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In Schelling’s “checkerboard” model of segregation, individuals’ moderately held preferences about the proportion of their neighbors who are similar versus dissimilar to them can, through an automatic and mathematical process, yield dramatic population-level segregative behaviors. The notion of such an automatic segregative process would seem to have implications for spatial dynamics when a group home for persons with disabilities is introduced into a community. This study sought to examine those implications alongside data in the research literature regarding community acceptance of group homes.

Using an agent-based modeling approach, computer simulations were constructed to apply Schelling’s model, as well as an alternative model, to community reaction to the introduction of group homes for persons with disabilities. Simulation conditions were set to roughly correspond to the proportion of group homes or other congregate living situations, as well as vacant dwellings, in a typical community in the United States.

The simulations predict that group homes will, to varying degrees, become spatially isolated within their communities. These predictions conflict with previous research findings that suggest minimal relocation of neighbors and rapid adjustment of communities to the presence of group homes.

Simulations of an automatic segregative process might offer a baseline or a “null hypothesis” of sorts, allowing us to more fully understand the extent of the social and socioeconomic forces that serve to moderate or override such an automatic process, allowing communities to adjust to group homes’ presence.

Does the classical liberal emphasis on freedom of association provide an intellectual cover for bigotry? We formulate this question in economic terms using James Buchanan’s economic approach to ethics, according to which moral values can be understood as preferences about other people’s behaviors. We discuss two possible market failures associated with freedom of association: inter-group externalities and Schelling-type emergent segregation. We show that the classical liberal position about freedom of association, as elaborated in Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent, is fully equipped to deal with the first one, but not with the second. The progressive view that some preferences are so offensive that they should be dismissed rather than engaged or negotiated with can be reframed as an attempt to solve the emergent segregation problem, but it is vulnerable to political economy problems of its own, in particular to an inherent tendency to over-expand the meaning of “bigotry.”

To determine where, when, how, and wherefore European social theory hit upon the formula of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” and how its structural position as a skeleton for the theory of action has changed.

Genealogy, library research, and unusually good fortune were used to trace back the origin of what was to become a ubiquitous phrase, and to reconstruct the debates that made deploying the term seem important to writers.

The triad, although sometimes used accidentally in the renaissance, assumed a key structural place with a rise of Neo-Platonism in the eighteenth century associated with a new interest in providing a serious analysis of taste. It was a focus on taste that allowed the Beautiful to assume a position that was structurally homologous to those of the True and the Good, long understood as potential parallels. Although the first efforts were ones that attempted to emphasize the unification of the human spirit, the triad, once formulated, was attractive to faculties theorists more interested in decomposing the soul. They seized upon the triad as corresponding to an emerging sense of a tripartition of the soul. Finally, the members of the triad became re-understood as values, now as orthogonal dimensions.

This seems to be the first time the story of the development of the triad – one of the most ubiquitous architectonics in social thought – has been told.

Recent work on the theory of teams and team reasoning in game interactive settings is due principally to the late Michael Bacharach (Bacharach, 2006), who offers a conception of the individual as a team member, and also to Martin Hollis (1998) and Robert Sugden and Natalie Gold (Sugden, 2000; Gold & Sugden, 2007), and is motivated by the conflict between what ordinary experience suggests people often to do and what rationality prescribes for them, such as in prisoner's dilemma games where individuals can choose to cooperate or defect. The source of the conflict, they suggest, is an ambiguity in the syntax of standard game theory, which is taken to pose the question individuals in games ask themselves as, “what should I do?,” but which might be taken to pose the question, particularly when individuals are working together with others as, “what should we do?” When taken in the latter way, each individual chooses according to what best promotes the team's objective and then performs the role appropriate as a member of that team or group. Bacharach understood this change in focus in terms of the different possible cognitive frames that individuals use to think about the world and developed a variable frame theory for rational play in games in which the frame adopted for a decision problem determines what counts as rational play (Janssen, 2001; Casajus, 2001).In order to explain how someone acts, we have to take account of the representation or model of her situation that she is using as she thinks what to do. The model varies with the cognitive frame in which she does her thinking. Her frame stands to her thoughts as a set of axes does to a graph; it circumscribes the thoughts that are logically possible for her (not ever, but at that time). (Bacharach, 2006, p. 69)Sugden understands this framing idea in terms of the theory of focal points following Thomas Schelling's emphasis on the role of salience in coordination games (Schelling, 1960), and his theory similarly ties decision-making to the way the game is understood (Sugden, 1995). This all recalls what Tversky and Kahneman (1981, 1986) termed standard's theory's description invariance assumption, whose abandonment makes it possible to bring a variety of the insights from psychology to bear on rationality in economics.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with tools to help change their organizational culture. Specifically, this chapter investigates the importance of leadership in understanding and changing culture within organizations and explores different change management models to effectively change culture within organizations. This chapter summarizes tools from the Leadership and Change Management literature, including findings from the author’s studies, and best practices from a variety of industries.

Tools are provided so that readers can target leadership changes in preparation for cultural change. Leadership behaviors at the top of an organization are discussed using the full-range leadership model, with a specific focus on understanding, developing, and harnessing transformational leadership behaviors within an organization. Leadership at the top of an organization is complemented with a discussion of the importance of middle leadership throughout the organization including a model to understand and develop those behaviors. The chapter ends with seven different approaches to structuring and managing change that organizations can adopt to improve the probability of driving successful change in their organizations.

For organizations seeking to develop or improve their safety culture, these tools provide a roadmap for harnessing the needed leadership behaviors and organizational tools to effectively make change. By understanding and applying these tools, organizations can find success in their culture change initiatives faster and with fewer problems.