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Founded in the second half of the twentieth century, the young European Union was driven by the experience of two world wars which had devastated big parts of Europe and traumatized its population. For some decades its peace-building impulse kept the organization going. After the fall of the Iron Curtain the idea of a common market remained the dominant motivation of the EU. However, the Union’s enlargement in the early 2000s to include almost 30 member states rendered it a highly diverse organization, without sufficiently adapting its structures and processes to this dramatic change. Since neither the insistence on homogeneity and discipline, nor old forms of nationalism, offers an adequate answer to these crises, I present adiversity management model(often used in describing ecosystems), to characterize, examine and understand the EU’s diversity problems and the kind of solutions or directions of change that may be drawn from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education research frequently refers to the complex external conditions that give our old-fashioned universities a good reason to change. The underlying theoretical assumption of such framing is that organizations are open systems. This paper presents an alternative view, derived from the theory of social systems autopoiesis. It proposes that organizations, being open systems, are yet operationally closed, as all their activities and interactions with the environment are aspects of just one process: the recursive production of themselves, according to a pattern of their own identity. It is their identity that captures exactly what can and what cannot be sustained in their continuous self-production. Examining the organizational identity of universities within the theoretical framework of autopoiesis may hence shed new light on their resistance to change, explaining it as a systemic and social phenomenon, rather than an individual and psychological one. Since all processes of an autopoietic system are processes of its self-production, this paper argues that in the case of traditional European universities, the identity consists in the intertwinement of only two processes: (1) introducing continuous change in the scope of scientific knowledge and (2) educating new generations of scholars, who will carry on this activity. This surprisingly leaves at the wayside seemingly the most obvious 'use of the university': the adequate education of students for the job market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As advertisers' media spend on online advertising continues to increase, there exists a need to update the means by which we understand and critique advertising. Reliance on textual analysis and visuality is of little use in a milieu increasingly predicated on technics and surveillance. A post-hegemonic critique is advanced here that argues for a stronger understanding of feedback relations and the means by which we as users contribute to heterogeneous advertising experiences. This paper progresses and updates Dallas Smythe's (1977) audience-as-commodity argument. It examines developments in online behavioural advertising that employs deep-packet inspection (DPI), which has caused consternation to technologically savvy consumers, privacy activists and regulators. Drawing upon the case study of Phorm that received national media attention in the UK and policy-maker attention in Europe, this paper highlights key features of DPI-based advertising, non-personally identifiable profiling and their implications for contemporary commercial autopoietic feedback relationships where users themselves are a fundamental component of online behavioural advertising practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Handcrafted practices of young designers, capable of acting as draftsman, craftsman-producers and selling agents of their own creations, are triggering the revaluation and the transformation of hand-crafted activity in Europe. The overview of the situation, which has reached the highest point in the occasion of the design week in Milan, also appears in other Mediterranean countries and in some Latin American countries, but with different distinctive features. However, it delineates a new relationship between design and handicraft, so that is convenient in an ambivalent way. This specific kind of "hand-crafted practice", defined "self-production", sometimes "new-handicraft", again "technological handicraft" or "electronic handicraft", differs from the traditional practice for its progressed or "advanced" dimension, that is enable to interpret crafts, techniques and expression changes, harking back to the union between technical skill and design, manual aptitude and creative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates an ontology of human rights as immanent potential produced outside of modernist frameworks. We begin with a consideration of the political and juridical subject of human rights, the subjectus, whose relation to sovereign law is one of submission and supplication. We then examine three registers of 'the law' that bear on the question of the subject, with a view to highlighting the distinction between law as a meditative, autopoietically sustained sovereign force, and as immanent production. Building on this conception of law as pure productivity, we propose an ontology of the subjectum for whom human rights are idiosyncratically produced acts of becoming or, in Spinozist terms, expressions of creative life force. While state and juridical forms may, through codification and re-presentation, attempt to contain and turn such open-ended possibility to their own ends, the material force of the subjectum, through its immanent expression of rights, carries the liberative potential to collapse sovereign force into its own expressive capacities. It is proposed, accordingly, that rights neither require nor depend on the ability to petition the state for legal status, but rather are produced within the forms of daily life of the multitude, that internally diversified social subject whose constitution and political action is premised neither on identity nor on appeals to sovereign power, but rather on what its singularities have in common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts by summarising major theoretical debates regarding European polity and governance. It highlights the role of statehood in those debates and suggests moving beyond the constraints of institutionalist and constructivist perspectives by adopting specific notions from the theory of autopoietic social systems. The following part describes the EU political system as self-referential, functionally differentiated from the system of European law, and internally differentiated between European institutions and Member State governments. Although the Union transgresses its nation-state segmentation, the notions of statehood and democratic legitimacy continue to inform legal and political semantics of the EU and specific responses to the Union's systemic tensions, such as the policy of differentiated integration legislated by the flexibility clauses. The democratic deficit of instrumental legitimation justified by outcomes, the most recent example of which is the Lisbon Treaty, subsequently reveals the level of EU functional differentiation and the impossibility of fostering the ultimate construction of a normatively integrated and culturally united European polity. It shows a much more profound social dynamics of differentiation at the level of emerging European society—dynamics which do not adopt the concept of the European polity as an encompassing metaphor of this society, but makes it part of self-referential and self-limiting semantics of the functionally differentiated European political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culture trap is the tendency to put cultural markers and habits above the demands of reason or compassion. It can reduce receptivity to new ideas and trigger Phoenix Cycles of catastrophe and renaissance. System research is then complicated by the historiographic problem of continuity and change, because there are no objective criteria for deciding whether "the system" survived or was destroyed by the catastrophe. This paper explores the differences between uncertainty emergence and self-organizing emergence using the concept of a "possibility space" to clarify the relationship between anti-causal events and causal states, i.e., the meso-history of conjuncture. Conjunctures are interpreted ex post in the context of deep time. The paper distinguishes autopoiesis, i.e., a new instance of a species, from elaboration, i.e., the origin of new species. It also describes a spectrum ranging from metastability, in which the possibility space is time invariant, to innovation, in which the possibility space is a synergetic artefact of changing habits and beliefs. Metastable systems are computably complex; we can make predictions across the boundaries of successive conjunctures, subject to statistical uncertainties. Innovative systems are uncomputably complex; although we can make predictions within a conjuncture and anticipate bottlenecks, we cannot predict beyond the conjuncture because conceptual taxonomies will not be conserved. The relationship between adaptive potential and constraint remains fundamental, although debates about whether the system is resilient are meaningless. System boundaries are artefacts of a dynamic consensus. The analytical sciences use methods designed for metastable systems, whereas the discursive sciences presume innovation. These methods predispose researchers to different space-time perspectives that, in turn, make it possible to generalize about their roles in different policy arenas. Tensions between analytical and discursive scientists become more understandable and manageable if these historiographic issues are clarified. The relationship between innovation and metastability is illustrated in an appendix on the emergence of social complexity in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the so-called new music in Europe after World War II, which was based on the idea of progress and aimed at a complete rationalization of composing and supposed structural listening. The emphasis of Theodor Adorno on the idea of new music as musical objectivation of dynamic subjectivity is already delineated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's criticism, namely in the identification pattern which was carried out by a new music, leading from the empfindsam style to the so-called sonata forms, a music which broke with mechanical conception related to the idea of a given Harmonia Mundi. The introduction of the concept of autopoiesis throws new light upon the theory of new music in the 1950s, which is dominated by this concept years before the term was coined in biology and sociology. In fact, while the musical expressionism of around 1910, insofar as it gave rise to a new musical language which should emanate from the depths of subjectivity, led the identification pattern to a most radical level, the serial and aleatoric music from the 1950s aimed, on the contrary, at the suppression of the composer's subjectivity from the process of composition. This clarifies Adorno's critic of serial thinking in his article "Das Altern der Neuen Musik."

Most attempts to define life have concentrated on individual theories, mentioning others hardly at all, but here we compare all of the major current theories. We begin by asking how we know that an entity is alive, and continue by describing the contributions of La Mettrie, Burke, Leduc, Herrera, Bahadur, D'Arcy Thompson and, especially, Schrödinger, whose book What is Life? is a vital starting point. We then briefly describe and discuss (M, R) systems, the hypercycle, the chemoton, autopoiesis and autocatalytic sets. All of these incorporate the idea of circularity to some extent, but all of them fail to take account of mechanisms of metabolic regulation, which we regard as crucial if an organism is to avoid collapsing into a mass of unregulated reactions. In a final section we study the extent to which each of the current theories can aid in the search for a more complete theory of life, and explain the characteristics of metabolic control analysis that make it essential for an adequate understanding of organisms., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier B.V.)