Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Iterative change“

In the past two decades, public health interventions have moved from education strategies aimed at individuals to broad, multilevel interventions incorporating environmental and policy strategies to promote healthy food behaviors. These intervention programs continue to employ classic behavior change models that consider individuals as deliberate, intentional, and rational actors. Contrary to the ideas posited by rational choice theory, diet-related literature draws little correlation between an individual’s intentions and his/her resultant behavior. This chapter adds to the dual-system model of cognition—reflective or slow thinking, and automatic or fast thinking—and introduces an emerging theory for dietary behavior change called behavioral design. Behavioral design recognizes that human decisions and actions lie on a continuum between spheres and are continually shaped by the interactions between an agent (individual, group) and his/her/their exposure (environment). More specifically, behavioral design considers the importance of the “experience” left as time passes, such as conditioning, resilience, expectation, repeated behaviors, and normality, as the central and iterative influence on future decisions. Behavioral interventions must consider the individual’s “experience” resulting from his or her interaction with the environment, while acknowledging the fast and slow mechanisms by which choices are made. This chapter introduces aspects to consider when using behavioral design to increase healthier food behaviors and physical activity, and briefly discusses ethics questions related to intentional modification of environment for health behavior change.

The domain of work has developed a myriad of social practices that are often shaped by information and communications technology infrastructures. The introduction of additional IT artifacts, of course, affects these practices and the related patterns of communication. While management and IT specialists plan for certain effects of a system’s introduction, unintended use of the system can play a central role. Therefore, the unanticipated appropriation of IT artifacts by their users is an important phenomenon. Given the existence of IT-related organizational change and adjustments related to the appropriation of software, the development of IT in organizations faces an iterative challenge. The “integrated organization and technology development” (OTD) approach deals with these interdependencies in projects of sociotechnical change.

Governments can play great roles, resolving festering problems and opening new pathways for progress. Examples are numerous and raise an important question: How do governments build the capabilities required to do great things? This chapter identifies ten cases of such governments to answer four dimensions of this question: how do governments to ramp up their capability? Who leads these interventions ?, When do they occur, and why? How changes implemented to ensure they yield sustainable results? The chapter suggests two sets of answers to these concerns, combining rival theories that explain how governments enhance capabilities and strengthen their role: “solution- and leader-driven change” (SLDC) and “problem-driven iterative adaptation” (PDIA). It proposes using these two theories in future research about how governments foster the kinds of achievements one could call great and argues this research should employ a version of theory-guided process tracking (TGPT) called systematic process analysis.

This article discusses the psychology of composition. Composition is a reflexive, iterative process of inscription. The work, once named as such and externalizable to some degree, passes circularly between inner and outer states. It passes through internal and external representations – mostly partial or compressed, some projected in mental rather than physical space, not all necessarily conscious or observable – and phenomenological experience, real or imagined. At each state-change the work is re-mediated by the composer, whose decision-making process is conditioned by the full complexity of human experience. This entire activity informs the simultaneous development of the composer's understanding of the particular work in its autonomy, of their own creativity, and of music more broadly. While the urge to compose – to invent, structure, and define sound and musical behaviour – may be to some degree innate, modes of conceiving, representing, and realizing are the product of a situated process. Even if some or all of that activity is so well assimilated personally or culturally that it remains hidden from experimental view, it remains a behaviour in respect of an emerging object.

This chapter presents an introduction to epistemic iteration, realism, and pluralism, as further discussed in the following chapter. It discusses the nature of epistemic iteration as a linear cumulative improvement of knowledge which may be contrasted with revolutionary changes of scientific paradigms, as well as the issue of realism-antirealism.

In development circles, there is now widespread consensus that social entrepreneurs represent a far better mechanism to respond to needs than we have ever had before--a decentralized and emergent force that remains our best hope for solutions that can keep pace with our problems and create a more peaceful world. David Bornstein’s previous book on social entrepreneurship, How to Change the World, was hailed by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times as “a bible in the field” and published in more than twenty countries. Now, Bornstein shifts the focus from the profiles of successful social innovators in that book--and teams with Susan Davis, a founding board member of the Grameen Foundation--to offer the first general overview of social entrepreneurship. In a Q & A format allowing readers to go directly to the information they need, the authors map out social entrepreneurship in its broadest terms as well as in its particulars. Bornstein and Davis explain what social entrepreneurs are, how their organizations function, and what challenges they face. The book will give readers an understanding of what differentiates social entrepreneurship from standard business ventures and how it differs from traditional grant-based non-profit work. Unlike the typical top-down, model-based approach to solving problems employed by the World Bank and other large institutions, social entrepreneurs work through a process of iterative learning--learning by doing--working with communities to find unique, local solutions to unique, local problems. Most importantly, the book shows readers exactly how they can get involved. Anyone inspired by Barack Obama’s call to service and who wants to learn more about the essential features and enormous promise of this new method of social change, Social Entrepreneurship is the ideal first place to look.

This chapter continues the discussion from the previous chapter. The motion of a charge (m,q) in the field of another charge (m′,q′) and in its own field can now be studied in the lowest orders of the velocities directly using the equation of motion obtained in the preceding chapter. However, the features of this motion are revealed more easily by deriving them from the Darwin Lagrangian. This allows for a rigorous establishment of a balance between the energy radiated by the system and the mechanical energy lost by the system. The chapter concludes this general study of the electromagnetic radiation of a system of charges by outlining the ‘post-Minkowski’ approach based on iteration in the ‘coupling constant’ qq′ rather than in the velocities.

Cabinets, Ministers, and Gender explores why men have been more likely than women to be appointed to cabinet, why gendered patterns of appointment vary cross-nationally, and why, over time, women’s inclusion in cabinets has grown significantly. The book is innovative in conceiving of cabinet formation as a gendered process governed by rules that empower and constrain presidents and prime ministers as selectors of cabinet ministers, and rules that prescribe, prohibit, and permit a range of criteria (experiential, affiliational, and representational) that qualify individuals for inclusion in cabinet. Focusing on seven country cases (Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States) using three data sets—elite interviews, media data, and autobiographies—the book reveals the complex sets of rules governing cabinet formation in each country and demonstrates their gendered effects. The book shows how different types of rules empower and constrain selectors, and how these rules interact to create different opportunities and obstacles for women’s cabinet inclusion. The findings demonstrate how institutional change emerges from a complex iterative process through which political actors interpret and exploit ambiguity in rules to deviate from past practices of appointing mostly male cabinets. These selectors help to develop new rules about women’s inclusion, which constrain future leaders in assembling their cabinet. The authors coin the term “concrete floor” to capture the process by which minimum levels for women’s cabinet inclusion are established and become locked in over time, explaining how competing rules for cabinet appointments, changing norms, and women’s mobilization in political parties shape outcomes.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the DSM has guided psychiatrists in categorizing disorders. Revisions have taken years, with work groups considering changes to the entire manual. A more timely and efficient approach to updating the DSM would involve continuous improvement of particular diagnostic categories, when and if supported by advances in the field. The aim is to avoid the delays in the incorporation of new knowledge that are inherent in updating at intervals of a decade or more. The American Psychiatric Association has therefore established a structure by which evidence-based proposals for changes to the DSM can be considered and adopted on an ongoing basis. This chapter describes how proposals will be considered and the standards to be applied to proposed modifications. Challenges include calibrating optimal rigor of the review process, pruning diagnoses that lack validity or clinical utility, and subjecting the process itself to iterative improvement.

Swedish politics can still be characterized as deliberative, rationalistic, open, and consensual but only if these four concepts are reinterpreted. Sweden has changed from a long-term “sounding-out” style of policy-making to a short-term and iterative trial-and-error method. Whereas commissions of inquiry in the 1960s were expected to carry out thoroughgoing investigations of policy alternatives and their possible consequences, since the 1980s they have been ordered to finish their assignments in less time and deliver shorter reports. Political decisions today are taken on a much less solid factual ground. The political process has moved from a consensus-seeking system based on selected access for a few major interests to a competitive and open-ended system.