Excerpt: Historically, the tools and methodologies created for administration have faced a reductionism problem associated with the human beings that constitute the organization. Therefore, these tools have deficiencies when considering that it is possible to establish an objective representation that is adequate to the problem situations, without including considerations of the human beings that operate the developed models. In this sense, it can be seen that there is dissatisfaction of the administrators because at the time of applying them, they do not see the real advantages of their use, and this idea is reinforced by the research of Tangen (2004), who finds strong criticism by the users and researchers of the many platforms and mechanisms developed for management control. These human beings, acting in their role as administrators, arise as observers in the experience of being aware of themselves, of what they do, and of the possible consequences of what they do (Maturana 2008), accounting for their different emotional states through self-observation, generating structural interactions and couplings in the language (Maturana and Varela 1987), and forming conversational networks that become complex systems whose participants have the ability of operating individually as autonomous agents and influencing others (Garcia and Saavedra 2011). ||

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present and explain an enactive tool to be used by managers to move effectively in the context of high uncertainty and complexity that organizations nowadays operate. Design/methodology/approach – The approach raises in the enactive management that focusses on the ability of the manager to incorporate distinctions as an observer and self-observer to design interactions that can move the situation to be transformed. The key ontological tool that allow this learning is called CLEHES©. Findings: Using a soft technology as CLEHES, re configures the ways to observe and self-observe of manager and opens the design possibilities of the situation in which the organization is. Managers become choreographers in the sense they can design and move the interactions they observe. The embodied us of this tool requires an educational program that takes the form of hermeneutical laboratory where managers incorporate distinctions in the body and change the perspective they enact. Practical implications: This approach evokes changes in the observer and the enactor situation/situated in the organizational areas where the manager is responsible. Originality/value – A different and nurturing technology to self-observer and observation, allow enactive management in multiples domains and organizational contexts where the manager dance. The structural dynamics of the CLEHES dimensions creates multiples realities, through enactive conversations in a learning self-awareness process.

Key words: complexity, CLEHES laboratory, enactive management, self management.

Today’s mobile and smart technologies have a key role to play in the transformative potential of educational practice. However, technology-enhanced learning processes are embedded within an inherent and unpredictable complexity, not only in the design and development of educational experiences, but also within the socio-cultural and technological contexts where users and learners reside. This represents a limitation with current mainstream digital educational practice, as digital experiences tend to be designed and developed as ‘one solution fits all’ products, and/or as ‘one-off’ events, failing to address ongoing socio-technological complexity, therefore tending to decay in meaningfulness and effectiveness over time. One ambitious solution is to confer the processes associated with the design and development of digital learning experiences with similar autopoietic properties found within living systems, in particular adaptability and self-organisation. The underpinning rationale is that, by conferring such properties to digital learning experiences, intelligent digital interventions responding to unpredictable and ever-changing socio-cultural conditions can be created, promoting meaningful learning over-time. Such an epistemological view of digital learning aims to ultimately promote a more efficient type of design and development of digital learning experiences in education. Read less

As the UK’s Labour government prepares a new strategy for sustainable waste management, this article considers the efficacy of the previous Conservative government’s endeavours. Confusion over the relative merits of reclamation, incineration and landfillhas diverted attention from the key priority of minimising waste and increasing recycling. This article considers the muddled aspirations of the Conservative government’s policy; its reliance on indirect policy instruments; the capacity of local authorities to respond to these aspirations; and the suggestibility of the greater waste management system. Sustainability may require more sweeping a reconfiguration of the waste management system than has hitherto been considered.

Excerpt: The so-called ‘new music’ in Europe after the Second World War, which was based on the idea of ‘progress’, similar to ‘technological progress’ and related to it, aimed at a complete rationalization of composing and supposed ‘structural listening’ (Adorno, 1976, 1988). At the same time, as I have argued in other articles (Vieira de Carvalho, 1994, 1995b, 1996a), the concept of musical composition as autopoiesis seems to have become already in the early 1950s – that is to say, many years before the concept was coined in biology and sociology by Maturana (1993) and Luhmann (1984) – inherent to this development and, in particular, to Stockhausen’s and Goeyvaerts’ serial thinking. It supposed a kind of communication ‘upon’ music as a reified object – not by chance in accordance with Luhmann’s (1996) recent theory of art as well – which opposed musicmaking and listening as communication ‘between’ partners.

Excerpt: We human beings exist – that is, we are realized as human beings – in conversations. It is not that we use conversations – we are, we exist as a flow of conversations. It is not that language is the home of the Dasein, as Heidegger says – our being occurs in languaging in the flow of our being in conversations. The human being is a dynamic manner of being in language, not a body, not an entity that has an existence that can be imagined independent of language and that can then use language as an instrument for communication.

Excerpt: One of the central features of our operation as living systems is that we cannot distinguish in the experience between what we call in daily life perception and illusion. This is so because we as living systems are structure-determined systems, and all that happens in us or with us is determined in our structure and in our structural dynamics. Indeed, it is precisely because of this that virtual realities are possible. Here I wish to say a few words about what the experiential indistinguishability between what we call in daily life perception and illusion entails in relation to the nervous system, in relation to our existence as languaging beings, and in relation to virtual realities. This I shall do in a series of short self-contained statements.

Excerpt: One of our main difficulties in understanding historical phenomena in general, and biological and human phenomena in particular, is our cultural manner of thinking in local, linear causal terms. Thus, our usual form of arguing is “A” causes “B,” as if “A” determined “B” by itself. And we are frequently unaware that what we call a causal relation is an abstraction of some local regularity of the structural dynamics of a larger system that we have not distinguished as such in our attempt to understand the situation that we want to explain in local linear terms. In other words, we frequently do not see or are not fully aware of the system with which we are dealing at any instant. As we attend to the linear local relations that constitute the particular situation under our view, we do not grasp the systemic structural coherences to which it belongs.

Excerpt: A difficulty that we usually have in fully understanding biological phenomena in general, and human phenomena in particular, is that we do not consistently follow in our explanations, our arguments, or our reflections, all the implications of the operationality of structural determinism.