Marketing systems research has the potential to contribute to the well-being of individuals, communities and our environment but we need to ensure that we do not mechanistically apply inadequate approaches. This article identifies tensions and limitations within the developing marketing systems theory and literature. Using the tools of critical realism, we aim to critique the omissions in the metatheory of marketing systems research and then put forward CR to reconstruct a more comprehensive basis for the development of marketing systems theory. (...) We draw attention to the failings of current metatheory in its use of conflationary approaches to theorizing before setting out the features of a CR informed study of marketing systems. (shrink)

Bhaskar's philosophy supports society via a process of homeostasis to resist socioecological system disintegration by developing its values and ethics in response to endogenous and exogenous change. To the contrary, positivist (first generation) and hermeneuticist (second generation) approaches to systems theory have distorted humanity's mechanism of homeostasis because, amongst other things, they disallow the use of facts to guide values/actions. Since acting on knowledge is, ceteris paribus, a given in Bhaskar's approach, resolving socioecological system problems involves correcting the method of (...) homeostasis (our method of finding knowledge and acting on it) rather than correcting the consequences of the failure of homeostasis (the poorly informed action or inaction). This is reminiscent of Gandhi's approach to social transformation in which we trust the means to arrive at appropriate ends and it releases activists from having to be keepers of the moral high-ground or having to try to change people's behaviour. (shrink)

This article aims to study the intersection between critical realism and complexity theories through the existing literature on complex systems via an engagement with Luhmann’s autopoiesis. With reference to the philosophies of substance and persistence, I build on previous critical realist scholarship and provide an explanation for what the literature has only noted as the limitations and potentials of autopoiesis for complex systems thinking and its compatibility with Critical Realism. By highlighting how Luhmann’s autopoiesis is not a trans-immanent/ perdurantist-exdurantist system, (...) I show first how a trans immanent system through the method of calibration entails a complex causation involving objects in the environment of systems and not just within their boundaries. Second, I explain how a trans-immanent system fits with CR via the Morphogenetic Régulation framework by exploring the theme of crisis in terms of the movement from inadequate to adequate understanding of objects. (shrink)

The naturally occurring complexity of the social and natural worlds, along with rising challenges in the social, health and environmental domains, makes retroduction a compelling mode of inference...

Michelle’s thesis explores the extent to which a researcher could contribute to change by engaging leaders in conversations that might intensify commitment to or the direction of their actions around socio-environmental decline in Bermuda as a country historically organised in the tradition of an entrepreneurial for-profit enterprise. The framing of a space to reflect on highlighted the significance of time that led to the bricolage design of a heuristic device called a moon gate. Time, the keystone of the moon gate, (...) created a prism lighting up the twists and turns of kaleidoscopic images of the chaos of the markets and the creative diversity of human and nonhuman participants. She undertook a philosophical approach with her study of the contested space of time around sensitivity to maintaining a fulcrum point based on the wellbeing of people and planet. (shrink)

U.S. doctrines have introduced a third approach within Operational Art, called the design approach, which has evoked military professional and academic debate as well as influenced NATO doctrines. Allied Joint Doctrine for Operational-level Planning states that a Force Commander should choose one out of three approaches when conducting Operational Art and conducting operational planning: a traditional, a systemic or a design approach. The difference between the causalist- and the systemic- approach concerns the clash between reductionism and holism, but the difference (...) between the design- and the systemic- approach is methodologically vague. Hence the following question concerning methodology and Operational Art arises: What methodological implications could constitute an argument for choosing the design approach when conducting Operational Art within a battlespace? Neither NATO doctrine, planning framework nor previous research offer any explicit methodological argument for choosing, or preferring, the design- over the systemic- approach. This article concludes that one possible argument for preferring a design approach is adherence to value-focused thinking, but this requires that the Force Commander can and is willing to focus on stakeholders’ values within the battlespace. This conclusion is implied by two methodological implications identified and discussed in this article. If the design approach is to be a relevant option, then further conceptual development, experimentation and education is required. To conclude, NATO should review the description of their approaches within Operational Art since the argument for preferring one approach over another is lacking and this could hamper the Force Commander’s management of the battlespace. (shrink)