O presente estudo busca problematizar a visão tradicional de democracia, a partir da análise do papel do dissenso na sociedade moderna hipercomplexa. Para tanto, utiliza-se como cânone teórico a teoria dos sistemas de Niklas Luhmann, a qual parte da diferenciação funcional para a identificação da sociedade moderna. A partir desta perspectiva de observação a democracia é compreendida como resultado da diferenciação funcional entre o sistema político e o sistema jurídico, os quais se fecham operativamente, trabalhando com seus próprios códigos. Em razão da diferenciação funcional, marcada pela autopoiese dos sistemas parciais sociais, a legitimação da tomada de decisão dos sistemas político e jurídico já não pode se embasar em uma cosmovisão devendo, portanto, partir de uma característica interna, ou seja, deve-se autolegitimar. Para tanto, são criados procedimentos que buscam justificar as escolhas realizadas pelos sistemas jurídico e político, controlando o dissenso e permitindo que suas decisões sejam tomadas como padrões de comportamento social. Contudo, em relação ao caso brasileiro, vê-se que o clientelismo, personalismo e exclusão social aparecem como óbice à estabilização da democracia como conquista evolutiva, na medida em que dificultam a realização das funções desses dois sistemas funcionais. Por fim, a leitura imagética do cinema é utilizada como forma problematização do caso brasileiro, a partir da busca da identidade desta sociedade pela via mais autêntica de expressão, qual seja, a cultura de um povo, evitando-se, assim, a crítica dos problemas sociais por meio da utilização de paradigmas evolutivos dos denominados países desenvolvidos, notadamente o padrão europeu. / This study seeks to question the traditional view of democracy, from the analysis of the role of dissent in hypercomplex modern society. For this purpose, we used as a theoretical canon Niklas Luhmanns systems theory, which draws on the functional differentiation for identification of modern society. From this observation perspective, democracy is understood as the result of functional differentiation between political and legal systems, which are operatively locked, working with their own codes. Because of the functional differentiation, marked by partial autopoiesis of partial social systems, the legitimacy of the decision making of legal and political systems can no longer be grounded in a worldview, and therefore from a built-in feature, that is, it should self-legitimate. To that end, procedures are created that seek to justify the choices made by the legal and political systems, controlling dissent and allowing decisions to be taken as patterns of social behavior. However, for the Brazilian case, we see that clientelism, personalism and social exclusion appear as an obstacle to the stabilization of democracy as an evolutionary achievement, in as much as they limit the realization of the functional roles of these two systems. Finally, the reading of film imagery is used as a questioning of the Brazilian case, from the search for identity in this society by the most authentic expression, namely the culture of a people, avoiding thus the criticism of social problems, using evolutionary paradigms of the so-called developed countries, notably the European standard.

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl / This dissertation takes up Maurice Merleau-Ponty's unfinished project of developing an ontology of nature whose concepts are drawn from the phenomenon of life, rather than from human techne. I argue that the question of life has been hopelessly obscured by the collapse, in the Modern era, of the distinction between nature and artifice. We cannot hope to understand the difference between life and non-life until we understand the difference between the living body and the machine. Merleau-Ponty's constant aim was to show that the living body is not a blind mechanism, and that the body has its own endogenous sense which is not projected onto it by a disembodied consciousness. Central to these efforts were the phenomena of learning and development, and the concept of form or Gestalt. Development is what distinguishes the living body, which is an open-ended process of becoming, from the machine, whose possibilities are determined in advance by its creator. In order to conceptualize the phenomenon of development, Merleau-Ponty appropriated from psychology the concept of form (Gestalt): a dynamic, self-organizing whole that cannot be decomposed into independent parts. Where the conception of nature as mechanism implies that everything is determined in advance, Merleau-Ponty's conception of nature as Gestalt allows for the genesis of genuinely new phenomena through nature's own self- organizing movement. We would thus be able to understand the genesis of sense in nature as a process of morphogenesis--the genesis of form. However, Merleau-Ponty struggled to clarify the ontological status of form. He lacked the conceptual resources to explain form in its own terms, rather than by contrast with the decomposable wholes of human artifice. This dissertation attempts to locate these conceptual resources in the science of complexity that has emerged since Merleau- Ponty's death, and whose descriptions of complex systems are uncannily anticipated in Merleau-Ponty's writings. I take from this new science the conception of form as asymmetry or difference, and of morphogenesis as symmetry-breaking or self-differentiation. In order to investigate how meaning emerges out of form, I turn to recent work in biology and psychology that applies the concept of symmetry-breaking to the phenomena of anatomical growth and motor development. By studying the development of the living body and its behavior, I show how nature articulates itself into perceiver and perceived. In the movement of the living body, form folds back upon itself, giving rise to a new kind of meaning: a pre-reflective, motor significance that is neither mechanism nor mental representation. In Chapter One, I distinguish the living body from a machine or artifact by distinguishing between manufacturing and growth. This distinction, which seemed obvious to the Ancients, has been obscured by Modern science's pivotal decision to treat nature as if it were a product of human artifice. This decision has committed us to an atomistic ontology, which takes nature to be a synthetic whole composed of mutually indifferent parts. However, this ontology faces a basic problem, which I call the problem of form: how to explain the synthesis of indifferent atoms into the complex, harmonious wholes we observe in nature, without appealing to an intelligent designer. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in the phenomenon of anatomical development or embryogenesis. I argue that biology has been unable to explain this phenomenon in mechanical or atomistic terms: the Neo-Darwinist view of the living body as a synthetic whole determined in advance by a genetic blueprint or program has succeeded not by explaining development, but rather by ignoring it. In Chapter Two, I argue that the problem of form--and of living form in particular--can only be resolved by abandoning our atomistic ontology, and with it our synthetic understanding of form as a shape imposed on an indifferent material. Recent developments in the science of complexity have yielded a new definition of form as asymmetry or difference. On this view, the genesis of form in nature is not the synthesis of wholes out of pre-existing parts, but the self-differentiation of wholes into parts through symmetry-breaking. In order to understand how natural wholes become less symmetrical over time, I introduce three further concepts from the science of complexity: nonlinearity, stability, and instability. With these concepts in hand, I return to the problem of embryogenesis, in order to show how complex living forms can develop reliably and robustly without being determined in advance by a design or program. In Chapter Three, I turn from anatomical development to the development of behavior, in order to see how the genesis of form becomes a genesis of sense. I begin by criticizing three mechanistic theories of behavior--Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Connectionism--which suffer from the same problem of form that plagues mechanistic theories of anatomical development. Behavior grows like an organ: by symmetry-breaking, not by synthesis. Learning is not a matter of association, but of differentiation: the perception of increasingly subtle asymmetries in the body's environment through increasingly asymmetrical movements. It is the world that teaches the organism how to move--but a world that is only revealed to the organism by its own movements. Thus the living body and its world grow together dialectically, each driving the other to become more determinate through its own increasing determinacy. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Com o crescimento do comércio global e a ampliação das relações de trocas em todo o mundo industrializado, muitas organizações estabeleceram relações com fornecedores e distribuidores globais, constituindo grupos de negócios denominados ?cadeias produtivas?. Assim, o gerenciamento dessas cadeias torna-se essencial e pode propiciar ganhos de escala e aumento da capacidade em atender diferentes mercados e segmentos, tornando-as como um todo mais ágil e flexível, promovendo a redução dos estoques e aumento dos fatores de produção em todas as organizações-chave das cadeias de organizações que delas participem. Existem muitas oportunidades de ampliação da qualidade e de redução de custos na cadeia de organizações e que pode aumentar substancialmente sua receita ou diminuir seus custos pelo gerenciamento eficaz. Acompanhar a evolução de cada organização no contexto da sua cadeia de organizações e dos seus detentores de interesses oferece uma visão muito mais completa, uma imagem holística das atividades, uma cadeia de capacidades e de know-how, de si própria e das aliadas. Como o ambiente circundante, essas capacidades e relacionamentos recíprocos se encontram em constante mutação e evolução. Por conseguinte, a empresa deve monitorar e gerenciar todo o conjunto que compõe a sua cadeia de organizações, incluso os seus fluxos em processos e sistemas. Utilizando modelos de estratégia logística e de gestão de cadeias de distribuição, teoria de sistemas, teoria dos custos de transação, modelos e modelagem foram propostos os Princípios de Cadeias de Organizações e foi desenvolvido um Modelo de Eficiência em Cadeias de Organizações. Um estudo de caso múltiplo na cadeia de negócios da Natura Cosméticos foi realizado para conhecer como está o conceito de cadeias de organizações nessa indústria e seis fornecedores. / Global trade growth and exchange relations enlargement in the industrialized world contributed to make many organizations establish links with suppliers and global distributors, building up business groups called ´productive chains´. Therefore, managing those chains becomes essential in order to provide gains of scale and increasing capacity to accommodating different markets and segments in a more flexible and fast way, providing inventory reduction and increasing production factors in all key organizations of organizations chains that take part in them. There are many opportunities of enlarging the quality and the reduction of costs in the organizations chains that may substantially increase their revenue or decrease their costs through effective management. Acquiring a complete view and a holistic image of the activities for a chain of capacities and know-how of itself and its allies means following up the evolution of every organization in the context of its organizations chain and its interests´ owners. As the surrounding environment, those reciprocal capacities and relationships find themselves in constant change and evolution. Hence, enterprises should monitor and manage all the ensemble that determines their organizations chain, including their flows in processes and systems. With the use of logistic strategy and distribution chains management models, the systems theory, the transaction costs theory, models and modeling, the Organizations Chains Principles were proposed and Organizations Chains Efficiency Model was developed. A multiple case study at Natura Cosmetics´ business chain was held in order to getting to know how this industry and its suppliers deal with the concept of organizations chains.

Children's sex-typed preferences for colours and toys are well-established, and often function as markers of sex-typicality in research on the development of sex-typed behaviour. However, children's sex-typed colour and toy preferences have not been tested cross-culturally, or in remote unindustrialised cultural settings. The present thesis tested children's preferences for sex-typed toys in four cultural settings: Shipibo villages in the Lake Imiria region of the Peruvian Amazon; kastom villages in the mountains of Tanna Island in Vanuatu in the South Pacific; children attending school in Lenakel town on Tanna Island; and in a large industrialised city in Australia. It also tested children's colour preferences in three of these cultures. It was hypothesised that colour and toy preferences would show some similarities across cultures, and further, that similarities in toy preferences across cultures would be explained by the different types of play afforded by the toys. Results suggested that colour preferences, specifically, a sex difference in preference for pink, are specific to industrialised cultures. Results further suggested that some sex differences in toy preferences replicate in different cultures, and that the relationship between toy preferences and children's preferences for play affordances is a potentially important area for further research. The present thesis also provided two demonstrations of how new statistical methods, adapted from complex and dynamic systems theory, could be applied to the cross-cultural dataset. A machine learning method suggested that sex, more than culture, affects children's sex-typed toy preferences. A multistate dynamic method further suggested that sex, more than culture, affects the dynamics of children's toy choices.

Law and technology regularly conflict. The reasons for this are several and complex. Some conflicts are trivial and straightforwardly resolvable. Others, such as the creation of artificial minds, are not. History indicates that when law and technology conflict; both systems can adapt—often over periods of time—to new social circumstances and continue performing their societal functions. Simply: law and technology co-evolve. However, if the legal system is to retain its autonomous role in society, what are its adaptive limits in the context of profound, and perhaps unprecedented, technological changes? My thesis addresses the question of whether, and if so, to what extent, the legal system can respond to ‘conflicts’ with increasingly complex and legally problematic technological change. It draws on theories of legal and social evolution—particularly the Social Systems Theory (SST) of Niklas Luhmann—to explore the notion of a ‘lag’ in the legal system’s ability to respond to technological changes and ‘shocks’. It evaluates the claim that the legal system’s ‘lagged’ response to technological change is a deficit of its functioning. ‘Lag’ may be both good and bad. It allows the law to be self-referential while also limiting its effectiveness in controlling other sub-systems. Thus there is an implicit intersystemic trade-off. The hypothesis here: ‘lag’ is an endogenous legal advantage that helps to ensure the legal system’s autonomy, as well as the continuity of legal processes that help ameliorate potentially harmful or undesirable outcomes of science and technology on society and the individual. The legal system can adjust to technological change. However, it can only adjust its internal operations, which takes time and is constrained by the need to maintain legal autonomy—or in SST terms—sits autopoiesis. The signs of this adjustment are the conceptual evolution of legal concepts and processes related to new technological changes and risks, among other things. A close reading of Anglo-American legal history and jurisprudence supports this. While legal systems are comparatively inflexible in response to new technologies—due to doctrinal ossification and reliance upon precedent and analogy in legal reasoning—an alternative outcome is possible: the disintegration of the boundary between law and technology and the consequential loss of legal autonomy. The disintegration of this boundary would consequentially reduce society’s capacity to mediate and regulate technological change, thus diminishing the autopoiesis of the legal system. A change of this kind would be signalled by what some identify as the emergence of a technological ordering—or a ‘rule of technology’—displacing and potentially subsuming the rule of law. My thesis evaluates evidence for these two scenarios—the self-renewing capacity of the legal system, on the one hand, or its disintegration in response to technological change, on the other. These opposing scenarios are evaluated using a social ontological study of technology generally, and a case study using Artificial Intelligence (AI) specifically, to identify and predict the co- evolutionary dynamics of the law/technology relationship and assess the extent to which the legal system can shape, and be shaped by, technological change. In assessing this situation, this thesis explores the nature of AI, its benefits and drawbacks, and argues that its proliferation may require a corresponding shift in the fundamental mechanics of law. As AI standardises across industries and social sub-systems, centralised authorities such as government agencies, corporations, and indeed legal systems, may lose the ability to coordinate and regulate the activities of disparate persons through ex post regulatory means. Consequentially, there is a pressing need to understand not just how AI interfaces with existing legal frameworks, but how legal systems must pre-adapt to oncoming, and predominately unexplored, legal challenges. This thesis argues that AI is an autopoietic technology, and that there is thus a corresponding need to understand its intersystemic effects if there is to be an effective societal governance regime for it. This thesis demonstrates that SST provides us with the shared theoretical grammar to start and sustain this dialogue.

Este trabalho estuda o tema Genocídio a partir do estudo comparativo dos sete casos do século XX, como oficialmente definidos pelas Nações Unidas: Armênios, Holodomor, Nanking, Holocausto, Cambódia, Bósnia-Herzegovina, e Ruanda. O mapeamento de suas similaridades é contraposto aos modelos de (i) Stanton (Genocide Watch); (ii) Albert Bandura (Desengajamento Moral); bem como (iii) Conceitos desenvolvidos a partir de estudos em Psicologia Social, oportunamente identificados. Chegou-se, então, a um Modelo Teórico Ajustado, sistêmico, que potencialmente ajuda a identificar as causas e consequências de Genocídios. / This work studies Genocide from comparing the seven ocurrences in the twentieth century, as oficially defined as Genocides by the United Nations: Armenians, Holodomor, Nanking, Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda. The similarities among these cases are then compared with (i) The Stanton Model (Genocide Watch); (ii) The Moral Desengagement Framework, as proposed by Albert Bandura; as well as (iii) Social Psychology concepts, identified and conveniently presented. A theoretical adjusted model, systemic, is then presented, aiming to potentially help identifying causes and consequences of Genocides.

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the experiences of high-ability, Black, female college freshmen when preparing for college to identify influences from various family, school, and community environments. Using a theoretical framework, which incorporates both Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory in an orientational manner as a guide to examine literature related to the multiple identities and experiences potentially shared by the participants and to generate the interview questions to collect data and explore their experiences as broadly as possible. To explore these experiences, the researcher conducted in-depth individual interviews of ten Black female freshmen and two focus groups of six of those ten freshmen who are high ability and from low-income households. The participants answered questions to learn more about experiences that influenced their processes preparing for college. These perspectives may help inform the development of interventions, programs, counseling practices aimed at helping students with shared identities. Findings from this qualitative research study revealed that intrinsic and extrinsic motivating experiences and relationships across multiple contexts within the participants’ lives have contributed to their process of preparing for college. Nine themes emerged from the participants’ responses: (1) navigating the “crooked room”: perceptions of self; (2) prophetic excellence: family and friends support and expectations, (3) it takes a village: community culture and resources, (4) from chaperone to mentor: exploring the depth of K-12 educational interactions and opportunities, (5) preparing for a home away from home: college exploration and preparation, (6) demystifying the process: I don’t know what I do or don’t need to know, (7) calibrating to fit and understand new environments, (8) and still I rise: acknowledgement of systemic issues, and (9) hindsight 20/20: if I knew then what I know now. Implications for practice and future research are included.

This naturalistic exploratory multiple case study of the academic writing activity of L2 writers enrolled in an introductory Spanish literature course reveals the complex dynamicity of intertextual activity and L2 development. The writing tasks, designed for communicative practice rather than for mastery of a genre, required students to upload Microsoft Word documents to the learning management software’s dropbox, thus necessitating their engagement with multiple digitally mediated resources. Participants completed the assignment outside of class in a computer lab, where data were collected, including observational field notes, screen recordings, and stimulated recall, and semi-structured interviews about the participants’ use and perception of digital resources. Findings show that these students employed many strategies with a variety of resources, including online dictionaries, translators, and original and translated texts, when experiencing a lexical gap while writing. A close examination of second language writers’ intertextual engagement with the affordances provided by these digitally mediated resources through an analytical frame informed by dynamic systems theory (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008a) reveals idiosyncratic use and evidence of emergent word and strategy learning. Pedagogical implications, including the need to start where students are, are discussed.

The new millennia has been characterised by developments in the digital world, creating a new space for social work practice globally. The aim of this research is to explore the online medium as an alternative resource for social work with online groups through an observation and interviews in an online group for Bipolar Disorderin Sweden. The results found that lived experience proved central to all forms of participation and support was seen as a resource to be shared. The implications for social work practice were found on multiple levels with broad areas of influence, such as utilising the online medium as an alternative source of insight, thereby allowing needs assessment, both onindividual and [sub]group level. Accessibility by way of the internet was seen as a catalyser to participation as well as a comprehensive method in creating such communities both locally and internationally through the development of digital social work.

In this thesis I employ insights from Conversation Analysis and Embodied Cognition Theory to examine the discursive practices of a group of interactants who operate in what I describe as a group cognitive system. While studies on embodied cognition have been done on both individuals and groups involved in various concrete physical tasks and situated cognition studies have been done on many types of socially situated conversations, my aim is to combine these two theoretical frameworks to observe people’s embodied interactions in informal everyday conversation as they engage in ongoing learning processes. My research question revolves around understanding how the group’s shared cognition unfolds and how new paradigms of thought and purpose are generated in the process of their interactional practices. I employ Conversation Analysis methodology in the collection and analysis of data with attention on how learners interact with each other and their environment via verbal communication. In addition, I focus on non-verbal embodied actions as they function to form a cognitive system where new realities are mentally simulated and brought to materiality via information feedback loops.