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Frustration among systems thinking practitioners and academics surfaces from time to time at the apparently limited real‐world influence of systems methodologies and frameworks. Critical systems thinking (CST), in particular, faces many of the challenges common to qualitative research and has the additional challenge that its principal modality is to offer ways of conceptualising. This paper argues that recent explorations of phronetic social science (PSS) provide a useful conceptual frame to discuss and enhance the value of CST. We outline some characteristics of phronetic models and how to conceive and evaluate systemically informed phronetic models. By way of illustration, the paper describes the phronetic framing of two practical tools to support collaborative practice, each built on existing systemic models. Finally, we discuss the potential value of informing PSS with insights drawn from CST, and CST with insights drawn from the emerging field of PSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the rate of citation-capture across the social sciences, sciences, business school disciplines and economics. It also explores differences in the rate of citation-capture between leading journals in economics and a representative science category, and between higher and lower ranked economics journals. Short-term citation counting as used in impact factors and journal ranking schemes is shown to favour sciences over social sciences. In addition, within economics, short-term impact factors are systematically biased towards lower ranked journals. Our results imply that the use of leading multidisciplinary journal rankings as a proxy for direct citations introduces an unreported bias in research assessment. Such biases are in addition to those attributable to the well-known differences in the total number of cites received by papers across various disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study of scholarly communication behaviour among Arab scholars. The main objective of this study is to determine how Egyptian and Saudi Arabian social sciences and humanities scholars engage in scholarly communication practices. The study used a mixed‐methods approach. A questionnaire was answered by a sample of 104 participants, followed by interviews with 36 participants to gain insight into the scholarly communication behaviour of the Arab scholars. The analysis demonstrated that participants use different styles of scholarly communication approaches. Most of the participants do use informal (social media) channels to communicate their research findings (particularly ResearchGate and Facebook), although priority is given to formal over informal publication in peer reviewed journals. Responses showed that the promotional systems of both countries dictate publication choices of scholars, reducing the amount of collaboration by ranking co‐publications lower than sole publications and favouring printed journals over online‐only journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous series of papers (Sutherland, Dicks, Everard, & Geneletti,), we summarise the use of a range of social science methods in conservation decision‐making. Moon et al. () claim that the special feature risks narrowing the scope of social science research and suggest that we presented a limited perspective on the field. They thereby criticise the special feature for not doing something that it never intended to do in the first instance. We did not claim that the list of articles covered in the special feature is a comprehensive list (which it obviously is not) and we are unclear why anyone would think it is.While we consider the Moon et al. () paper to be a useful contribution for conservation scientists as a supplementary paper, it serves less as a critique to the special feature. Moon et al.('s () paper makes very few direct and substantive criticisms of points raised in the special feature. We respond to areas of contention referring specifically to research philosophy, bias, and data reporting.Moon et al. () criticise the set of papers for perpetuating an objectivist view of the world. We believe that it would be rather disconcerting for the research community if there were no social truths to discover. Rather, social science research methods conducted in specific places can be good ways of exploring how truths vary in different contexts.We also note that Moon et al. () completely missed the point we were trying to make about psychological biases, which are quite different to the issues associated with researcher bias highlighted by them.We encourage readers to pay close attention to the use of social science methods in conservation science. We reiterate, however, that the main purpose of the special feature was to ensure that social science methodologies for decision‐making are accessible for all conservation scientists to use, regardless of disciplinary background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terms like 'levels' and 'nested' are used to describe relationships between components of conceptual systems (theories, models etc.). However, they have not been fully explored. This paper investigates levels to better understand how theories are structured and so how we may develop more useful theories and models to better support more effective practice. We find a horizontal dimension (represented by causal connections between concepts at one ontological level) and a vertical dimension (represented by connections of emergence between concepts of differing ontological levels). This view of emergence offers a new way to structurally distinguish between conceptual components of a theory, thus supporting a new approach to building theories that better reflects our systemic world. A third, perspectival, approach may be applied to aid in the understanding of both dimensions. A typology is proposed as are conventions for diagramming theories and new criteria for improving the structure of theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal's special issue is presented in which the guest editors discuss the use of the system dynamics approach (SD).

Abstract: Decision‐making is a complex process that typically includes a series of stages: identifying the issue, considering possible options, making judgements and then making a decision by combining information and values. The current status quo relies heavily on the informational aspect of decision‐making with little or no emphasis on the value positions that affect decisions. There is increasing realization of the importance of adopting rigorous methods for each stage such that the information, views and judgements of stakeholders and experts are used in a systematic and repeatable manner. Though there are several methodological textbooks which discuss a plethora of social science techniques, it is hard to judge the suitability of any given technique for a given decision problem. In decision‐making, the three critical aspects are “what” decision is to be made, “who” makes the decisions and “how” the decisions are made. The methods covered in this paper focus on “how” decisions can be made. We compare six techniques: Focus Group Discussion (FGD), Interviews, Q methodology, Multi‐criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), Nominal Group Technique and the Delphi technique specifically in the context of biodiversity conservation. All of these techniques (with the exception of MCDA) help in understanding human values and the underlying perspectives which shape decisions. Based on structured reviews of 423 papers covering all six methods, we compare the conceptual and logistical characteristics of the methods, and map their suitability for the different stages of the decision‐making process. While interviews and FGD are well‐known, techniques such the Nominal Group technique and Q methodology are relatively under‐used. In situations where conflict is high, we recommend using the Q methodology and Delphi technique to elicit judgements. Where conflict is low, and a consensus is needed urgently, the Nominal Group technique may be more suitable. We present a nuanced synthesis of methods aimed at users. The comparison of the different techniques might be useful for project managers, academics or practitioners in the planning phases of their projects and help in making better informed methodological choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this age of isolation, exacerbated by an increased number of natural disasters and their associated impact, we are faced with a deepening poverty of social connections and a high degree of polarisation on multiple counts. Designed for contexts ranging from workplaces to spiritual discourse, more and more instances of intentional conversations are surfacing across the world. It is only when we are able to appreciate the view of 'another', that we are truly able to step beyond the boundary of the self. In this paper, we explore a practitioner's perspective on three formats of gathering that are currently practiced at the International Society for the Systems Sciences. Using social and humanistic values, we outline how these three simple yet powerful techniques embody inclusivity, with the intention of inspiring its readers to consider hosting alternate forms of meetings in academic and organisational settings, thus creating grounds for compassionate understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on fourth World Conference on Complex Systems (WCCS) on April 22–25 in Ouarzazate, Morocco.

As neoliberalism is sinking into disrepute, states are responding to current crises by inroads on basic rights. This constellation adds urgency to the timeworn subject of statehood and its relationship to law and liberty. The paper addresses this subject by enhancing the neoliberal concept of an encased economy with James Coleman's concept of law as indicator of social change and Niklas Luhmann's functional differentiation. The resulting multifunctional liberalism associates liberties and rights with the autonomy of function systems—such as politics, economy or law—and envisions an ecosystem of multifunctional organizations able to navigate the full spectrum of functional differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles in the issue is presented on topics including the need for systems science to overcome its fragmented condition and to deepen its scientific foundations, phenomenological foundations of systems engineering and systems science, and principles from humanities that have relevance for thinking about systems.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy built his hopes for system theory on the growing visibility of systems in the world. The first introductory section of the 1968 edition of General System Theory is titled "Systems Everywhere." Half a century later, system theory has fallen into disrepute in several fields of study. It is targeted for its technocratic and governmental ambitions; it is depicted as an attempt to understand and reshape the world according to the system image of the world. This paper sketches how the social world has been analysed as a system—with a focus on hierarchy, predictability, and control. It proceeds to show how Von Bertalanffy's emphasis on the distinction between system and environment allows for the analysis of heterogeneity, indeterminacy, and uncontrollability. This paper thus makes a plea for a reflexive theory that focuses on problems that emerge despite the fact that our society imagines itself as a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Research funding bodies have significantly increased emphasis on the need for public involvement in research with the requirement to evidence effective methods and approaches to achieving this. Specific definitions and approaches within published research remain tokenistic and vague. Objective: The concept analysis explores and clarifies the nature and meaning of public involvement in health and social sciences research and identifies operational definitions which can be used to guide, develop and evaluate public involvement in research activity. Search strategy: A literature search was conducted using online databases. Systematic literature reviews and broader studies on the impact of PPI were included as was grey literature such as guidance from INVOLVE and research funding bodies. Limits were set to papers published in the last 10 years and in the English language. A concept analysis framework adapted from Rodgers (Concept Development in Nursing: Foundations, Techniques and Applications. London, UK: Saunders; 2000) and Walker and Avant (Strategies for Theory construction in Nursing. Boston, MA: Pearson Prentice Hall; 2005) was applied. Main results: Five operational definitions were developed from the concept analysis: undefined involvement; targeted consultation; embedded consultation; co‐production; and user‐led research. Typical examples of each approach were identified from the literature. Defining attributes included having clear and agreed meaning and purpose for any involvement; reciprocal relationships; and value and recognition of the expertise of all those involved. Conclusions: The authors argue the need for researchers to more explicitly incorporate and evaluate details of approaches used. Impact of public involvement on a research study should be identified when reporting on findings to prevent tokenistic practices where involvement is viewed as secondary to the core research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before commenting on the papers from a recent interdisciplinary gathering of scholars from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, a case is made for regional academia conversations today, because international conferences, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are still dominated by 'Western' traditions, discourse, and protocols. After touching on the relative stability or variability of phenomena and procedures in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, political and cultural questions are considered along with some of the ongoing consequences of the East Asian adoption of the European model of the modern research university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 20th century saw at least five regions of the world that gave themselves over to unspeakably evil regimes, each resulting in totalitarian dictatorships responsible for horrific suffering and deaths of millions of people. As part of a group of authors involved in various ways in the study of civil society and the common good, this author was invited to address what systems thinking could contribute to understandings of the emergence of such extensive evil. This article develops a qualitative model crafted to capture the generic structure and dynamics of the emergence of extensive evil in a society. Focusing on crucial stocks and flows and feedback loops, the map reveals eight areas where a healthy society may be vulnerable to the spread of such evil, with corresponding areas of resistance pushing back on its apparent inevitability. The paper concludes with reflections on values in systems thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have investigated factors thought to affect the total number of citations in various academic disciplines, and some general trends have emerged. However, there are still limited data for many fields, including aquatic sciences. Using papers published in 2003–2005 (n = 785), we investigated marine and freshwater biology articles to identify factors that may contribute to the probability of citation and for cumulative citation counts over 10 years. We found no relationships with probability of citation; however, we found evidence that for those that were cited at least once, cumulative citations were related to several factors. Articles cited by books received more citations than those never cited by books, which we hypothesized to be indicative of the impact an article may have in the field. We also found that articles first cited within 2 years of publication received more cumulative citations than those first cited after 2 years. We found no evidence that self‐citation (as the first citation) had a significant effect on total citations. Our findings were compared with previous studies in other disciplines, and it was found that aquatic science citation patterns are comparable to fields in science and technology but less so to humanities and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis to examine the characteristics and evolutionary trends of open access (OA) publications in natural and social sciences. We use data recorded by Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Journal Citation Reports during 2001–2015 as the main source. We then comparatively analyse the characteristics of natural and social sciences in terms of historical evolution, main contributors, and distribution of OA journals and publications across different languages, disciplines, and impact factor quartiles. Our results suggest that both natural and social sciences experienced dramatic growth of OA journals since 2009, but the share of social science OA journals within journal impact factor quartile 1 is much lower than that of natural sciences. While natural and social sciences share some similarities in OA publishing activities, such as main countries of contribution, they differ greatly in dimensions such as OA ratio across specific disciplines, countries, and publishing languages. We acknowledge that OA publishing offers a level playing field for traditionally disadvantaged languages, countries, and scientific disciplines, but meanwhile, the advancement of high‐quality OA publishing needs more targeted and sophisticated approaches to tackle differences in natural and social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author announces his resignation as editor of the journal as of January 2021, and enumerates his accomplishments during his tenure.

This is the first of a series of papers on the stages of critical systems practice. Critical systems practice is a multimethodology that seeks to employ the ideas developed in critical systems thinking to intervene in and improve complex real‐world problem situations. It has four stages—Explore (the problem situation), Produce (an intervention strategy), Intervene (flexibly) and Check (on progress)—called to mind as EPIC. The aim is to set out where thinking has reached on the best way to carry out each of these stages and to invite comment on what more needs doing. The first stage, Explore, is concerned with how to start a multimethodological study. If this is done well, it can bring to the fore opportunities for a full and in‐depth systems intervention. If done badly, it can lead to practice that makes the problem situation worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objective: Acquired brain injury (ABI) can result in considerable life changes. Having choice and control over daily life is valued by people following ABI. This meta‐synthesis will analyse and integrate international research exploring perspectives of choice and control in daily life following ABI. Methods: Databases were searched from 1980 to 13 January 2022 for eligible qualitative studies. After duplicates were removed, 22,768 studies were screened by title and abstract, and 241 studies received full‐text assessment with 56 studies included after pearling. Study characteristics and findings were extracted that related to personal perspectives on choice and control by people with an ABI (including author interpretation and quotes). Data from each study were coded and then segments of coded data across the studies were compared to create multiple broad categories. Findings: Findings were then reduced from categories into 3 overarching themes with 12 subthemes. These themes were: (1) feeling like a second‐class citizen; (2) reordering life and (3) choosing a path. Participants with an ABI tussled between their feelings of loss following brain injury and their thinking about how they start to regain control and become agents of their own choices. The themes describe their sense of self, their changed self and their empowered self in relation to 'choice and control'. Conclusions: Re‐engaging with choice and control after ABI is dynamic and can be challenging. Health professionals and supporters need to facilitate a gradual and negotiated return to agency for people following ABI. A sensitive and person‐centred approach is needed that considers the readiness of the person with ABI to reclaim choice and control at each stage of their recovery. Clear service or process indicators that are built on lived experience research are needed to facilitate changes in service delivery that are collaborative and inclusive. Patient or Public Contribution: This review included the voices of 765 people living with ABI and was conducted by a diverse team of allied health professionals with practice knowledge and research experience with people following ABI. Twenty‐nine of the 56 included studies had participants contributing to their design or analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Value chain interventions have become widespread throughout the international development sector over the last 20 years, and there is a need to evaluate their effectiveness in improving women's welfare across multiple dimensions. Agricultural value chains are influenced by socio‐cultural norms and gender dynamics that have an impact on the distribution of resources, benefits, and access to opportunities. While women play a critical role in agriculture, they are generally confined to the least‐valued parts of the value chain with the lowest economic returns, depending on the local, social and institutional contexts. Objectives: The review assesses the effectiveness of approaches, strategies and interventions focused on women's engagement in agricultural value chains that lead to women's economic empowerment in low‐ and middle‐income countries. It explores the contextual barriers and facilitators that determine women's participation in value chains and ultimately impact their effectiveness. Search Methods: We searched completed and on‐going studies from Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection (Social Sciences Citation Index [SSCI], Science Citation Index Expanded [SCI‐EXPANDED], Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Science [CPCI‐S], Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities [CPCI‐SSH], and Emerging Sources Citation Index [ESCI]), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, EconLit, Business Source Premier, APA PsycInfo, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane, Database of Systematic Reviews, CAB Abstracts and Sociological Abstracts. We also searched relevant websites such as Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR); the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); AgriProFocus; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF); Donor Committee for Enterprise Development; the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); the International Labour Organisation (ILO); the Netherlands Development Organisation; USAID; the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation; the International Food Policy Research Institute; World Agroforestry; the International Livestock Research Institute; the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS); AGRIS; the IMMANA grant database; the 3ie impact evaluation database; Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA); The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J‐PAL); the World Bank IEG evaluations; the USAID Development Data Library; Experience Clearinghouse; the proceedings of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy conference; the proceedings of the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference; the proceedings of the North East Universities Development Consortium (NEUDC) Conference; and the World Bank Economic Review. The database search was conducted in March 2022, and the website search was completed in August 2022. Selection Criteria: The review includes value chain interventions evaluating the economic empowerment outcomes. The review includes effectiveness studies (experimental and non‐experimental studies with a comparison group) and process evaluations. Data Collection and Analysis: Two review authors independently assessed studies for inclusion, extracted data, critically appraised the studies, and synthesised findings. Results: We found that value chain interventions are successful in improving the economic conditions of their intended beneficiaries. The interventions were found to improve women's economic outcomes such as income, assets holdings, productivity, and savings, but these effects were small in size and limited by low confidence in methodological quality. The meta‐analysis suggests that this occurs more via the acquisition of skills and improved inputs, rather than through improvement in access to profitable markets. The qualitative evidence on interventions points to the persistence of cultural barriers and other constraints. Those interventions implemented in Sub‐Saharan Africa and South Asia are consistently more successful for all outcomes considered, although there are few studies conducted in other areas of the world. Conclusions: The review concludes that value chain interventions empower women, but perhaps to a lesser extent than expected. Economic empowerment does not immediately translate into empowerment within families and communities. Interventions should either moderate their expectations of empowerment goals, or they should be implemented in a way that ensures higher rates of participation among women and the acquisition of greater decision‐making power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a brief overview of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's contributions to the evolution of the fields of biology and systems theory and the significance of his work in relation to contemporary developments across a broad spectrum of disciplines. In documenting some of the ways in which his insights have remained relevant, inspiring scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields, it also addresses the philosophical and ethical implications inherent in Bertalanffy's work. Perhaps one of the most striking dimensions of his writing is his passionate critique of mechanistic science, which he sees as dehumanizing and as responsible for many of the challenges confronting humanity. In contrast, he emphasized the humanistic orientation of his conception of general systems theory as an approach that could provide guidelines and support for addressing these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Geographer is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the binary code for functional systems sustainable development, the sustainable skills for work in the digital age, and the business networks.

Background: The term 'care‐experienced' refers to anyone who is currently in care or has been in care at any stage in their life. A complex interplay of factors leads to care‐experienced children and young people (CECYP) experiencing poorer oral health and access to dental care than their peers. A rapid review of the co‐production of health and social care research with vulnerable children and young people (CYP) was carried out to inform the development of a co‐produced research project exploring the oral health behaviours and access to dental services of CECYP. Here, 'co‐production' refers to the involvement of CYP in the planning or conduct of research with explicit roles in which they generate ideas, evidence and research outputs. Aim: To learn how to meaningfully involve vulnerable CYP in the co‐production of health and social science research. Objectives: To identify: Different approaches to facilitating the engagement of vulnerable CYP in co‐production of health and social science research; different activities carried out in such approaches, challenges to engaging vulnerable CYP in co‐production of health and social science research and ways to overcome them and areas of best practice in relation to research co‐production with vulnerable CYP. Search Strategy: A rapid review of peer‐reviewed articles was conducted in six databases (MEDLINE, Embase, SocINDEX, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Web of Science) and grey literature to identify studies that engaged vulnerable CYP in co‐approaches to health and social research. Main Results: Of 1394 documents identified in the search, 40 were included and analysed. A number of different approaches to co‐production were used in the studies. The CYP was involved in a range of activities, chiefly the development of data collection tools, data collection and dissemination. Individual challenges for CYP and researchers, practical and institutional factors and ethical considerations impacted the success of co‐production. Discussion and Conclusion: Co‐production of health and social science with vulnerable CYP presents challenges to researchers and CYP calling for all to demonstrate reflexivity and awareness of biases, strengths and limitations. Used appropriately and well, co‐production offers benefits to researchers and CYP and can contribute to research that reflects the needs of vulnerable CYP. Adherence to the key principles of inclusion, safeguarding, respect and well‐being facilitates this approach. Patient and Public Contribution: Members of our patient and public involvement and stakeholder groups contributed to the interpretation of the review findings. This manuscript was written together with a young care leaver, Skye Boswell, who is one of the authors. She contributed to the preparation of the manuscript, reviewing the findings and their interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of asylum policy under the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments between 2008 and 2013 and evaluates its impact on irregular maritime arrivals and deaths at sea. In addition to providing an account of asylum policy during this political epoch - and the dramatic rise in irregular maritime arrivals and deaths at seas - we also evaluate these policies in an effort to distil some broader public policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although current systems‐based methods of organization development provide some benefit to improving the ability of organizations to reach their goals, consultants are continually seeking to improve the way they may be used to support internal and external clients. This paper reports on an emerging systems‐based analytical method, "Integrative Propositional Analysis," and its use for improving strategic plans leading to improvements in the capacity of an academic research institution. This preliminary report suggests a new structural perspective that may be useful for consultants and leaders interested in improving the usefulness of strategic plans for improving organizational effectiveness so that organizations may better fulfil their missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering activity possess robust methods for designing, realizing, and managing complex engineered systems. As engineered systems become more complex, engineering activity's complexity is growing along with it. Current engineering management tools and methods, although they serve well for many engineering activities, begin to fail when the complexity of the engineered systems exceeds a threshold. Part of the problem is that social, organizational, and psychological sciences have been integrated in limited capacity into engineering activity. Further, the methods and tools for managing engineering activities tend to be rigid and often do not adapt well to complex engineering environments. To address these limitations, the author proposes for the use of the purposeful human activity systems framework as a systems perspective on engineering activity. The framework provides a flexible approach to managing engineering activity by enabling the selection and application and effectiveness measurement of the best social, organizational, and psychological methods and tools according to the specific needs of the engineering organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, there are many perspectives aiming to account for what the field of information systems (IS) is or should be. For some, IS is conceived as a reference and stable discipline with dominant or core knowledge to export to other disciplines. To others, IS still requires a more eclectic/fluid perspective to enable IS to be adaptable to emerging challenges and possibilities. In both types of perspectives, there is a need to appreciate fully how IS knowledge has effectively unfolded through time in broader contexts of social sciences. In line with an emerging research orientation to conceive the IS field as both dominant and eclectic, we propose a systemic framework to account for these stages. We identify key IS knowledge concepts/themes emerging from analysing 4100 abstracts from articles in eight IS journals covering European Union/US regions over the last 25 years. Our findings suggest that such knowledge does not accumulate, but rather, some IS key concepts like systems, information and use resurface over time, leading to draw important implications for IS education, research and practice. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Methods in Ecology & Evolution is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Introduction: Very few pragmatic and community‐level effectiveness trials integrate the use of qualitative research over all stages of the trial, to inform trial design, implementation optimization, results interpretation and post‐trial policy recommendations. This is despite the growing demand for mixed methods research from funding agencies and awareness of the vital importance of qualitative and mixed methods research for understanding trial successes and challenges. Discussion: We offer examples from work we have been involved in to illustrate how qualitative research conducted within trials can reveal vital contextual factors that influence implementation and outcomes, can enable an informed adaptation of trials as they are being conducted and can lead to the formulation of theory regarding the social and behavioural pathways of intervention, while also enabling community engagement in trial design and implementation. These examples are based on published findings from qualitative studies embedded within two ongoing large‐scale studies demonstrating the population‐level impacts of universal HIV testing and treatment strategies in southern and eastern Africa, and a qualitative study conducted alongside a clinical trial testing the adaptation, acceptability and experience of short‐cycle therapy in children and adolescents living with HIV. Conclusions: We advocate for the integration of qualitative with clinical and survey research methods in pragmatic clinical and community‐level trials and implementation studies, and for increasing visibility of qualitative and mixed methods research in medical journals. Qualitative research from trials ideally should be published along with clinical outcome data, either integrated into the "main" trial papers or published concurrently in the same journal issue. Integration of qualitative research within trials can help not only to understand the why behind success or failure of interventions in different contexts, but also inform the adaptation of interventions that can facilitate their success, and lead to new alternative strategies and to policy changes that may be vital for achieving public health goals, including the end of AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requirements engineering is a social process and while working together, stakeholders develop socio‐technical relationships. Socio‐technical aspects such as communication (information exchange among members) and awareness (knowledge of others) were discussed in literature, but little is known with respect to their role in requirements engineering activities. Therefore, requirements‐driven collaboration (RDC), particularly on the relevance of socio‐technical aspects, warrants further investigation. The authors aim to fill this gap by conducting a systematic literature review on these two aspects. This review covers planning (defining objectives and search strategy), execution (study search and selection), and interpretation of the findings (results and discussions). Findings revealed more studies on communication than on awareness. Two aspects of communication covered for RDC in literature are: (i) preferred communication medium, and (ii) communication patterns of teams. However, for awareness the aspects affecting awareness and vice versa were studied for RDC. Further investigation indicated the interdependence of awareness and communication and that distance does not affect team's awareness. The authors discuss implications for software practitioners in terms of enhancing their performance by considering the role of information brokers, and identifying central and emergent members etc. Researchers can strengthen the domain by providing more empirical results on interdependence of socio‐technical aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite advances in theory, often driven by feminist ethicists, research ethics struggles in practice to adequately account for and respond to the agency and autonomy of people considered vulnerable in the research context. We argue that shifts within feminist research ethics scholarship to better characterise and respond to autonomy and agency can be bolstered by further grounding in discourses from the social sciences, in work that confirms the complex nature of human agency in contexts of structural and other sources of vulnerability. We discuss some of the core concepts and critiques emerging from the literature on women and children's agency in under‐resourced settings, highlighting calls to move from individualistic to relational models of agency, and to recognise the ambiguous, value‐laden, and heterogeneous nature of the concept. We then draw out what these conceptual shifts might mean for research ethics obligations and guidance, illustrating our analysis using a case vignette based on research ethics work conducted in South Africa. We conclude that if research practices are to be supportive of agency, it will be crucial to scrutinise the moral judgements which underpin accounts of agency, derive more situated definitions of and responses to agency, and enable people and participants to influence these based on their own experiences and self‐perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author presents a call for papers on system research and theory of systems and their applications like artificial intelligence to be published in a special issue of the journal.

In the article, the author discusses his plans as new editor-in-chief of the journal as of January 2021, like striving to increase the citation rates of published papers and the use of emerging technologies in finding creative and innovative ways to communicate systems research.

Policy PointsThe historic 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization decision has created a new public policy landscape in the United States that will restrict access to legal and safe abortion for a significant proportion of the population.Policies restricting access to abortion bring with them significant threats and harms to health by delaying or denying essential evidence‐based medical care and increasing the risks for adverse maternal and infant outcomes, including death.Restrictive abortion policies will increase the number of children born into and living in poverty, increase the number of families experiencing serious financial instability and hardship, increase racial inequities in socioeconomic security, and put significant additional pressure on under‐resourced social welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with other aquaculture issues, attention to human and social dimensions is lagging behind. Sectoral development, policy, and programmatic factors have created inequities and sub‐optimal social outcomes, which are jeopardizing the broader contribution the sector could make to human well‐being. Human rights in aquaculture are at the core of this article, which argues that aquaculture development, as a major economic and food producing sector, needs to be about human development. The article reviews: the application of human rights in aquaculture, and the related right to decent work; the notions of justice and equity including the idea of Blue Justice and its relevance in aquaculture; and ethics and social license to operate with the challenges that business ethics and public acceptance pose to the sector. It also reviews how these issues affect people: women, along with slow progress in gender equality in the sector; youth and their engagement in aquaculture, while noting that 'youth' does not equate to "jobs" and requires the lifting of many more societal hurdles for their full participation in the sector; indigenous people and local ecological knowledge—a precious asset for future aquaculture as well as the survival and enhancement of the cultural value of aquaculture; and people with disabilities and other minorities who have yet to become fully visible and accounted for in aquaculture development. Redressing human and social issues in aquaculture, and placing people at the center of aquaculture development requires a fundamental change from business as usual. To humanize aquaculture development, a renewed human relationship with aquaculture is proposed, which is founded on recognizing substantive equality and agency, embracing intersectionality, that is, the multiple social dimensions of identity and interaction, and valuing cross‐disciplinary knowledge systems. It would be implemented through new, inclusive, business models, social provisioning approaches, and procedural justice and governance mechanisms for overcoming inequalities. Public, private, and non‐state actors will need to be involved, inclusive of small‐scale farmers, women, youth, people with disabilities, and indigenous communities as key groups. Six key messages conclude the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so‐called "empirical turn" in bioethics gave rise to extensive theoretical and methodological debates and has significantly shaped the research landscape from two decades ago until the present day. Attentive observers of the evolution of the bioethical research field now notice a new trend towards the inclusion of data science methods for the treatment of ethical research questions. This new research domain of "digital bioethics" encompasses both studies replacing (or complementing) socio‐empirical research on bioethical topics ("empirical digital bioethics") and argumentative approaches towards normative questions in the healthcare domain ("argumentative digital bioethics"). This article draws on insights taken from the debate on the "empirical turn" for sounding out perspectives for the newly developing field of "digital bioethics." We particularly discuss the disciplinary boundaries, chances and challenges, and potentially undesirable developments of the research field. The article closes with concrete suggestions on which debates need to be initiated and which measures need to be taken so that the path forward of "digital bioethics" will be a scientific success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows: (1) To evaluate the reporting quality of systematic reviews published in Chinese social science journals against the PRISMA and MOOSE standards; (2) To evaluate the methodology quality of systematic reviews published in Chinese social science journals against the AMSTAR‐2 and DART standards; and (3) To analyze other characteristics of systematic reviews published in Chinese social science journals using content analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented in which the editor discusses topics on the future of humanistic, the role music school as a social ecological system to enhance community connectivity and resilience, and artificial intelligence.

Alongside claims that 'the methodological pluralism debate has been won', worries grow just why the victory is not shared by the wider social sciences and applied disciplines. Remedies are sought but mainly tinkering on presentation tactics. Against this status quo, this article argues for a critical reflection on theoretic approaches to methodological pluralism. Seemingly convenient for legitimating diverse methodologies though, the Paradigm root metaphor has from the very beginning trapped methodological pluralism theorising in a no‐win battle. Drawing on Kuhn's later perspective of scientific change as 'proliferation of specialties', this article posits that the enhanced evolutionist metaphor fits better with methodological pluralism by depicting the increasing variety of methodologies as deepened division of labour and combined‐use of methodologies as enlarging human competence. In Kuhn's spirit, this article calls for a strongly pluralist, responsive approach, not so much in flexibly 'managing paradigms' or 'living with incommensurability' as in reflexively deliberating the comparative advantages of adopting different theoretic approaches in terms of efficacy in facilitating compelling theorising and sharing ideas with practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Attempts to conduct systematic reviews of ethical arguments in bioethics are fundamentally misguided. All areas of enquiry need thorough and informative literature reviews, and efforts to bring transparency and systematic methods to bioethics are to be welcomed. Nevertheless, the raw materials of bioethical articles are not suited to methods of systematic review. The eclecticism of philosophy may lead to suspicion of philosophical methods in bioethics. Because bioethics aims to influence medical and scientific practice it is tempting to adopt scientific language and methods. One manifestation is the increasing innovation in, and use of, systematic reviews of ethical arguments in bioethics. Yet bioethics, as a broadly philosophical area of enquiry, is unsuited to systematic review. Bioethical arguments are evaluative, so notions of quality and bias are inapplicable. Bioethical argument is conceptual rather than numerical, and the classification of concepts is itself a process of argument that cannot aspire to neutrality. Any 'systematic review' of ethical arguments in bioethics thus falls short of that name. Furthermore, labels matter. Although the bioethics research community may find that adopting the language and the outward methods of clinical science offers apparent prospects of credibility, policy influence and funding, we argue that such misdirection carries risks and is unlikely to pay dividends in the long term. Bioethical sources are amenable to the review methods of the social sciences, and it is on these methods that specific methods of bioethics literature review should be built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the natural and social world, some fairly advanced and apparently robust systems destroy themselves without discernible reason, function, or purpose. Whereas such and similar cases have been discussed within specific branches of scholarships, the attempts to propose and test a general theory of self‐destruction in complex systems remain, to our knowledge, a thing of the future. To move in this direction, we suggest that the conflicts between explicit stratification, thorough functional differentiation and tacit segmentation within complex systems, are likely to provoke their unintended self‐annihilation. Furthermore, we hypothesize that whenever such systems collapse, it is the circular co‐dependency of noisy signaling, redundancy, and semantic inflation that sets self‐destructive mechanisms in motion. We illustrate our preliminary findings with examples from social, natural, and artificial life; reexamine autoimmunity as a popular model of systemic self‐destruction; and indicate potential avenues of empirical research aimed at supporting, qualifying or disproving the underlying hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desire to ensure that the benefits of successful small‐scale social innovation are more widely available has led to a plethora of frameworks that seek to scale such innovations. We review 20 extant frameworks for scaling and distinguished four directions: up (producing changes in laws, policies, institutions or norms), down (resource allocation to support implementation), in (ensuring organizations have the capacity to deliver the type and number of good practices required) and out (geographically replicating or broadening the range or scope of good practices). In addition to these directions of scaling a generic pathway, or process, to achieve scaling is also discernible across many of the frameworks reviewed. This involves five phases: identifying, planning, implementing, learning and adapting. We stress the need for a more dynamic and systemic approach to scaling, as well as one which anticipates, addresses and assesses the extent to which scaling is inclusive of marginalized groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term Anthropocene initially emerged from the Earth System science community in the early 2000s, denoting a concept that the Holocene Epoch has terminated as a consequence of human activities. First associated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it was then more closely linked with the Great Acceleration in industrialization and globalization from the 1950s that fundamentally modified physical, chemical, and biological signals in geological archives. Since 2009, the Anthropocene has been evaluated by the Anthropocene Working Group, tasked with examining it for potential inclusion in the Geological Time Scale. Such inclusion requires a precisely defined chronostratigraphic and geochronological unit with a globally synchronous base and inception, with the mid‐twentieth century being geologically optimal. This reflects an Earth System state in which human activities have become predominant drivers of modifications to the stratigraphic record, making it clearly distinct from the Holocene. However, more recently, the term Anthropocene has also become used for different conceptual interpretations in diverse scholarly fields, including the environmental and social sciences and humanities. These are often flexibly interpreted, commonly without reference to the geological record, and diachronous in time; they often extend much further back in time than the mid‐twentieth century. These broader conceptualizations encompass wide ranges and levels of human impacts and interactions with the environment. Here, we clarify what the Anthropocene is in geological terms and compare the proposed geological (chronostratigraphic) definition with some of these broader interpretations and applications of the term "Anthropocene," showing both their overlaps and differences. Plain Language Summary: The Anthropocene concept, that modern human impacts on Earth have been sufficient to bring in a new geological epoch, is only two decades old. In that short time, its use has grown explosively, not only in the Earth sciences but also far more widely to spread through the sciences generally, to spill over into the social sciences, arts, and humanities. This has led to welcome discussions between diverse scholarly communities, though also to some very different interpretations of the Anthropocene, when interpreted through different disciplinary lenses. Notably, the geological interpretation used as basis for a potential unit of the Geological Time Scale, of a time unit starting planet‐wide and synchronously in the mid‐twentieth century with the massive changes triggered by industrialization and globalization, jars with interpretations of an Anthropocene that ranges back many millennia to encompass early human environmental impacts. We analyze and compare these diverse standpoints and their effect upon evolving disciplinary practices, and discuss approaches that could make communication clearer and enhance cross‐disciplinary exchanges. Key Points: The Anthropocene concept developed in the Earth System science community is closely consistent with its proposed chronostratigraphic (geological) definitionA wide range of other meanings of the Anthropocene subsequently emerged that represent inherently valid, but partly different, conceptsCross‐disciplinary discussion is encouraged to help resolve issues of meaning and communication in this important area [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]