The activities of the Research Program are intended to advance transdisciplinary social science, through philosophy, theory and practice. Our primary interest is the effect of ideas on society and the creation and diffusion of ideas that, if widely adopted, we believe will have a beneficial impact on society. We are currently working on several projects.
Visiting Scholars
We host visiting professors mostly from the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia under several programs sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. These scholars improve their knowledge of the Western literature in their fields and become familiar with American research and teaching methods. We also introduce them to process improvement methods and group facilitation methods, since we believe these methods will help them in introducing changes in their home universities.
Systems Theory and Cybernetics
The theoretical and philosophical perspective underlying our activities is systems theory and cybernetics. The members of the Research Program: Conduct research in these fields; arrange conferences on systems theory and cybernetics; manage a listserve on Cybernetics Communication, called CYBCOM; and arrange occasional lectures on systems theory and cybernetics.
Please note the CYBCOM discussion group has moved to a new platform: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cybcom
Reflexive Systems
We arrange a University Seminar on Reflexive Systems.
Technology of Participation
We use group facilitation methods in our work. We find that these methods are very effective in helping people to work together to do planning and problem-solving.
Quality Improvement Methods
We teach and use quality improvement methods. In particular we have developed the method of Quality Improvement Priority Matrices.
Service Learning Projects in the School of Business
A website was created as a resource for faculty members and students to reference while integrating service learning into their courses and for future students to refer to when working on their projects. It contains links to additional service learning resources.
