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To derive from the environmental risk and knowledge management literatures a model that integrates organizational form, democratic vision and epistemological needs of public agencies responsible for addressing environmental risks. To analyze the knowledge management practices of the United States Department of Energy (USDOE) that is responsible for cleaning up landscapes contaminated by 50 years of plutonium production.

The model was used as a framework for a case study analysis of the USDOE knowledge management practices.

Conceptual: a vision of democracy and an understanding of the type of knowledge process can facilitate organizational constancy. Organizational forms should be matched to knowledge process and democratic vision. Empirical: USDOE has behaved erratically in addressing environmental risks viewed through this model of knowledge management.

The model idealizes democratic visions, epistemological processes and organizational forms. Care should be taken in making predictions for the success or failure of an organizational approach based solely on this model.

Practically, the model aids scholars in making connections between knowledge management and public sector environmental risk management literatures; and provides managers with a systematic framework for relating democratic context knowledge production processes to particular organization forms. Use of this model particularly during agency restructuring may facilitate resolving environmental risks though improving organizational legitimacy, constancy, and knowledge generation capacity.

This is a first attempt at integrating two related but so‐far disconnected literatures (environmental risk management and knowledge management).

Accounting’s definition of accountability should include attributes of socioenvironmental degradation manufactured by unsustainable technologies. Beck argues that emergent accounts should reflect the following primary characteristics of technological degradation: complexity, uncertainty, and diffused responsibility. Financial stewardship accounts and probabilistic assessments of risk, which are traditionally employed to allay the public’s fear of uncontrollable technological hazards, cannot reflect these characteristics because they are constructed to perpetuate the status quo by fabricating certainty and security. The process through which safety thresholds are constructed and contested represents the ultimate form of socialized accountability because these thresholds shape how much risk people consent to be exposed to. Beck’s socialized total accountability is suggested as a way forward: It has two dimensions, extended spatiotemporal responsibility and the psychology of decision-making. These dimensions are teased out from the following constructs of Beck’s Risk Society thesis: manufactured risks and hazards, organized irresponsibility, politics of risk, radical individualization and social learning. These dimensions are then used to critically evaluate the capacity of full cost accounting (FCA), and two emergent socialized risk accounts, to integrate the multiple attributes of sustainability. This critique should inform the journey of constructing more representative accounts of technological degradation.

In part 1 of this paper the organisation was modelled as a socio‐cognitive agency with a normative personality, where patterns of behaviour occur through underlying trait control processes, and from which specific behaviours can be predicted. However, prediction is dependent on a stable agency orientation which occurs in normal conditions of homeostatic equilibrium. In post‐normal conditions the immanent dynamics of the agency have the potential to change its orientation leading to a lesser likelihood of predicting behaviour. Using information theory, this paper aims to further develop the model to show how it is possible to predict behaviour in post‐normal conditions. It also aims to consider the nature of agency pathologies.

The information theory approach of Frieden is harnessed to explain the immanent dynamics of the agency, and explore the likelihood of predicting its behaviour.

The outcomes of the research formulate the cognitive processes of normative personality such that its potential behaviour in given situations can be predicted, even potentially where the agency has pathologies.

There are no comparative approaches to explore organisational behaviour and their potential pathologies.

This paper aims to present a new master’s programme for promoting energy access and energy efficiency in Southern Africa.

A transdisciplinary approach called “participatory integrated assessment of energy systems” (PARTICIPIA) was used for the development of the curriculum. This approach is based on the two emerging fields of “multi-scale integrated assessment” and “science for governance”, which bring innovative concepts and methods.

The application of the PARTICIPIA methodology to three case studies reveals that the proposed transdisciplinary approach could support energy and development policies in the region. The implementation of the PARTICIPIA curriculum in three higher education institutions reveals its ability to respond to the needs of specific contexts and its connection with existing higher education programmes.

Considering energy issues from a transdisciplinary approach in higher education is absolutely critical because such a holistic view cannot be achieved through engineering curricula. Deliberate and greater efforts should be made to integrate methods from “multi-scale integrated assessment” and “science for governance” in higher education curricula to train a new breed of modern-day energy planners in charge of coming up with solutions that are shared by all relevant stakeholders.

This paper presents an innovative higher education curriculum in terms of the attention given to energy access and energy efficiency that affect the southern Africa region and the nature of the methodology adopted to face these issues.

This paper aims to introduce and investigate dialogic interaction as a key element of achieving a transition towards sustainability in people, organizations and society as a whole. Furthermore “sustainability competence” as a potential outcome of such interaction is to be introduced, referring to the capacities and qualities that people, and the organizations and communities of which they are part, need in order to address (un)sustainability.

The argument of the paper is grounded conceptually in emergent thinking among scholars preoccupied with learning‐based change and sustainability in organizations and communities. Empirically, the paper uses two case studies carried out by the authors to ground the argument in real efforts by communities to create a (more) sustainable way of living.

The main results include: a post‐normal understanding of sustainability highlighting uncertainty, complexity, normativity, controversy and indeterminacy; a framework facilitating dialogic interaction; and a number of key competences that appear conducive to both dialogic interaction and a transition to sustainability.

Although the two case studies are quite extensive and rigorous, the conceptual nature of the paper and the word limitation did not allow for a more detailed discussion of the methodology used in the case studies and the contexts in which the two case studies are located.

The paper adopts a post‐normal perspective of organizational transitions towards sustainability and focuses on dialogue and dialogic interaction as a key learning‐based mechanism for facilitating such a transition. Furthermore the framework for dialogic interaction allows for a more holistic approach toward such a transition and the development of competences needed to accelerate its realization.

Since the publication of its first results in 2000, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) implemented by the OECD has repeatedly been the subject of heated debate. In late 2014 controversy flared up anew, with the most severe critics going so far as to call for a halt to the programme. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological design of PISA and the ideological basis of scientific and policy arguments invoked for and against it.

The authors examine the soundness of the survey methodology and identify the conflicting interpretations and values fuelling the debate.

The authors find that while PISA has promoted the focus on the important subject of children's education worldwide there are legitimate concerns about what PISA measures, and how. The authors conclude that the OECD should be more transparent in the documentation of the methodological choices that underlie the creation of the data and more explicit about the impact of these choices on the results. More broadly, the authors advise caution in the attempt to derive and apply evidence-based policy in the domain of education; the authors furthermore propose an alternative model of social inquiry that is sensitive and robust to the concerns of the various actors and stakeholders that may be involved in a given policy domain.

The issues and tensions surrounding the PISA survey can be better understood in the framework of post-normal science (PNS), the application of which to the PISA controversy offers a potential solution to a stalemate.

The environment poses many ‘wicked problems’ that cannot be addressed from a single disciplinary perspective. In a research-oriented university, it is a challenge to overcome discipline boundaries to create different pathways for thinking and teaching about the environment. This vignette reflects on two strands, performance and academic culture, in what is necessarily a complex system involving the development and implementation of a new interdisciplinary subject. While we imagined what the learning process was for the students, what evolved was a mutual process of rethinking expectations about how to collaboratively learn as an academic team. This chapter examines three learning tasks prescribed for students as examples of how we came to understand the difficult nature of our engagement, and to reflect on what happened in the initial semester of the subject. Emergent from our reflections is the need for a culture of interdisciplinarity, and suggestions for how to more effectively support the kind of learning practices that will inform our understanding of complex systems as citizens and scholars.

LIS has been described as a fragmented field in crisis, with an increased competition from other fields; and lacking in development of theories. The purpose of this paper is to articulate a strategy in which the perceived weakness can be seen as a source of strength.

The text builds mostly on reflections on meta‐theoretical and science‐organisation literature. Ten distinct problems for the research field are identified and discussed in order to provide a viable strategy for the future.

While it is common to suggest a convergent movement toward the idealised characteristics of the strong research discipline as a recipe against fragmentation, a strong convergent movement is suggested that feeds off the fragmented character of the field. What is commonly perceived as a weakness, the multidimensional character of the field, can be translated into a strategic resource.

The paper provides a fresh perspective on the strategic situation of LIS.

The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with societal origins of public (dis)trust and public credibility of nutrition science and offer suggestions for addressing its public dismissal.

This viewpoint presents a conceptual analysis of public dismissal of nutrition science, drawing together perspectives on the relationships between science and society from the history, sociology and philosophy of science.

The origin of trust amongst scientists relies is actively tied to their social and moral status and science as a cultural activity is inextricably linked to institutions of power. Accordingly, trust in science relies heavily on public perceptions of those institutions, the ways in which citizens feel represented by them, and to what extent citizens consider these institutions to be held accountable. Ignoring this origin leads to expectations of science and scientists they cannot live up to and inevitable disappointment in those holding such expectations.

Managing responsible expectations asks that we first dismiss dominant portrayals of science as pure, neutral, value-free and fuelled by curiosity. Second, we should pursue a reorganisation of science, favouring social inclusiveness over scientific exceptionalism.

Post-truth dynamics are a source of concern in the dissemination of nutrition science. Rather than dismissing it as a consequence of public ignorance, a comprehensive engagement with post-truth arguments allows a constructive repositioning of nutrition science organisation and communication. It asks that we design research programmes and studies differently, incorporate different voices. Above all else, it asks humility of researchers and tolerant approaches to other perspectives.

Pluralities of personality schemas reside across different Maruyama universes suggesting incommensurability and isolation. Schemas may migrate across Maruyama universes given appropriate means. As illustration, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) schema for personality temperament is migrated into a sociocognitive schema through the intermediary of knowledge cybernetics (KC). MBTI is a type approach that operates with polar opposites; however, conceptually there is no reason for it not to be associated with a trait space. Supposing that MBTI has traits at some horizon of meaning, then since traits are responsible for the creation of enduring states, sociocognitive explanations should be able to explain the stable states consistent with a variation of the McCrae and Costa proposition. As a result this paper aims to formulate for the first time a link between the MBTI type schema, a trait space, and a capacity for sociocultural descriptions.

The paper uses the meta‐framework of KC, part of the relevantial universe identified by Maruyama, to formulate a representation of MBTI. This also appears to be the first serious use of the Maruyama universe concept, and the first time that MBTI has been explored from a relevantial perspective. A consequence is the possible development of a more sophisticated trait theory that is capable of providing more complex information about personality.

The findings indicate that a more complex form of type theory is possible than has been provided by MBTI.

This paper is limited to the investigation of MBTI. However, it offers a generic approach that can be applied to other solitary theories like MBTI. It also postulates a trait basis for the MBTI type approach.

The paper leads to the possibility of improved explanatory power for a type theory than is currently possible.

The paper adopts for the first time a relevantial meta‐framework approach to explore a development of MBTI. It has value to those researchers who may wish to explore the potential of more complex forms of type personality theory than are currently available.