The question of how to organize collaborative problem-solving efforts when collective action is necessary has received considerable attention in the scientific literature. More recently, it is even argued that to organize successful collaborative arrangements, the complex system characteristics of the governance system in which such an arrangement is applied needs to be taken into account. This would trigger a bandwagon effect of mutually reinforcing changes and be successful in overcoming deadlocks. In this paper, we will argue that this line of reasoning is far from complete, even resulting in misguiding conclusions. By analyzing the governance of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, we suggest that—instead of complicating the problem by establishing more self-organizing collaborative bodies, hoping to avoid path dependencies and bring new solutions—there is rather a need to clear ‘the disposition of complexity’ profoundly, towards concrete associative opportunities, and co-evolution beyond political agendas and/or plans. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The study investigates the moderating effect of CEO (Chief Executive Officer) duality and CEO ownership on the relationship between organisational slack and firm performance. Through reviewing relevant literature on organisational slack, agency and stewardship theories, this study develops hypotheses on the relationship between organisational slack and firm performance and the moderations of CEO duality and CEO ownership. On the basis of a large data of Chinese firms, this study finds that there is a positive relationship between organisational slack and firm performance, and the moderating effect of CEO duality is positive, whereas that of CEO ownership is insignificant. The findings not only improve the understanding on the performance implication of organisational slack but also indicates that stewardship theory is more powerful than agency theory in China. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper introduces a novel conception of an economic organization, where its Total Profit Equation accounts for the phenomenon of cognitive time distortion—this being understood as the discrepancy between physical and cognitive time. Cognitive time distortion is unconditionally inherent in all human beings and everything they do, and typically produces economic inefficiencies as well as human stress; all this may now be conceptualized, detected, and acted upon. The novel Total Profit Equation as introduced here, including its underlying Total Revenue Equation and the Total Cost Equation, echoes a call of the founders of Systems Sciences that non-trivial systems manifest several kinds of temporal experiences. This call has largely been ignored by the various disciplines that study organizations and their management, particularly economic organizations, where the temporal experience of economic organizations is reduced to physical time. In this sense, this contribution offers an alternative to remedy that reductionism. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study uses the amount of time users spend on social networking sites (SNSs) to differentiate user groups and investigates the following three issues: (1) the most common behavior of different groups when using SNS; (2) whether users have different perceptions of their social capital on SNSs versus in real-life environments; and (3) whether there are differences in the perceived social capital of different groups. This study discovered that users have different user behavior depending on their amounts of usage. In particular, heavy users tend to be willing to share information and often use application programs associated with SNSs. With regard to perceptions of social capital, the study found that different groups have somewhat different ideas as to what constitutes social capital. We summarize a novel individual social capital systematic behavior and discuss the practical implications of this work and suggestions for future research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper examines the proposition that self-concept exists as a networked modular structure in which the modules, consisting of actual or current self-concept and a number of possible selves, are held together as a dynamical system through an autopoietic process of self-regulation. In this context, the whole lifeworld of an individual can be thought of as a field that is maintained and/or changed through engagement in various kinds of developmental tasks controlled through self-regulation. A ‘morphology’ of self-concept defined in this way involves a dimension ranging from the internal (the person) to the external (the environment) passing through some form of interface. As a system, like any other system, self-concept is characterized by structure, pattern, and process elements. Self-concept, therefore, can change and develop yet ‘stay the same’, thus providing the individual, in a reflective and reflexive way, with a personal sense of history, growth, continuity, and change. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gerard de Zeeuw introduced the term ‘Third Phase Science’ in 1997. A deliberative method that is called dialogic design science (see http://dialogicdesignscience.wikispaces.com) illustrates an effective way of implementing third-phase science as a means of understanding and adapting complex social situations. This paper explains De Zeeuw's concept in non-specialist language and expands on the historical context of third-phase science as a means of addressing contemporary needs. It shows how dialogic design science completes third-phase science as an axiomatic science and makes third-phase science into a valuable design methodology. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The development of systems practitioners in engineering has revealed the need to bridge between the research methods teaching of engineering management and soft systems approaches. Although action research might be viewed implicitly as the research strategy of systems practice, we argue that engineering management research methods, in the broadest sense, require practical linking with soft systems approaches to meet the needs of research projects that span the boundary between engineering and the social world. Our observations arise from the experience of delivery of an Engineering Doctorate in Systems Programme. We explore this need for bridging using soft systems methodology as a reflective device. We argue from our analysis that systems education for engineers needs to focus on 10 key aspects that will be instrumental in bringing about the wider use of soft systems approaches to engineering systems. We present these conclusions using a process-oriented view. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This is our third Research Note belonging to an ongoing debate in Systems Research and Behavioral Science about socially sustainable work organisations and systems approaches in their creation. In the Research Note, we provide a history of the debate and summarise some of its key points. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research on the performance of interdisciplinary teams has produced mixed findings. We argue that this debate can be usefully reframed in terms of expertise knowledge disparity and experience knowledge variety. We analyzed 237 papers in top management journals and found that moderate level expertise knowledge disparity produces novel combinations and higher level experience knowledge variety facilitates exchange, which increases the quality of knowledge creation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Classification of migrations into distinguishable types is a frequently used technique in migration research. Typologies of migrations are usually based on some specific criterion, such as voluntary–involuntary, permanent–temporary, international–internal or on some combination thereof. In this paper, an approach to the construction of migration typology based on the living systems theory by J. G. Miller was applied. Consideration of functioning and interactions of living systems at the social level was a theoretical foundation for the building of this typology. The construction of migration typology, at least in its initial stage, does not need quantitative data, which usually are scarce in research of migrations. Instead, we rely on historical and sociological texts, which give us a qualitative description of migration processes. Grounded theory, a qualitative research method for behavioral science, developed by the sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, was applied to derive the typology on the theoretical basis of living system theory. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When discussing a theory, are we talking about the ‘same thing’? Here, two analyses of institutional theory find more conflict than agreement. This opens a question—how best to investigate, understand, and communicate our understanding of theoretical constructs. A third analysis uses an emerging systems-based methodology to look at theory as a system unto itself. In that study, the system of theory is quantified in terms of its systemic structure and complexity. This approach suggests new ways to understand the core and belt of a theory and provides a path towards integrating disparate theories in fragmented fields and a more objective way to advance theories towards greater effectiveness in research and practical application. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper explores the way the idea of sustainability is linked to categories traditionally examined by the general systems theory—the categories of system, environment, and complexity. Toward this end, the paper builds upon the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann to explain the nature of the trade-off between complexity and sustainability. Exemplified by Luhmann's theory of ecological communication, the trade-off emerges because the growing systemic complexity entails the increasing risk that systems develop insensitivity to those environmental conditions on which they critically depend. The key implication of the trade-off is that it may be rational for social systems to withdraw their internal complexity to maintain their sustainability in a given environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper is directed towards answering questions such as the following:•How can policy makers develop agreement on what constitutes and supports well-being of the planet rather than the gross domestic product of a nation state (Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi)?•How can nested forms of participatory democracy and systemic governance do the following: (i) support the appropriate distribution and consumption of resources; and (ii) protect social and environmental diversity and justice at the local and regional levels? To this end, the paper addresses pathways to redress the commodification of relationships across human beings, the voiceless and the environment, on the basis of considering the consequences for the next generation of life on the planet. It makes the case that the ‘technologies of humility’ for social and environmental justice (Jasanoff) need to be informed by a caretaking approach. Many kinds of knowledge need to decentre anthropocentricism (Wynne) to protect biodiversity (Rose Bird, Freya Mathews, and Haraway). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Article introduces the model for implementing the technology-supported learning and knowledge building (LKB) framework for developing the simulated extended professional community in which Estonian teachers’ professional accreditation may be reorganized. A design-based participatory method was used involving the domain experts from the university and teacher's professional association to collaboratively design and validate the implementation model elements. We propose the cyclical implementation process model that integrates the activities of designing a suitable technology-supported LKB framework for an extended professional community. Three domain-experts from the university and the teacher's association and thirteen teachers were involved in launching the simulated extended professional community according to the implementation model. For model validation the focus-group interviews were conducted with the participants. We illustrate the implementation model phases using the narratives of the participants. As a result, we highlight some tips for practitioners who would like to support LKB in the extended professional community. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Accepting that increased climate variability will require that farmers make significant changes to their farm systems, we can see that maintaining flexibility is an important coping strategy. Using general systems theory, we offer a conceptual model for describing the tactical and strategic flexibility of farm systems to reveal the sensitivity of farm systems to variable critical inputs. The model is used to classify farm systems as rigid, robust, or elastic on the basis of two factors, the capacity of the farmer to reduce reliance on critical inputs by altering the following: (i) the use of critical inputs and (ii) farm output. The different production emphasis for the different types of systems has implications for how these farmers are able to respond to increased variability and on public policies that may support viable farm businesses in the face of increased variability. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The idea of accommodating worldviews in problem structuring is a common approach across many methodologies. A key assumption of this research is the idea that actors must reach a point where a debate about change, through an accommodation of worldviews, can occur. This paper looks at a field study where actors actively used their declared worldviews against each other to argue for change. Even though this process led to a stalling of the method, an argument is made that there is still much to be learned from actors who actively structure disagreement. In particular by studying how this process occurs, we can develop new streams of research into problem framing and methodology use that are currently absent problem structuring research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has captured significant attention of managers and executives especially at multinational and multi-divisional firms. However, links between CSR's drivers (strategic planning, firm culture) and CSR have seen little or no empirical verification, particularly in South Asia. The present study aims to test two antecedents if they contribute in shaping firms' CSR. This study considers formal strategic planning and humanistic culture as drivers of CSR. Data were collected from CEOs of 800 randomly selected organizations in Pakistan, with 21.5% response rate. Results from hierarchical regression indicate that formal strategic planning and firm's humanistic culture, over and above the impact of formal strategic planning, are linked positively with CSR. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The following article from Systems Research and Behavioral Science “Intrinsic Preferences, Revealed Preferences and Bounded Rational Decisions” by Zhao Yong and Wu Xinlin, published online on 26 June 2012 in Wiley Online Library (http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com; DOI: 10.1002/sres.2120), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal editor, M.C. Jackson, and John Wiley & Sons. The retraction has been agreed due to unauthorized usage of material previously written by Dr Christopher J. Tyson of Queen Mary, University of London.

Although an extensive body of literature has stressed the firm-level barriers or drivers for knowledge acquisition, little attention has been paid to the barriers and/or drivers nested within manager–organization subsystem. This article aims to explore the factors from nested system perspective by investigating the effects of manager's wealth-oriented and career-oriented incentives (COIs) on firm's external knowledge acquisition and the moderating effects of technological uncertainty. Four hypotheses are proposed and tested by the data from 607 Chinese firms. We find that COI has a positive effect, whereas wealth-oriented incentive has an inverse U-shaped effect on external knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, we also find that the effects of wealth-oriented and COIs are contingent on technological uncertainty. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The globalization connects different parts of the world tightly, one region can be closely interacted by another region. The globalized environment can become dynamic and turbulent, thus brings uncertainties into decision making. A critical challenge in system science is to deal with the uncertainties such as fuzziness, randomness and roughness of information. In this paper, a programming model in rough sets is presented. First, the characteristics and limitations of the existing rough programming methods are analysed systematically. Second, the necessity and feasibility of developing a new rough programming model is discussed, and the model is developed on the basis of the greatest compatible classes and synthesis effect. Finally, the effectiveness and characteristics of the newly developed model are validated through a case study. The result illustrates that the new programming model is of significance in practical applications, and it makes it possible to take decision preferences into account of the decision-making processes effectively. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model has been successfully applied as a popular linear model for economic time series forecasting. In addition, during the recent years, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used to capture the complex economic relationships with a variety of patterns as they serve as a powerful and flexible computational tool. However, most of these studies have been characterized by mixed results in terms of the effectiveness of the ANNs model compared with the ARIMA model. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model, which is distinctive in integrating the advantages of ARIMA and ANNs in modeling the linear and nonlinear behaviors in the data set. The hybrid model was tested on three sets of actual data, namely, the Wolf's sunspot data, the Canadian lynx data and the IBM stock price data. Our computational experience indicates the effectiveness of the new combinatorial model in obtaining more accurate forecasting as compared to existing models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Recent literatures about complex systems indicate that the economy self-organizes under control mechanisms. By applying the theory of control mechanism to capitalism, this paper analyzes why the ongoing world financial crisis is a credit crisis and the epistemological root of credit crisis—information asymmetry. Furthermore, this paper argues that neo-liberalism economic system and the defective credit management system, which lead to the deficient government supervision and consistent lack of effective government supervision, caused the world financial crisis. This paper also argues that rescue measures taken by many countries cannot resolve the financial crisis fundamentally. Some measures are proposed at the end of this paper to strengthen the negative feedbacks, aiming at defusing or avoiding crises fundamentally. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Science and technology are the primary drivers of the nations’ economies. Advanced technologies play an irreplaceable role in modern societies, industrial enterprises and public services. Advanced science and technologies make it possible to integrate number of simple systems into a large-scale complex system, where the behaviours of system components must be highly coordinated and collaborated to achieve optimized system performance of integrated systems. The perquisites of system coordination and collaboration are interoperability and standardization of system components. To meet these requirements, it is of great significance to clarify the interaction mechanism between technology standardization and technology development. In this paper, the characteristics of technology standardization and technology development at different stages are analysed; the synergistic relations between these two factors are elaborated with the consideration of external driving forces. Moreover, the electromagnetic field theory is applied to analogize the interactions and develop a new model for the representation of the dynamic mechanisms of technology standardization and technology development. The reasonableness of the analog of the interactions by the electromagnetic field has been illustrated through theoretical analysis and case studies. Finally, the directions of the study on technology standardization and technology development are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

After analysing the security conditions in current Enterprise Systems (ES), this paper proposes a systematic framework that is based on the Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network (SSL-VPN) for improving security management. This framework takes account of several key aspects such as channel strategy, network pattern, workstation authentication, identity authentication, security workflow, etc. The proposed framework has the following advantages: low cost, high performance, easy to implement, and strong security control pattern. In addition, this paper proposes a dynamic security strategy that is about authorizing user ID and roles dynamically and conducting real-time mapping via agent or proxy technologies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The share of gross domestic product from the service industry reflects the competitiveness of a nation; the service industry in the USA accounts for around 80% of its gross domestic product, and it has been increasing gradually. Continual innovations and advances in enabling technologies for the service industry are crucial for developed countries to sustain their leading positions in the globalized economy. To clarify future research directions of operations research (OR) in the service industry, the state of art of OR has been examined systematically, the new requirements of OR are identified for its applications in service industries in comparison with those in manufacturing industries, and the limitations of existing methodologies and tools have been discussed. This paper was intended to provide an updated review on how OR has been applied in the service sector in recent years and what directions the study of OR will be carried forward in the near future. Under a proposed research framework, recent OR-related articles were collected from 17 leading OR journals and classified into the five most active sectors, that is, transportation and warehousing, information and communication, human health and social assistance, retails and wholesales, and financial and insurance services. The conclusions on the limitations of existing studies and the demanding ORs in the service have been drawn from our summaries and observations from a comprehensive review in this field. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using the data collected from 527 new ventures in China, this research evaluates the effects of top management team (TMT) heterogeneous background and behavioural attributes on firm's performance. Behavioural aspects of cognitive and emotional conflicts within the team are served as mediators. The results of the study indicate that the TMT functional background heterogeneity is positively related to both cognitive conflicts and emotional conflicts within the TMT. Moreover, team conflicts are found to mediate the effects of TMT functional background diversity on new ventures' performance. However, TMT functional background diversity alone is not significantly related to financial performance or growth performance of new ventures. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Knowledge sharing on emergency events in virtual communities is a significant information source for emergency management. Based on social cognitive theory and social capital theory as well as the consideration of the characteristics of emergency events, we employ a survey questionnaire for the empirical study and adopt the two-stage confirmatory factor analysis method to construct a structural equation model for identifying the influential factors in knowledge sharing in emergencies. Through conducting a detailed data analysis, our study reveals that that some emergency event characteristics have significant effects on both the quality and quantity of knowledge sharing. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite increasing attention have been paid to the role of external relationship management, some studies have been concerned about established firms’ relationship management; however, only few studies have explicitly discussed the role of relationship management for new venture performance in a transition economy. Trust and contracts are two kinds of governance mechanisms to manage external relationship. This research focuses on trust and contracts and examines their impacts on new ventures’ performance. Moreover, we argue that resource acquisition mediates the relationship between governance mechanisms and new venture performance. By using survey data from 188 questionnaires, this study finds that trust and contracts are positively associated with relationship performance and economic performance. New ventures also obtain more relationship and economic performance through resource acquisition. In addition, trust and contracts are substitutable that affect economic performance, but the interaction is not associated with relationship performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study utilized the eye-tracking technology to investigate consumers' behavioral responses in three different streaming media advertising forms. Thirty-two undergraduates and postgraduates participated in this study, and their eye-movement data were collected as they viewed four different types of streaming media advertisements on Web pages coded in Chinese. Considering audiences' online status, both browsing scenario and information search scenario are designed. Through analysing the impact of advertisement forms on audience by using the two-way analysis of variance, the results show that (i) audiences are more sensitive to streaming media advertising when they are in the information search scenario; (ii) ordinary floating layer advertising and Tear Page Advertising capture more attention than iTouch and hurdles advertising; and (iii) the play time do affect audiences' response to streaming media advertising. Detailed discussions on results and suggestions for future studies are provided in this paper. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.