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The purpose of this paper is to interpret Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory to discuss disaster resilience, and use its “functional method” for creating “local organizational inventories” to support the trend of integration in Turkey’s disaster management system. For this, the authors used a case study from Düzce province in 2013, investigating the organizational aftermath of two major earthquakes in 1999.

A purposive sample of local associations in city center of Düzce province was used. The local associations were selected according to the criteria if they organized any disaster-related activities after the 1999 earthquakes, despite being specialized in domains other than emergencies. Representatives of these organizations were interviewed about the content of their disaster-related activities and their organizational cooperation.

There was a lack of overlap between centralized emergency plans and local history of self-organized disaster activities. Both centralized and local organizations primarily engaged in activities that aim to reproduce their own systemic boundaries, rather than synchronizing central and local efforts in disaster planning.

The method used in this research helps discovering the local diversity of resources for improving resilience.

Arguing that disasters should be discussed under a theory of modern society, Robert A. Stallings refers to Luhmann’s theoretical work (Stallings, 1998, p. 134). Complexity plays a central role in emergencies in modern society. Therefore, the Luhmannian perspective needs to be incorporated into disaster studies to account for increasing social complexity and systemic differentiation. The problems resulting from functional differentiation and the relationship between different problem–solutions have their effects on emergency planning.

Sustainable energy has been on the political agenda in Denmark for decades. This chapter will highlight how wind turbine production quite unforeseen became a great success in Denmark before the turn of the Millennium. An integrative public leadership approach using a mix of supportive institutional designs and instruments, combined with an unexpected bottom-up pressure for alternatives to nuclear power, promoted ways for wind turbine innovation and production in the 1970s. After the turn of the Millennium, being a huge financial success creating many new jobs and export has it developed into a cluster based on huge investments and professionalised developers. The comprehensive transition of wind turbine production in Denmark, from small scale to large scale, has however provided a counterproductive decrease in community commitment for local renewable energy production.

Denmark is known internationally as a climate frontrunner and not only due to wind turbine production and planning. The status is obtained by polycentric governance applied in cooperative-owned energy systems. The Danish response to climate change is a concerted effort of a plethora of public and private actors, providing a crucial momentum and robustness in climate politics not at least generated from a genuine civic society involvement. ‘The Danish Energy Model’; a withhold strategic effort to combine ambitious renewable energy goals, energy efficiency targets and political support of technical and industrial development has for four decades, succeeded in providing high levels of cheap energy supply, while partly reducing fossil fuel dependency at the same time.

Comparing rural development with agricultural modernisation, there are fundamental differences. Industrial development of agriculture more and more segregates agriculture from other functions and is based on an ‘individualised transaction model’ in which the world consists of loose particles that are linked by markets (atomistic world view). Conversely rural development can be perceived as a form of re-socialisation of agriculture and is based on a ‘relational cooperation model’ in which new relations characterise business development.

This chapter is a second level type of analysis of many research findings of these common traits or features and gives a picture of the distinctiveness of rural development practices. Nine different features that characterize rural development practices are described and discussed: (1) novelty production, (2) relative autonomy, (3) synergy, (4) clashes and competing claims, (5) coalitions and new relations; the construction of rural webs, (6) common pool resources, (7) new division of labour, (8) the distinctive different impact and (9) resilience. The more these features are present and intertwined, the better the specific practice can face and withstand adverse conditions. These features and the associated practices have to be understood as part of a wider transitional process that might co-evolve with or run counter to competing transitional processes.

From a contingency perspective and by using the principles of self‐organization described by Morgan (1986), this essay relates the amount of variety in transactions and transformations to the requisite of self‐organization. Self‐organization is defined in terms of the local autonomy to make decisions on both the transactions to be realized and the way transformation processes are organized to achieve these transactions. Appropriate Human resource management (HRM) systems and policies can help to achieve the level of self‐organization aimed at. When the amount of variety in transactions is relatively low, an organization can easily standardize and control work processes. In this case, there is no need to develop self‐organization. The focus of HRM will be on standardization, behavioral control systems and the social needs of workers. In the case of a moderate level of variety in transactions, management may obtain responsiveness by creating self‐organizing teams which have the local autonomy to deal with variety in customer demand. HRM instruments can help these teams by supporting integrated management, the multifunctionality of workers, team development, and the introduction of a skill‐based assessment and reward system. When the amount of variety becomes high, it is more effective to assign responsibilities to individuals and to apply HRM practices aimed at the problemsolving capacity of workers and the commitment of workers to the organization.

Illustrate supported by Beer’s Viable System Model and four vignettes the relevance of self-organisation, recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity in policy processes. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, the concepts of self-organisation, recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity are briefly discussed to ground policy processes in good cybernetics. Then, with the support of four vignettes, the idea of good cybernetics in policy processes is illustrated.

The cybernetics of policy processes is often ignored.

If the purpose of this paper were to influence policy makers it would be necessary to further the empirical base of the four vignettes and clarify desirable forums to ground the relevance of self-organisation, recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity in policy processes.

Beer’s recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity have much to contribute to the betterment of policy processes and the amelioration of the unbearable social and organisational costs of many current policies.

The application of concepts such as self-organisation, recursive structures, self-reference and reflexivity adds to the understanding of policy processes.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the contribution of community-based research to the self-organisation of Civil Society and in particular to community engagement, policy processes and social change.

Starting from communities own issues and organisational structures, this paper presents a methodology to create spaces for social transformation. Its approach was designing engagement programmes of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with communities’ partnerships, supported by constructed conversations, workshops and fieldwork, coproducing knowledge within community structures.

The research offers evidence that supporting community empowerment and engagement with community-based research needs a deep understanding of participatory social processes. It makes visible that researchers should have more opportunities to focus their research on communities rather than on collecting data to respond to funders.

Though community self-organisation happens one way or the other effective self-organisation processes cannot be taken for granted and need further studies and elaboration. Despite current efforts it requires more studies to understand social systems and develop stronger links to active citizenship policies.

This research contributes to communities’ engagement in policy processes and highlights the enabling role of HEIs.

It rearticulates participatory approaches to active citizenship and learning in communities.

The Globally Networked Organization (GNO) is an archetype of the geographically distributed, globally integrated, and organizationally networked information-age multinational enterprise. While its organizational form has been widely discussed, methods for providing strategic direction to all or part of a GNO have been largely overlooked. We propose the concept of strategic animation as an innovative leadership approach to strategic management in the GNO and offer a set of guiding principles for installing such a system in organizations. Strategic animation employs sophisticated incentives to motivate voluntary buy-in, utilizing principles of self-organization to replace the command and control of the unitary firm and the uncertainty and transactional costs of real markets. This makes possible virtual integration of the multiple highly separable businesses that comprise the value-added proposition of the firm and encourages the development of emergent processes for both exploitation and renewal of assets. From a scholarly perspective, this model suggests a new framework for studying the strategic direction of GNOs. For practice, it offers an organizational solution to conditions where process control is preferred, but command of resources is limited. Strategic animation, set in motion through multiple managerial actions, facilitates the timely and flexible responses to chaotic environments that are the sine qua non of today’s global businesses.

This paper aims to hypothesize that modern health systems are transforming towards what has been called a health ecosystem in complexity‐based health care literature. It has been argued that complexity arises from the interconnectedness, which in this paper is equated with knowledge flows between actors. The paper seeks to discuss the possible implications of a health ecosystem approach to health system management.

The paper is conceptual in nature but the transition towards a health ecosystem is illustrated with an example of a regional health care system in Finland. The case description and related analysis presented are based on qualitative data gathered by interviewing leading office‐holders, by process modeling and by observing management group meetings.

Conceptually, a health ecosystem seems to have potential for the system‐level analysis of the health care system. The discussion concludes that management of knowledge flows should be a strategic management function for individual health organizations as well as for the wider health system.

This study focuses on a Finnish health care system. The operations and structures of health care services and systems vary in different areas and countries.

The practical illustration of the health ecosystem provides a reminder that health care systems are dynamic and largely based on interaction between different actors. The approach provides new strategic insights for the development of health care systems by concentrating on interrelationships and knowledge flows.

The literature has suggested that the ecosystem metaphor offers useful insights for the development of health care systems. Nevertheless, this approach has not been thoroughly studied so far. This paper makes a contribution by presenting a practical illustration of the framework and in light of this discusses the possible implications for health care management.

The purpose of this paper is to discourse the essence and utility of (re)emergence theory as the starting point of understanding and interpreting organizational routines dynamics as well as to propose a conceptual framework reflecting both epistemological and methodological value as the keystone of analysing the rationale of organizational routines and the process of their emergence.

The paper is based on extensive literature studies.

Referring to the research problem concerning the reconciliation organizational routines and the emergence phenomenon, the findings complement the insights of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organizational routine theory, providing a more comprehensive understanding of organizational dynamics by directly addressing the heretofore intractable phenomenon of emergence. In addition, it is going to be a well-justified epistemological base to operationalize routines – not only per se, but also with regard to the mechanisms enacted.

Routines change over time and the current studies results are not sufficient to understand these changes yet. Interpreting organizational routines from the emergence theory perspective reveals their soft, indeterministic, and unpredictable nature and ought to render the scholars dealing with that phenomenon interpretatively and methodologically cautious. Emergence is a priori embedded in organizational routines’ context. The considerations included in the paper are salient regarding ontological and epistemological issues as they emphasize specific thought and research directions in the field of organization study eventually. Emergence ideas may play a part in discussions of spontaneous order, particularly by implementing it to routines construct. A major issue is the role of these ideas and processes within organizational evolution.

Emerging pervasive computing scenarios require open service frameworks promoting situated and self‐adaptive behaviors, and supporting diversity in services and long‐term evolvability. This suggests adopting a nature‐inspired approach, where pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. However, there are many possibly nature‐inspired metaphors that can be adopted, and choosing one may require a careful analysis of the pros and cons of the different metaphors. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key requirements and desiderata for next generation pervasive computing services and associated infrastructures.

In this paper, the authors introduce and critically analyze a number of natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize these concepts and survey relevant proposals in the area.

The key result of this survey is that a uniform reference architecture can be a useful guide when framing the challenges involved in the design and implementation of future self‐adaptive pervasive service ecosystems.

The survey in this paper, along with the proposed reference architecture, can be effective starting points towards the definition and implementation of general‐purpose nature‐inspired pervasive service ecosystems.