This chapter begins by reviewing the Darwinian account of biological innovation, which is based on what Ernst Mayr calls “population thinking” and posits two kinds of key mechanisms underlying the innovation process: variation and selection. The chapter then argues that the increasingly popular tendency to adapt this account to provide the foundations for a theory of human sociocultural innovat...

From our earliest practice of family therapy at medical schools, private family therapy institutes, and public agencies, our work with difficult populations that do not respond to current treatment technologies has reminded us of the inadequacies of our theoretical descriptions and the limitations of our expertise. This work has influenced our current, evolving clinical theory as we move from t...

Social media are said to offer seemingly endless ways of connecting with people in a variety of online spaces. The mediated form that such communication takes has re-opened many theoretical debates regarding the status of relationships that are organized and managed online. In this paper we seek to explore these issues through the lens of topological thinking, and particularly through the work ...

This article is a critique of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s report, Grand Challenges for Engineering, based upon the “technocratic view” of progress as defined by historian Leo Marx and as exemplified by the public works of Robert Moses, including the 1964 World’s Fair, as well as technological determinist narratives on the digital age drawn from contemporary culture. While the soc...

This paper explores the history of ‘the social’ in information science. It traces the influence of social scientific thinking on the development of the field’s intellectual base. The continuing appropriation of both theoretical and methodological insights from domains such as social studies of science, science and technology studies, and socio-technical systems is discussed.

The West produces a lot of strategic thinking, most it ad hoc responses to present stimuli not only rarely analytically or strategically useful but often damaging existing and theory as consequence. Lukas Milevski applies resilience contrasts with its opposite, social utility. Resilience is explained applied the particulars thought. utility recognised, notably in attracting attention, which eve...