Modern RISC-Societies: Towards a New Paradigm for Societal Evolution (Complexity Design Society, Vol. 14)

Hardcover, 569 pages, NOT ex-library. Limited signs of gentle handling, book is clean, with unmarked text and firm binding, free of inscriptions and stamps. Issued without a dust jacket. Weight 970g. -- Between 2007 and 2009, the University of Ljubljana initiated a trans-disciplinary research program on rare events with strong societal repercussions and effects, which has been labelled the RISC-program (Rare Incidents, Strong Consequences). In this process, the university established a small unit that sought to act as a catalyst for promoting trans-disciplinary research on rare events across a wide variety of domains both inside and outside the social sciences. The RISC-unit organized a series of talks, lectures, workshops and research activities, which highlighted the current knowledge frontiers on rare events as well as the available policy recommendations and best practices in reducing hazards and disasters related to rare events. From its overall goals, these RISC-activities were intended as a model for a new type of trans-disciplinary knowledge production that draws together expertise in the social, physical, biological and technical sciences to address urgent societal problems. The present volume summarizes the advances of these RISC-activities and points to the high relevance of the new RISC-based perspective on societal problems both at present and in the future. -- Contents: Foreword; Abstracts; 1 The RISC-Program: An Experiment in Trans-Disciplinary Knowledge Production at the University of Ljubljana; - Part I: An Overview on RISC-Research: - 2 RISC-Processes and Societal Coevolution: Towards a Common Framework / Karl H. Müller; - Part II: RISC Modeling and RISC Theory: - 3 A Discussion on Zipf's Law / Heinz von Foerster; 4 Bubbles Everywhere in Human Affairs / Monika Gisler & Didier Sornette; 5 New Models for Generating Power Law Distributions / Günter Haag; 6 RISC-Processes and Their Weak Societal Protection Networks / Karl H. Müller; 7 Zipf's Law in Labor Status Transitions: New Insights from Austrian Labor Market Data / Michael Schreiber; 8 Self-Reflexive, Contagious, Attraction-Driven Networks (SCANs): Towards a New Transdisciplinary Framework for RISC-Modeling / Günter Haag & Karl H. Müller & Stuart A. Umpleby; 9 The Organizing of Promises: Finance Capital as Tensegrity System / Adrian Lucas; 10 The Poverty of Economic Explanations / Peter Strukelj; - Part III: RISC-Applications: - 11 Weather- and Climate-Related Natural Hazards / Joze Rakovec; 12 The RISC Potential of Converging Technologies / Toni Pustovrh; 13 Risk, Crises and Control: Between Fear and Negligence / Marko Polic; - Part IV: RISC-Prevention and Damage Control: - 14 Natural and Other Disasters: A Social Work Perspective / Romana Zidar; 15 Secondary Disaster and Social Work / Jelka Skerjanc; 16 'Tsunami Project': A Case of a Collaborative Project Between Two Universities / Mojca Urek & Bogdan Lesnik; 17 Seismic Isolation for Asymmetric Building Structures / David Koren & Vojko Kilar; - Part V: Towards Inter- and Transdisciplinary Forms of Science: - 18 Socio-Economics and a New Scientific Paradigm / Rogers Hollingsworth; 19 Turning Science Transdisciplinary: Is it Possible for the New Concept of Cross-Disciplinary Cooperations to Enter Slovenian Science and Policy? / Franc Mali; 20 Approaches to Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research / Simona Tancig & Urban Kordes; Bibliography; Index.…