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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]