to stimulate the next wave of research on organization learning. It provides a conceptual framework for research on the differences and similarities of learning by individuals, groups, and organizations.

This study explores the premise that knowledge in new product development proves both a barrier to and a source of innovation. To understand the problematic nature of knowledge and the boundaries that result, an ethnographic study was used to understand how knowledge is structured differently across the four primary functions that are dependent on each other in the creation and production of a high-volume product. A pragmatic view of “knowledge in practice ” is developed, describing knowledge as localized, embedded, and invested within a function and how, when working across functions, consequences often arise that generate problematic knowledge boundaries. The use of a boundary object is then described as a means of representing, learning about, and transforming knowledge to resolve the consequences that exist at a given boundary. Finally, this pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries is proposed as a framework to revisit the differentiation and integration of knowledge.

This paper is concerned with modeling the nature of expertise and its role in society in relation to research on expert systems and enterprise models. It argues for the adoption of a collective stance in which the human species is viewed as a single organism recursively partitioned in space and time into sub-organisms that are similar to the whole. These parts include societies, organizations, groups, individuals, roles, and neurological functions. Notions of expertise arise because the organism adapts as a whole through adaptation of its interacting parts. The phenomena of expertise correspond to those leading to distribution of tasks and functional differentiation of the parts. The mechanism is one of positive feedback from parts of the organism allocating resources for action to other parts on the basis of those latter parts past performance of similar activities. Distribution and differentiation follow if performance is rewarded, and low performers of tasks, being excluded by the f...

The article addresses the need, posed by the challenges of sustainable development and the changing context at the beginning of the 21st century, for changes in the method and practice of science. The major challenges for a “sustainability science ” arise from increasing complexification at the ontological, epistemological and political levels, calling for an integrated science going far beyond an interdisciplinary style of research. The requirement is for the development, adoption, and dissemination of a truly complexsystems scientific research model. Complex socio-ecological systems share a number of fundamental properties that require changes in scientific methods, criteria of truth and quality, and conceptual frameworks. These properties include non-linearity, plurality of perspectives, emergence of properties, self-organization, multiplicity of scales, and irreducible uncertainty. Some implications of the analysis are pointed out, in the form of practical recommendations. The authors argue for the involvement of both natural and social scientists in the investigation of the necessary steps to develop a sustainability science.

(www.unesco.org/issj) The article addresses the need, posed by the challenges of sustainable development and the changing context at the

The belief that conscious will is merely ‘‘an illusion created by the brain’ ’ appears to be gaining in popularity among cognitive neuroscientists. Its main adherents usually refer to the classic, but controversial ‘Libet-experiments’, as the empirical evidence that vindicates this illusion-claim. However, based on recent work that provides other interpretations of the Libet-experiments, we argue that the illusion-claim is not only empirically invalid, but also theoretically incoherent, as it is rooted in a category mistake; namely, the presupposition that neuronal activity causes conscious will. We show that the illusion-claim is based on the behaviorist ‘input-output ’ paradigm, and discuss the notions of ‘self-organization ’ and ‘self-steering ’ to provide an alternative perspective on the causal efficacy of conscious will. In the final sections, a tentative theoretical picture is sketched of conscious will as an instance of self-steered self-organization. We conclude that the subjective experience of conscious will is not a misguided one, but rather that the mechanisms supporting conscious will are considerably more complex than mainstream cognitive neuroscience currently acknowledges. Keywords: Conscious Will; Benjamin Libet; Self-Organization 1.

educator, has explored ideas in his work about the spontaneous evolution of forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques and notation for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art, computer music systems, interactive multi-media, compositional algorithms, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system since the 1960's. His work is widely distributed and presented and he is known as a pioneer in American experimental music. Rosenboom has been Dean of the School of Music, Co-Director of the Center for Experiments in

The individual biological organism is more than a mere aggregate of disparate body functions. Angyal (1941) remarked that there are no irrelevant properties to the component subunits of a biological organism. The feature is a definitive characteristic of systemic organizations. The idea of transformation of an aggregate of functions to a system was used by Sri Aurobindo in order to explicate his integral yogic method for a transition of the mind to a “higher ” status beyond common experience (Sri Aurobindo, 1977). Upasana, a Vedic meditative technique devised by the Indian Mystics, is a method of effecting a similar transformation by individuals in themselves. A descriptive account of this technique is facilitated by using a convenient parallel available from the dynamics of business corporations. The Conscious Corporation Organization as a System A business organization is a system, a unified whole, and therefore, by definition, cannot be separated into parts without losing some part of this character. As an autopoietic (self-organizing) system, it is characterized by a measure of autonomy vis-a-vis the environment (Jantsch, 1980;

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Traditional approaches to the study of organizational change and transformation, and the processes by which they develop new structural frameworks, are considered by some to be limited and potentially inadequate in guiding effective research and applied management practice (Mathews, White & Long, 1999; Van de Ven & Poole, 1995). Yet the challenges organizations must face to sustain themselves in an ever-changing environment continue to expand in order of magnitude and complexity. The collective theories of complexity and chaos, emerging from the scientific domains of quantum physics, theoretical biology, chemistry, and ecology (Kauffman, 1995; Mandelbrot, 1987; Prigogine, 1996; Maturana & Varela, 1987), offer new perspectives from which to explore sustainable organizational change and transformation. Complexity science is an interdisciplinary field of study that embraces a wide variety of approaches, yielding, at present, no single unified and coherent theory (Cohen, 1999). However, complementary elements of the theories originating in the physical and biological sciences have far-reaching implications for the development of knowledge (Lewin, 1992). Social scientists have begun to explore the degree to which complexity theories offer useful perspectives for understanding complex human systems (Cohen,1999; Gregerson &