The so-called rigor–relevance gap appears unbridgeable in the classical view of organization science, which is based on the physical sciences’ model. Constructivist scholars have also pointed out a certain inadequacy of this model of science for organization research, but they have not offered an explicit, alternative model of science. Responding to this lack, this paper brings together the two separate paradigmatic perspectives of constructivist epistemologies and of organizational design science, and shows how they could jointly constitute the ingredients of a constructivism-founded scientific paradigm for organization research. Further, the paper highlights that, in this constructivist view of organizational design science, knowledge can be generated and used in ways that are mutually enriching for academia and practice

We propose a methodological framework for developing and communicating academic knowledge relevant for practice: the dialogical model. This model of engaged scholarship comprises five activities: specifying a research question, elaborating local knowledge, developing conceptual knowledge, communicating knowledge, and activating knowledge. The current article focuses on the early stage of research question design and presents the epistemological framework in which the model was initially developed. It also offers guidance on how to maintain academic value and practical relevance in tension throughout the research process. Examples illustrate how to construct research questions relevant both for academia and practice, and how to justify validity in pragmatic constructivism. This model can likewise be mobilized in other epistemological frameworks, particularly for knowledge generation purposes. It enriches the researchers’ methodological toolbox by adding a new procedural tool that provides valuable guidelines from the very start of research projects. Relevance: The first part of this article is dedicated to presenting and discussing what internal validity, external validity, and reliability mean specifically in pragmatic constructivism, which is another name for radical constructivism. This naming is consistent with the radical constructivist view of the relationship between knowledge and action, and has the advantage of being free from all the misinterpretations associated with the term “radical.”

Open peer commentary on the article “Towards a PL-Metaphysics of Perception: In Search of the Metaphysical Roots of Constructivism” by Konrad Werner. Upshot: I disclaim the need for a metaphysics for perception, in the sense of a general metaphysics, and suggest that the motivations for embarking on that project can be satisfied in an interesting way without any general metaphysical stock-taking, by appeal to phenomenological and enactive accounts of perception.

Excerpt: In what follows, we shall argue that the defiantly nonrepresentational conception of ground-level intelligence developed and defended by Dreyfus himself, and by others who share his general approach, is ultimately unable to do justice to the distinctive dynamics of background, precisely because that conception, at least partly as a consequence of its representation-shunning character, fails to encompass the particular, transformative, background-involving embodied capacity so strikingly illustrated by the King’s routine.

This article considers the genealogies of the ‘bioeconomy’ by investigating shifting conceptions of life, debt and regeneration across the disciplines of biology and political economy. Returning to the post-industrial literature of the seventies, it seeks to understand how the perception of economic and ecological crisis fed into the US’s decision to promote life science innovation as the cutting edge of its new economic strategies. There is an intimate connection, it argues, between the world oil crisis, US debt and the speculative reinvention of life. In this context, a number of methodological and conceptual questions become imperative. When capital mobilizes the biological, how do we theorize the relationship between the creation of money (surplus from debt; futures from promise) and the technological recreation of life? When capitalism confronts the geochemical limits of the earth, where does it move? What is the space-time – the world – of late capitalism and where are its boundaries? What finally, becomes of the critique of political economy in an era in which biological, economic and ecological futures are so intimately entwined? And when the future itself is subject to all kinds of speculation?

Key words: bioeconomy, biopolitics, biotechnology, capital, ecology, marx

Unlike traditional approach, constructivists view the learner as the active participant of the learning process. Constructivist instructors’ main concern is providing the learners with learning environments in which they can engage in meaningful interactions. So, classrooms should be designed in such a way that the learners interpret and construct meaning based on their own experiences. Creation of rich learning environments via available technologies supporting constructivist learning platforms can be achieved through employing instructional strategies apt to the contextual variables. Teachers’ new role is integrating technology into the curriculum so that learners build on their own experiences, construct their own meanings, create products, and solve problems successfully.

Key words: technology, constructivist classroom, instruction, curriculum.

Excerpt: Cultural analysis is considered to deal with the phenomenon of the Second Reality. The First, physical, objectively given reality and its laws are only a subject of cultural analysis insofar as they are the basis of the Second Reality and provide the general functional laws for the latter. Human societies show a number of phenomena that, although they are products of the First Reality, cannot be completely reduced to it. All these phenomena have a semiotic nature (referring to Peirce’s semiotic conception, which is triadic and relation-functional). This includes conceptions that consider ‘acts’ (Schmidt 1980) or ‘communication’ (e.g. Drechsel 1984) as the basic elements of cultural phenomena, because all these phenomena are put down to signs and semiotic processes. For this reason the construction of a theory seems much more promising if one starts with the common fundamental elements rather than with objects which are products of semiotic processes. I assume that semiotic phenomena (generally speaking statements that the Second Reality is subject to the same laws as the First Reality) have an objective, that means inter-personal and collective nature, but they show a quite autonomous status and are partially ruled by self-organizing processes. This refers to the phenomenon of’Weltbilder’ and the principle of ‘constructivity’, the fact that in different cultures different constructs are formed out of the same semiotic material. These constructs, which organize society and are organized by society (= functional, cross-linked causality) are responsible for the functioning of culture and (due to the system’s conditions) are endowed with more ‘degrees of freedom’ than society is. It is assumed here that the laws of open, dynamic, irreversible systems apply to the Second Reality. The thermodynamic or biological system theory of evolution (after Riedl), the discourse theory (after Link and Fleischer) and semiotics (after Peirce) are regarded as object-adequate-theories. As epistemology serves the constructivistic functionalism (Finke 1982). The reason behind this choice is that it is more probable that the product of something (the culture) follows the laws of that particular something (nature, structure of evolution) rather than that it develops totally new, independent and autonomous laws.

Part of the World is the most extensive biographical account of Heinz von Foerster, widely regarded as a founder of “constructivism” although an important theme of this story is how he came to reject that label. The book reflects the significance of von Foerster’s over-ninety-year-long life against the background of world and scientific history. In a fascinating dialogue with Monika Broecker, who asks smart and empathic questions, von Foerster relates his life story and his most important thoughts. Many photographs are reproduced, some of them published here for the first time.

The full scope of enactivist approaches to cognition includes not only a focus on sensory-motor contingencies and physical affordances for action, but also an emphasis on affective factors of embodiment and intersubjective af-fordances for social interaction. This strong conception of embodied cognition calls for a new way to think about the role of the brain in the larger system of brain-body-environment. We ask whether recent work on predictive coding offers a way to think about brain function in an enactive system, and we sug-gest that a positive answer is possible if we interpret predictive coding in a more enactive way, i.e., as involved in the organism’s dynamic adjustments to its environment.