, on the one hand, agentic vs evolutionary mechanisms and, on the other hand, social vs biological encodings. The differences in the emergence processes of heuristics suggest the possibility of comparing them on three key characteristics – timescale, reflectivity and local optimality – which imply different forms of fitness.

The study proceeds as a conceptual elaboration; hence, it does not provide empirics. At a microlevel, it enables classification and comparison of the largest possible range of heuristics. At a macrolevel, it advocates for further exploration of managerial bundles of rules, regarding both their dynamics and their substantive nature.

In the field, practitioners are often observed to socially construct their theory of action, which emerges as a bundle of heuristics. This study demonstrates that such social calculations provide solutions that have comparatively good qualities as compared to heuristics emerging through other processes, such as agentic simple rules or instinctive – i.e. behavioral biology – heuristics. It should motivate further research on bundles of heuristics in management practice. Such an effort would improve the ability to produce knowledge fitting the absorptive capacity of practitioners and enhance the construction of normative managerial theories and pedagogy.

Bundles of rules may also play a crucial role in the emergence of collective action. This study contributes to a performativity perspective whereby theories can become reality. It demonstrates how the construction of a managerial belief system may amount to the launching of a social movement and vice versa.

Overall, many benefits accrue from integrating the bundles of rules expressed and exchanged by practitioners under the heuristic umbrella. So far, in management scholarship, such emergent objects have sometimes been interpreted as naïve or as indicative of institutional pressures. By contrast, this study shows that socially calculated bundles may efficiently combine the advantages of individuals' reflective cognitive processes with those provided by massive evolutionary exchanges. In conclusion, the social calculations of small heuristic bundles may constitute a crucial mechanism for the elaboration of pragmatic theories of action.

People who start new businesses vary in the degree of entrepreneurial talent and temperament they possess. The same is true of strategic leaders and intrapreneurs inside large organisations, where entrepreneurial people are required to champion the change agenda in dynamic and turbulent environments. These issues can be explored in the context of six key entrepreneur character themes, or natural and instinctive behaviours. Techniques help, but alone they cannot compensate for missing characteristics. Without the important entrepreneur characteristics, survival and growth rates are lower. This paper outlines a new framework for identifying entrepreneurs and describes the research programme through which the model has been validated.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new core hypothesis on laughter. It has been built by putting together ideas from several disciplines: neurodynamics, evolutionary neurobiology, social networks, and communication studies. The hypothesis focusses on the social nature of laughter and contributes to ascertain its evolutionary origins in connection with the cognitive and social-emotional functions it performs.

An in-depth examination of laughter in the social communication context and along the life cycle of the individual is performed. This instinctive behaviour that appears as a “virtual”, non-physical form of “grooming” would serve as a bond-making instrument in human groups. Further, the neurodynamic events underlying laughter production – and particularly the form of the neural entropy gradients – are congruent with a sentic hypothesis about the different emotional contents of laughter and their specific effects on bonding dynamics.

The new behavioural and neurodynamic tenets introduced about this unusual sound feature of our species justify the ubiquitous presence it has in social interactions at large and along the life cycle of the individual. Laughter, far from being a curious evolutionary relic or a rather inconsequential innate behaviour, should be considered as a highly efficient tool for inter-individual problem solving and for maintenance of social bonds.

Laughter, the authors would conclude, has been evolutionarily kept and augmented as an optimized tool for unconscious cognitive-emotional problem solving, and at the same time as a useful way to preserve the essential fabric of social bonds in close-knit groups and within human societies at large.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the practical daily work undertaken by middle‐level managers in Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), focusing upon the micro‐processes by which these managers enact sensemaking in their organisations.

The research took a case study approach, undertaking detailed case studies in four PCTs in England. Data collection included shadowing managers, meeting observations and interviews.

The research elucidated two categories of enactment behaviour exhibited by PCT managers: presence/absence; and the production of artefacts. Being “present” in or “absent” from meetings enacted sensemaking over and above any concrete contribution to the meeting made by the actors involved. This paper explores the factors affecting these processes, and describes the situations in which enactment of sense is most likely to occur. Producing artefacts such as meeting minutes or PowerPoint slides also enacted sense in the study sites in addition to the content of the artefact. The factors affecting this are explored.

The study has practical implications for all managers seeking to maximise their influence in their organisations. It also provides specific evidence relevant to managers working in the new Clinical Commissioning Groups currently being formed in England.

The study expands the understanding of sensemaking in organisations in two important ways. Firstly, it moves beyond discourse to explore the ways in which behaviours can enact sense. Secondly, it explores the distinction between active and unconscious sensemaking.