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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.

Dysfunctional governance processes have contributed to catastrophic healthcare system failures due to discordance between clinical and corporate governance processes. The emergence of an integrated governance approach endeavours to overcome the traditional boundaries between corporate and clinical governance systems, to enhance understanding and transparency in the organisations approach to service provision. The purpose of this paper is to discusses the attributes of an integrated governance approach and its contribution to enhancing service delivery.

The paper provides an overview of the governance approaches and the emergence of integrated governance to improve overall service delivery.

An integrated governance approach erodes the traditional boundaries that exist within the complex healthcare system. This allows for a greater understanding of healthcare strategies and organisational objectives, and the dissemination of these throughout the organisation. Further, enhancing awareness within the clinical setting of the core attributes of the organisation and for the upper echelons of management to have a greater understanding of the clinical issues. Integrated governance acknowledges the contribution of all stakeholders including consumers in safe guarding the delivery of healthcare and its standards.

This paper contributes to the discussion and debate regarding governance approaches and how these are situated in enhancing organisational performance.

This conceptual article aims to contribute to the design of a theory of family-influenced firms by a framework for the management of business-family dilemmas.

It combines systemic principles with the tetralemma, a tool from ancient Indian logic that families and businesses can use to manage and reframe dilemmas without dissolving the dilemmatic tensions or blurring their boundaries.

In applying the tetralemma, the article offers a range of suggestions, such as observing business and family as two discrete, yet codependent, social systems and envisioning conceptual and methodological imports from codependency research and therapy into family business research and practice.

The article proposes a framework for the selective and flexible navigation of family-business tensions without dissolving them or blurring their boundaries.

A striking feature of Jaques' work is his “no nonsense” attitude to the “manager‐subordinate” relationship. His blunt account of the origins of this relationship seems at first sight to place him in the legalistic “principles of management” camp rather than in the ranks of the subtler “people centred” schools. We shall see before long how misleading such first impressions can be, for Jaques is not making simplistic assumptions about the human psyche. But he certainly sees no point in agonising over the mechanism of association which brings organisations and work‐groups into being when the facts of life are perfectly straightforward and there is no need to be squeamish about them.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement (GFA) through the lens of sport, particularly football, and with reference to theoretical literature on peace-making processes.

The paper is structured in such a way as to review theoretical literature, to consider the nature of the Northern Ireland problem and its implications for sport, to critique the current settlement and to demonstrate its failings using sport as an exemplar. The methods used are a critical review of relevant literature combined with reflections on the author's own involvement in sport and community relations.

The paper argues that the GFA has resulted in a consociational “solution” to the Northern Ireland problem. The example of sport, and especially the standing of the Northern Ireland football team, indicates that such a settlement fails to address the central problem of two divided communities with different political aspirations and attitudes towards national identity.

The analysis is limited to the extent that it adopts an essentially top down approach. The findings deserve to be confirmed (or indeed refuted) at some future point by a gathering data from football fans and others. However, the implications are that the terms of the GFA should be revisited in the light of evidence of the failings of the current settlement not only as found in this paper but based on recent political developments.

The Irish Football Association has to address the perception that appears prevalent amongst some Catholic players that they are not wanted by the national association. Politicians need to renew their efforts to create greater mutual understanding instead of fooling themselves that so long as they can talk to each other, the communities they represent will remain peaceful.

I doubt if any academic author has had the same degree of involvement in relation to the role of sport in the Northern Ireland peace process. What gives the paper its particular value, however, is the fact that it is probably unique in looking at sport in Northern Ireland with specific reference to political science peace-making literature.

This paper aims to critically reflect on the growing systems orientation in marketing research and the approaches used to understand marketing systems. In response, the paper offers an integrative metatheory built on the ontic necessity and subsequently constitutive and causal efficacy of relations.

This conceptual paper is built on a logic of critique, identifying the generative absences that produce problems in the frameworks in use and attempting to rectify these problems by offering an alternative meta-theoretical structure. This paper draws from critical realism, systems thinking and relational sociology.

This paper advocates for an emergentist ontology for marketing systems built on the value of both substance and relation as co-principles of existence and the subsequent irreducible stratification derived from this. This position suggests the following propositions: the ontological premise of being is reliant on relations; the social world is constructed of stratified levels of organisation in which entities, their properties and powers emerge by virtue of these relations; these entities operate in complex and mutually modifying interrelations; stability and change is the result of this complex interplay of temporally/spatially stratified relations; and time and space are properties and potential powers of organisation.

This paper considers a number of inconsistencies in current approaches to the study of marketing systems arguing these arise based on the absence of a view of relations that supports an effective theory of emergence. In response, the paper develops a set of ontological presuppositions regarding the nature of marketing systems and a subsequent set of epistemic conditions as an integrative metatheoretical position, through which these systems are better understood and analysed. The paper argues that these improve our ability to theorise about the multi-dimensionality of these systems.