#ISSS2016 Boulder

2889 Socio- technical systems are systems where humans interact with technology (hardware or software) towards the achievement of a goal. Because of the presence of the human behavior and the constant change and evolution of technology, such systems are constantly changing and are difficult to define. Various approaches exist to analyze and understand socio-technical systems’ behaviors, however many of these approaches analyze socio-technical systems from a certain discipline’s weltanschauung, problem context, and purpose of the system. Therefore, the proposed approaches only provide partial definitions that are difficult to generalize. The objective of this research is to provide a categorization of socio-technical systems based on their context and purpose, within the functionalist systems paradigm(s). The resulting categorization will serve as a foundation for a socio-technical systems framework to assist analysis select and/or design the right socio-technical intervention approach based on context and purpose. Keywords: Socio-Technical systems, Critical Systems Thinking, Problem Context, Methodological Purpose, Systems Thinking

2819 Language functions as a complex adaptive system. With time and circumstance, both its building blocks—the words that comprise it—and the guidelines according to which those blocks can be arranged—its grammar—are subject to evolution. Perhaps because it is often considered a function of culture, the question of how such linguistic evolution might be acted upon with intention is rarely considered. Yet language is no more a function of culture than culture of language. The two act interdependent and interdeterminant. And the manner in which disparate elements such as academic developments, political correctness, and pop culture drive linguistic change is both uncoordinated and acting on relatively weak leverage points. The foundational concern of this paper will be the ways in which the structures of language affect human behavior. It will employ existing research from the field of comparative economics to suggest the importance of approaching linguistic evolution from an idealized design perspective arguing that sustainability and thrivability are outcomes which, to be realized, must be supported by the language employed in their pursuit. Though this paper will, to some extent, address the role of neologisms in linguistic evolution, its focus will be on the more foundational aspects of language—on grammatical structures such as verb tense, possessives, pronouns, and article usage—and the behaviors they most readily facilitate. Just as a systems approach to organizational behavior must look beneath events and patterns for the structures and mental models that underlie them, this paper is intended to serve as the starting point of large scale inquiry into the mental models that are embedded in the linguistic structures of English and how they might be altered to better support human wellness. As the first global language, English is not only a convenient central test case for the inquiries of this paper, it is also an impactful one. In investigating the structures of English and the mental models they embody, the field of comparative linguistics will be pertinent providing points of comparison from other languages. By seeing what variations of language have evolved elsewhere, the project of envisioning an idealized version of English will provide itself with a range of possibilities upon which to draw. In that language is adaptive and contextual, it will not be possible for this paper to prescribe a final version of what is being proposed. Rather, the goals of the paper will be to propose the importance of this design question alongside suggestions about possible directions responses to it might take. In that its central argument will be that linguistic design is a field to which time and effort should be dedicated, this paper will also have to address the question of whether the changes proposed are realistic. In arguing that they are, evidence of how this approach has already been successfully employed and a summary description of how existing resources and networks might be employed in its realization will be presented.

2872 Historically, the evolution of supply chain management passed in four stages: the physical distribution management (1960s); the logistics management (1970s-1980s), the SCM (1980s-1990s) and the Green Supply chain Management (1990- Till now). Green supply chain management (GSCM) integrates environmental thinking into supply chain management; from conceptual product design to the delivery of final product to the consumers, and also involves end-of-life management. The implementation of GSCM is supported by few factors which are known as GSCM drivers. The aim of this paper is to study the state of green supply chain in the Lebanese food industry and investigate focally on the drivers affecting GSCM. To approach this investigation, we selected four companies due to their size in the Lebanese food industry.

2898 How can knowledge be created (incentivised) and distributed (shared socially) when it is what economists define as a public good - it is very expensive to produce, its use by any one person leaves no less for anyone else and it is generally difficult to sustain property rights over? In economic terms the marginal cost of distributing knowledge is zero and as marginal cost should equal price for optimality, price should be zero. Clearly if the price were zero there will be no incentive for anyone to produce it. So what is to be done? To charge for it on a per use basis is hard as it can be cheaply and costless transferred from one person to another. Despite this it is undoubtedly been made available in ever increasing quantities and quality. Universities were one traditional way of creating new knowledge in the public domain. These were supported out of general taxation or endowment and scholars working in them were expected to make their ideas available free to all who might be interested. Modern academic capitalism seeking to establish IPR in academically produced knowledge undermines that. These essence of creative advance in knowledge is that the ideas of all are available to all to do with what they will. If for commercial reasons sharing in this way may be undesirable and if it does not occur then a particular line of inquiry will be blocked of and in the longer term this could kill creativity.

2812 What is the difference between people outside, or within, organizations that look at a problem with a lot of limits and see unusual and new possibilities, and those who look at a problem with a lot of limits and see no way out? How would an organization intentionally transform its worldview and its problem-solving practices to creatively reconsider its own structures, policies, and assumptions when solutions to key needs and complex problems are limited or prevented by institutional or resource constraints? Education, government, and business leaders agree that creativity and innovation are essential for future organizational success and even survival, yet leaders are often blinded by past policies, organizational goals, or assumptions about resources and systems relationships when faced with complex and changing problems. However, research suggests that there are qualitative differences between individuals, teams, and organizations that become cleverly, resourcefully innovative in the face of complex problems under constraints, and those who do not. The culture and practices that activate shrewd, transdisciplinary, and unconventional problem-solving in the face of resource limits and other constraints are associated with a familiar, but largely unexamined, concept called ingenuity. Most frequently, ingenuity has been used to describe innovative solutions that are surprisingly smart, unconventionally resourceful, and contextually superior, often completely changing an institution or social-technical culture. In this messy intersection where creative, innovative problem-solving is at once demanded and prevented, ingenuity is the human factor necessary to hack the hairball, to pursue the impossible by being willing to seek unconventional connections arising from diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives; dialogue at the margins; resilience; imagination; creative and resourceful improvisation; and systems thinking. The culture and practices of organizational ingenuity integrate systems thinking into a framework designed to provoke the unconventional approaches to complex problems that produce exponentially better solutions for sustainable business and a sustainable world. As organizations develop broad-based cultures and capacities for ongoing innovation, there is a need to distinguish the concept and value of an innovation culture that integrates systems thinking and the resilient, empathetic, value-driven, collaborative, improvisational, diverse, counter-intuitive, paradoxical capacities of ingenuity. Keywords: systems thinking, innovative, business, resilience, human factor

2786 It is widely understood that the complexity of the challenges we face globally and locally in this increasingly interdependent and VUCA world require our collective intelligence to create emergent adaptive approaches that sustain. Benyamin Lichtenstein has developed a framework for emergence that synthesizes previous scholarship and has gone further to identify the concept of “opportunity tension” that is at the core of the individual and collective entrepreneurial spirit that can create generative emergent social structures through acts precipitating sufficient disequilibrium in a system. Opportunity tension combines the extensive entrepreneurial literatures of both opportunity and motivation. This paper posits the critical and pivotal nature of opportunity tension as a driver of emergence. Five factors are identified that contribute to a nonlinear increase in the sense of opportunity tension. 1) The sense of opportunity tension perceived by those involved is expanded in a mutually reinforcing way as participants bring their capital (physical, human, social, cultural) to the endeavor. The more capital, the more opportunity surface is exposed. 2) Positive organizational behaviors (positive emotions, high-quality connections, enhanced knowledge creation, positive human traits, etc.) are mutually reinforcing and are consistently associates with positive outcomes in groups. They are attractive and inherently motivate participation. 3) Mutual reinforcement creates an upward spiral (nonlinear) sense of increased opportunity 4) All of these factors operate from the micro to the meso to the macro creating a web of reinforcing forces across scale and across units of analysis. This cross-hierarchical web becomes a powerful driver of cross scale action and cross-scale disequilibrium. 5) Emergence manifests across scale as a result contributing to a rising tide effect. The evidence for this deepening theory of opportunity tension comes from very extensive literatures in positive organizational scholarship, recent frameworks for types of emergence, and a developing body of thought around complexity leadership. The paper draws together these bodies of literature and the empirical evidence to create a richer theory of generative emergence of collective social structure from individual intention and sense of opportunity. Understanding this process is critical to developing organizations that use positive organization behaviors grounded in a relational calculus of organization as organism rather than organization as machine.