Functions of scenarios in transition processes

Given the interplaying tendencies of economic decline, social instability, and environmental depletion, any transition towards sustainable development faces a challenging task. To successfully cope with this complexity requires transition management. Integrated approaches for supporting sustainability transitions have been elaborated in the last years. Future studies and scenario construction are regarded as essential components in these approaches. However, the related studies in this field have focused either on a specific type of transition process, or on decision support in a different contextual process, or on a specific function of scenarios. Thus, an evaluation of the wide range of viewpoints on the functions of scenarios with respect to the requirements for transition management is still missing. In this paper, we systematically elaborate upon the functions for transition management that scenarios can fulfil. The developed concept is applied to five empirical scenario studies supporting transition processes on the national, regional and local level in Switzerland. The paper contributes to the development of a functional methodology of transition support, providing initial guidelines for answering the question of which method is appropriate for what type and phase of a transition process.     

Science and policy in designing complex futures

Many complex systems scientists are motivated by making changes to socio-technical systems. Change also motivates policy makers. Thus, both aspire to design new systems and trajectories through time. Science has always been used to forecast the implications of policy. Traditional science predicts system states at precise points in time. Usually point predictions are impossible in the science of complex systems. Most scientists cannot perform in vivo experiments on complex socio-technical systems. They have neither the mandate nor the budget. Massive advances in ICT enable simulation as a powerful new in silico experimental methodology. However, complex systems scientists are unable to collect the huge databases necessary to plan and manage heterogeneous multilevel socio-technical systems—these data are collected by public and private agencies according to perceived policy needs. Most implemented policies are experiments, but the outcome of policy is rarely monitored from a scientific research perspective. To test in silico forecasts against in vivo observation requires data owned by policy makers, requiring completely new data collection protocols that have to be aligned with policy makers. Complex systems scientists must make an obvious added-value contribution to policy, making explicit their role as designers with their science fitting into the policy-driven process of designing, planning, managing and controlling real complex socio-technical systems. Remaining in the loop is essential for policy makers to maintain control over policy objectives as they co-evolve towards the delivered design solution and its implementation.     

Standards in transitions: Catalyzing infrastructure change

Infrastructures are difficult to change in response to new societal demands. They are entrenched, materially and socio-institutionally, and seem to be ‘locked-in’. Scholars have addressed this problem by, for example, devising strategies for de-entrenchment, alternative path creation and transition management that focus on the process of change (emphasis on ‘how’). In this paper, we take a novel and counterintuitive approach, and focus on standards as a starting point for change (emphasis on ‘what’). We analyze in what manner standards can play a catalyzing role in infrastructure transitions and which standards characteristics facilitate in doing so.Central to our framework are the concepts of gateway technology and compatibility. We analyze three cases, i.e., the modal shift in freight container transport; the transition from barcode to Radio Frequency Identifier (RFID); and the possibility of a Dutch energy transition from natural gas to hydrogen.The article concludes that standards can catalyze infrastructure transitions if, first, their content well-reflects relevant stakeholder interests; and, second, if standard specifications are simple and performance-oriented. Their impact is highest in stable markets and for expanding infrastructures. Under these conditions standards can exploit the forces of entrenchment and socio-technical lock-in to bring about change.     

Innovation niches and socio-technical transition: A case study of bio-refinery production

In this paper we investigate socio-technical transition pathways concentrating our attention on innovation niches formations. Specifically, we present first a methodological conceptualization of innovation niches and suggest an empirical methodology, based on a Social Network Analysis (SNA), aimed at capturing and measuring the internal development status of innovation niches. Further, we propose a taxonomy of various niche development statuses. The proposed empirical methodology is subsequently tested on a specific case study where we assess the development status of the emerging bio-refinery niche situated in the province of Foggia (Apulia Region, Italy). Although not exhaustive, we believe this study represents an important step in a much-needed direction, which is the development of a commonly shared empirical methodology for innovation studies dealing with socio-technical transitions.     

Management control of complex,mission-critical processes

Because the failure of complex, mission-critical systems—such as certain process control and manufacturing operations—can be exceptionally costly to an organization, appropriate management control of these systems is imperative. This paper presents a theory of management control of complex systems that is the potential basis for an intelligent DSS, which would be capable of supporting human agents monitoring complex systems. The theory is derived from field studies of agent decision making under procedural guidance, and it focuses on the most crucial—and interesting—aspect of agent behavior, i.e. the decision to deviate from a procedure when the procedure is considered detrimental to the achievement of organizational goals. The theory is instantiated in a computer model of the agents' decision processes. The computer model in turn embeds a simulation of the agents' situation and goal assessment processes that produce procedural non-compliance. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SCOPE: a blackboard model-based decision support system for crude-oil trading

A complex decision problem dealing with crude-oil trading is hierarchically decomposed into multiple subproblems. A blackboard architecture for a Decision Support System (DSS) called SCOPE is developed in which the subproblems generated during the initial decision analysis can be mapped to relevant knowledge sources incorporating the most appropriate techniques for each. A prototype implementation of SCOPE-0, an expert system application using Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) for supporting the most critical subproblem—crude-oil evaluation—is presented. Some of the lessons learned from this research project, methodological issues, and promising future directions for DSS design are outlined. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Judicial Reform and Economic Development: A Survey of the Issues

Acknowledging the importance of sound judicial systems to goodgovernance and economic growth, the World Bank and several otherdonor organizations have funded judicial reform projects inmore than two dozen developing countries and transition economiesduring the past few years. Yet little is known about the actualeffect of judicial reform on economic performance or even aboutwhat elements constitute a sound reform project. This articlesurveys a wide range of current studies on judicial reform andfinds some surprising results.      

Goal-based socio-technical scenarios: Greening the mobility practices in the Stockholm City District of Bromma,Sweden

This paper presents a new five-part method for developing goal-based socio-technical scenarios. In the first part, Scenario ‘Seeds’ are identified or created. The Scenario Content part focuses on the question of what could be changed and by whom, a fundamental element being iterative identification of objects and actors of change. Scenario Outcome focuses on the question of how to assess the potential contribution of these changes, estimated through modelling the scenario in terms of energy usage systems. Scenario Process explores the question of how to develop and represent a scenario in terms of a process of governance. Scenario Content, Outcome and Process are then combined into a Final Scenario which is further assessed and evaluated using qualitative methods. The development of Scenario Content is tested and exemplified in this paper through a scenario study of green mobility in the district of Bromma in Stockholm, Sweden. Preliminary findings indicate that by supporting explicit inclusion of actors and ‘the social’ aspect, the what-who iteration in Scenario Content also helps identify opportunities and obstacles of a social character, thus contributing to creation of socio-technically more consistent and comprehensive scenarios.     

Are wildcard events on infrastructure systems opportunities for transformational change?

Infrastructure systems face a number of pressing challenges relating to demographics, environment, finance and governance pressures. Furthermore, infrastructure mediates the way in which everyday lives are conducted; their form and function creating a persistence of unsustainable practice and behaviour that cannot be changed even if change is desired. There is a need to find means by which this obduracy can be broken so that new, more sustainable futures can be planned. This paper develops a methodology, taking concepts from both engineering and social science. Wild cards, or physical disruptions, are used to ‘destructively test’ complex infrastructure systems and the multi-level perspective is used as a framework for analysing the resulting data. This methodology was used to examine a number of case studies, and with focus groups consisting of a range of different infrastructure providers and managers, to gain a better understanding of systems’ socio-technical characteristics and behaviours. A number of impactful ‘intervention points’ emerged that offered the opportunity to promote radical changes towards configurations of infrastructure systems that provide for ‘less’ physical infrastructure. This paper also examines the utility of wild cards as enablers of transition to these ‘less’ configurations and demonstrates how a ‘wild card scenario’ can be used to co-design infrastructure adaptation from with both infrastructure providers and users.     

Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies: Where is the accounting?

In a recent survey of academic research, Fintech related topics, broadly classified as crypto-currency studies, were by far the most researched topics in the social sciences. However, we have observed that, perhaps surprisingly, even though crypto-currencies rely on a distributed accounting ledger technology, relatively few of those studies were conducted by accounting academics. While some of the features of a system like Bitcoin do not necessarily rely on a traditional accounting knowledge, this knowledge is key in designing effective real-world distributed systems. Building on a foundational framework developed by Risius and Spohrer (2017), we provide support for their hypothesis that to date, research in this area has been predominantly of a somewhat narrow focus (i.e., based upon exploiting existing programming solutions without adequately considering the fundamental needs of users). This is particularly reflected by the abundance of Bitcoin-like crypto-currency code-bases with little or no place for business applications. We suggest that this may severely limit an appreciation of the relevance and applicability of decentralized systems, and how they may support value creation and improved governance. We provide supporting arguments for this statement by considering four applied classes of problems where a blockchain/distributed ledger can add value without requiring a crypto-currency to be an integral part of the functioning system. We note that each class of problem has been viewed previously as part of accounting issues within the legacy centralized ledger systems paradigm. We show how accounting knowledge is still relevant in the shift from centralized to decentralized ledger systems. We advance the debate on the development of (crypto-currency free) value-creating distributed ledger systems by showing that applying accounting knowledge in this area has potentially a much wider impact than that currently being applied in areas limited to auditing and operations management. We develop a typology for general distributed ledger design which assists potential users to understand the wide range of choices when developing such systems.     

Shamrock Shirt Co.'s non-interest bearing note

Student knowledge engineering is a new instructional technique which places students in the role of expert systems developers. This paper examines the feasibility, costs and benefits of this technique within the context of the accounting curriculum. A knowledge engineering project in the area of taxation is presented and evaluated by monitoring students' problem solving behaviour before, during and after developing their expert systems. Evidence suggests that knowledge engineering provides and environment in which students learn to (1) search, (2) read with a problem solving frame of mind, (3) communicate logically, (4) organize and structure accounting knowledge, and (5) logically problem solve, while learning accounting content material. In addition, knowledge engineering gives students a hands-on introduction to expert systems technology. Student knowledge engineering was implemented and evaluated in an Accounting Information Systems course. Student experiences were generally positive and confirmed expectations. Times required for completion of the projects were similar to those of other major course assignments.     

Transitions: Taking complexity seriously

The aim of this paper is to make the case for a systematic engagement of transition studies with complexity theory and research. We argue that transition research is important for the understanding and development of possible sustainable future pathways. However, there are several controversies in transition research, including, the role of agency in transitions; the relationships between levels (niche, regime and landscapes); the origin of transitions; the identification of a transition, including starting and ending point of transition processes; and the paradox of replicability and scaling up of independent experiments. We argue that transition research, and future studies can benefit from taking complexity theory seriously. In the paper, we elaborate four insights from complexity studies that can move the research agenda of transition studies forward: empirically investigating the degree of complexity of a system; investigating complexity at the level of the policy-making system; longitudinal and retrospective research designs for the identification of transitions; methodological tools which accommodate complexity, such as agent-based modeling and ARIMA modeling. Further, we suggest how these can improve our knowledge of transitions towards sustainable future.     

A fuzzy logic-driven multiple knowledge integration framework for improving the performance of expert systems

To maintain a high performance in an ill-structured situation, expert systems should depend on multiple sources of knowledge rather than a single type. For this reason, we propose multiple knowledge integration by using a fuzzy logic-driven framework. Types of knowledge being considered here are threefold: machine, expert and user. Machine knowledge is obtained by a back- propagation neural network model from historical instances of a target problem domain. Expert knowledge is related to interpreting the trends of external factors that seem to affect the target problem domain. User knowledge represents a user’s personal views about information given by both expert knowledge and machine knowledge. The target problem domain of this paper is one-week-ahead stock market stage prediction: Bull, Edged-up, Edged-down, and Bear. Extensive experiments with real data proved that the proposed fuzzy logic-driven framework for multiple knowledge integration can contribute significantly to improving the performance of expert systems. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A pragmatist approach to transdisciplinarity in sustainability research: From complex systems theory to reflexive science

The importance of questioning the values, background assumptions, and normative orientations shaping sustainability research has been increasingly acknowledged, particularly in the context of transdisciplinary research, which aims to integrate knowledge from various scientific and societal bodies of knowledge. Nonetheless, the concept of reflexivity underlying transdisciplinary research is not sufficiently clarified and, as a result, is hardly able to support the development of social learning and social experimentation processes needed to support sustainability transitions. In particular, the concept of reflexivity is often restricted to building social legitimacy for the results of a new kind of ‘complex systems science’, with little consideration of the role of non-scientific expertise and social innovators in the design of the research practice itself.The key hypothesis of the paper is that transdisciplinary research would benefit from adopting a pragmatist approach to reflexivity. Such an approach relates reflexivity to collective processes of problem framing and problem solving through joint experimentation and social learning that directly involve the scientific and extra-scientific expertise. To test this hypothesis, the paper proposes a framework for analysing the different types of reflexive processes that play role in transdisciplinary research. The main conclusion of the analysis is the need to combine conventional consensus-oriented deliberative approaches to reflexivity with more open-ended, action-oriented transformative approaches.     

Transitions: Two steps from theory to policy

This paper bridges a gap between emergent transition theories and the policy maker facing societal transitions when making long-term policy. Using a two-step approach the abstract concepts are linked to the realm of the policy maker. First the forces underlying transitions are identified and second where they can be found is presented. For this a conceptual map of societal systems, the clover model, is introduced. With the clover model the structures, cultures and practices of societal systems can be found. Furthermore, intermediate changes are systematically treated to track the phases of a transition. These transition diagnostics are supplemented with recommended policy frameworks.     

Valuing the project: a knowledge-action response to network governance in collaborative research

The delegation of research to self-directed networks is a relatively new strategy to focus academic endeavour on public priorities. Networks involve policy-makers, knowledge producers and knowledge users in unfamiliar governance and management relationships. Here we reflect, as practitioners, on research networks as complex governance systems and on their projects as knowledge-action systems designed to deliver public value. Projects represent the currency in which delegated research is issued, but their conversion into monetary grants and awards diverts attention from their potential as boundary organizations or communities of practice in the production of societal knowledge and understanding. Recognizing and supporting projects as scalable components of enduring knowledge-action systems, rather than as transient instances of research funding, is key to sustaining delivery of public value under conditions of network governance.     

Firms in Transition: A Review of the Venture Capital,IPO, and M&A Literature

A key area of research focuses on firms in transition, particularly those going public via initial public offerings, those growing via venture capital infusions, and acquirers and targets in merger and acquisition deals. In this article, we provide a review of research regarding firms in transition, with a primary focus on accounting‐related research. As part of our review we include key contributions both in the Canadian context and internationally, and discuss areas to be considered for future research.     

Information-sharing in services for military personnel in transition to civilian life

An analysis of policy and practice documents on information-sharing in the transition of military personnel into civilian life finds (1) a complex transition pathway along which the responsibility for co-ordination of transition shifts from service providers to those in transition; (2) a lack of attention to operationalizing information-sharing for different service circumstances; (3) the potential for developing a framework for managing information-sharing; and (4) a need for further research to draw on the evidence of transitions and information-sharing in other policy sectors.     

Creating a new socio-technical regime in China: Evidence from the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City

The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City (SSTEC) in China was designed to leverage Singaporean expertise in top-down city planning, systematic management, and water treatment technologies and act as a replicable hub-and-spoke model. This study shows that an expansion of the scale of urbanization, and its transformation into the focal point of the hub-and-spoke eco-city model will enable China to advance as an international pioneer, by the creation of a new socio-technical regime dependent on green and ecologically sustainable systems. In particular, the potential capacity of China's new socio-technical regime, built on eco-cities, is based on its capability to (1) create a vision for a smart energy system; (2) drive down the cost of renewable energy equipment and devices; (3) support local industrial clusters for socio-economic development; (4) implement effective policies for city-level solutions; and (5) standardize and replicate these strategies in the new regime as a whole. In the top-down landscape approach, the public authority's integrated administrative capability and capacity is important as a means by which to link the various types of stakeholders. This has to be done, in the process of managing a city's transition and reducing the risk of transformational failure, by reinforcing the four types of capital assets – namely manufacturing capital, natural capital, human capital, and social capital.     

Challenges of using RPA in auditing: A socio-technical systems approach

The use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rapidly growing in the professional services sector such as auditing. Despite the great benefits RPA can offer, RPA failure rates are still high. In this research, we draw on socio-technical systems theory to examine the challenges of using RPA in the various phases of auditing and how auditors address these challenges. By interviewing experienced partners and auditors in auditing firms and technology companies, we show that challenges arise when there is a lack of fit between the technical requirements of the RPA tool (technical subsystem) and the skills and knowledge of the auditors and clients (social subsystem). We discuss our findings and provide valuable practical implications and opportunities for future research.