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Arriving at England in 1830 and being confronted with the newest technology of early industrialism, the Danish philosopher and historian, Bishop N.F.S. Grundtvig, realised at once that technology is something more than “speechless nature”. Technology is also the incarnation of human and social nature, which you don't need to be a technician to be able to appreciate. Actually it is tempting to say that almost the reverse is true — the more you let yourself be blinded by technology as a piece of mindless matter, the more blind you become to its social significance and purpose.

These words were written by Gabriel Naudé (1600–1657) in his Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (How to manage a library), published in 1627. Born in Paris, he had already published several books by his early twenties, and was employed by the President of the Paris Parliament, Henri de Mesme, to manage his private library.

The idea of Evidence-Informed Practice (EIP) was introduced in Denmark at a national policy level with the 2013 national school reform. After 10 years of gradual development towards an output-oriented, accountability-based school system, the school reform fully realized the idea of a school system, which was oriented towards learning objectives and based on capacity building and supporting professional capital. One element of professional capital was EIP, and this idea was supported financially both by the parliament and large private foundations (e.g. the Maersk Foundation). However, for different reasons, the national reform created a lot of resistance among teachers and the national teacher union, including a number of pedagogical researchers. Partly, the reform was underfunded, and partly it represented a qualitative change from understanding teaching as craft to observing it as a rational, research-informed professional practice. The result was that EIP was met with scepticism among many teachers. After 6–7 years of EIP development, the current status is that one can identify a small, yet statistical significant positive correlation between teachers' professional, evidence-informed collaboration, and their job satisfaction. However, there have been no significant changes to student achievement, well-being and teaching experiences. Part of the explanation seems to be that EIP has been introduced with a combination of high social regulation and low social cohesion, pointing towards a fatalist system approach. However, this is not an expression of an intentional approach, but rather the result of a lack of teacher acceptance. One important reason for this was that the reform was underfunded. Consequently, it was combined with a labour market conflict followed by an increase of teachers hours without an increase of salary. This resulted in a legitimation crisis, which negatively influenced the teachers' acceptance of the school reform, including the idea of EIP.

Background: The ideas-informed society represents a desired situation in which: (1) citizens see value in staying up to date, and; (2) citizens regularly keep themselves up to date by actively, openly and critically engaging with new ideas, developments and claims to truth. As a result, it is hoped citizens become increasingly knowledgeable, better able to make good decisions, and better positioned to support new progressive norms and beliefs. Yet despite these potential benefits, a substantive proportion of the population do not value staying up to date, nor attempt to do so.

Methods: With this research project we seek to identify whether the theoretical lens of anomie can account for why “ideas refusers” do not engage with ideas, as well as provide clues as to how they might be encouraged to do so. To explore the possible impacts of anomie on ideas-engagement we conducted four online focus groups, interviewing a purposive sample of ten individuals who previously indicated they were ideas refusers.

Results: Our findings identify eleven themes which seemingly account for why ideas refusers do not currently engage with ideas. Of these, ten are related to anomie, including themes which encapsulate feelings of frustration, anxiety, confusion and powerlessness regarding the complexities of modern society.

Conclusions: We also identify three areas of future focus that might help the ongoing development of the ideas-informed society. These are: (1) the more positive and relevant reporting of ideas; (2) supporting “healthy” face-to-face engagement with ideas; and (3) supporting effective ideas engagement through social media.

There are not many people left who deny the potential use of compu‐ters in Social Work practice. In almost every country Social Work implies exchange of information, giving help and advice to clients and thereby using external or internal sources of information. For this kind of activities computer technology is a very useful tool.

Firms can be regarded as autopoietic systems that continuously reproduce themselves. This paper regards the firm itself as an autopoietic entity. This approach helps identify: the “sensory function” (“interactive openness”) that enables the continual co‐evolution with the environment; and “memory function” (“self‐referentiality”, “organisational closure”) that enables the firm’s effective functioning. The integration of these two functions helps utilise the major knowledge flows and facilitates the firm’s continual learning and renewal in its changing business environment. The analysis of case companies that represent the management consulting industry indicates that very different firms can be described as autopoietic, self‐producing systems. The case firms have built sophisticated, interconnected organisational solutions and information and communication systems to support interactive openness and self‐referentiality. Aligning the two major knowledge functions and flows with other organisational solutions helps build successful and sustainable knowledge management solutions that support the firm’s continuous renewal.

A principal problem of information systems (IS) development today is how to integrate the work activity and social context of users into the IS which is being designed. This paper aims to delineate a sociocybernetic approach which enlightens the relationship between IS design activity, use activity, and the embedded social context. First and second order cybernetics are employed as a general skeleton or structure for conducting the sociocybernetic approach. Approaches from social autopoiesis theory and activity theory are introduced respectively to provide the skeleton of cybernetics with flesh and blood elements of real problems. An emerging conceptual body resulting from an organic integration of the cybernetic structure and social‐psychological elements which demonstrates the relationship between IS design activity, use activity, and embedded social context is presented.

The purpose of this paper is to interpret Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory to discuss disaster resilience, and use its “functional method” for creating “local organizational inventories” to support the trend of integration in Turkey’s disaster management system. For this, the authors used a case study from Düzce province in 2013, investigating the organizational aftermath of two major earthquakes in 1999.

A purposive sample of local associations in city center of Düzce province was used. The local associations were selected according to the criteria if they organized any disaster-related activities after the 1999 earthquakes, despite being specialized in domains other than emergencies. Representatives of these organizations were interviewed about the content of their disaster-related activities and their organizational cooperation.

There was a lack of overlap between centralized emergency plans and local history of self-organized disaster activities. Both centralized and local organizations primarily engaged in activities that aim to reproduce their own systemic boundaries, rather than synchronizing central and local efforts in disaster planning.

The method used in this research helps discovering the local diversity of resources for improving resilience.

Arguing that disasters should be discussed under a theory of modern society, Robert A. Stallings refers to Luhmann’s theoretical work (Stallings, 1998, p. 134). Complexity plays a central role in emergencies in modern society. Therefore, the Luhmannian perspective needs to be incorporated into disaster studies to account for increasing social complexity and systemic differentiation. The problems resulting from functional differentiation and the relationship between different problem–solutions have their effects on emergency planning.