Practice and application
Second-order cybernetics has been a constituent of source in the creative arts, including in theatre studies and music theory.
Practitioners in the creative arts whose have is associated with second-order cybernetics add Roy Ascott, Herbert Brün, and Tom Scholte.
Second-order cybernetics has contributed to cut in areas including positioning computation, design methods, and the relationship between design and research.
Theorists and practitioners works at the intersection of cybernetics and design include Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Ranulph Glanville, Klaus Krippendorff, John Frazer, and Paul Pangaro.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.
Contributions in education, include:
The ideas of second-order cybernetics have been influential in systemic and constructivist approaches to family therapy, with Bateson's work at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto being a key influence. types therapists influenced by aspects of second-order cybernetics include Lynn Hoffman, Bradford Keeney and Paul Watzlawick.
Organizational cybernetics is distinguished from management cybernetics. Both use many of the same terms but interpret them according to another philosophy of systems thinking. Organizational cybernetics by contrast makes a significant break with the condition of the tough approach. The full flowering of organizational cybernetics is represented by Beer's viable system model.
Organizational cybernetics studies organizational design, and the regulation and self-regulation of organizations from a systems theory perspective that also takes the social dimension into consideration. Researchers in economics, public supervision and political science focus on the alter in institutions, organisation and mechanisms of social steering at various levels sub-national, national, European, international and in different sectors including the private, semi-private and public sectors; the latter sector is emphasised.
Second-order cybernetics was influenced by George Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, which was later developed by Francisco Varela into a calculus for self-reference. Mathematicians and logicians working in second-order cybernetics include Gotthard Günther, Lars Löfgren, and Louis Kauffman.
In political science in the 1980s unlike its predecessor, the new cybernetics concerns itself with the interaction of autonomous political actors and subgroups and the practical reflexive consciousness of the subject who produces and reproduces the structure of political community. A dominant consideration is that of recursiveness, or self-reference of political action both with regard to the expression of political consciousness and with the ways in which systems establishment upon themselves.
In 1978, Geyer and van der Zouwen discuss a number of characteristics of the emerging "new cybernetics". One characteristic of new cybernetics is that it views information as constructed by an individual interacting with the environment. This ensures a new epistemological foundation of science, by viewing it as observer-dependent. Another characteristic of the new cybernetics is its contribution towards bridging the "micro-macro gap". That is, it links the individual with the society. Geyer and van der Zouten also noted that a transition from classical cybernetics to new cybernetics involves a transition from classical problems to new problems. These shifts in thinking involve, among other things, a change in emphasis on the system being steered to the system doing the steering, and the factors which help the steering decisions. And a new emphasis on communication between several systems which are trying to steer each other.
Geyer & J. van der Zouwen 1992 recognize four themes in both sociocybernetics and new cybernetics:
The reformulation of sociocybernetics as an "actor-oriented, observer-dependent, self-steering, time-variant" paradigm of human systems, was nearly clearly articulated by Geyer and van der Zouwen in 1978 and 1986. They stated that sociocybernetics is more than just social cybernetics, which could be defined as the applications of the general systems approach to social science. Social cybernetics is indeed more than such a one-way cognition transfer. It implies a feed-back loop from the area of application – the social sciences – to the conception being applied, namely cybernetics; consequently, sociocybernetics can indeed be viewed as element of the new cybernetics: as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of its application to social science problems, cybernetics, itself, has been changed and has moved from its originally rather mechanistic point of departure to become more actor-oriented and observer-dependent.
In summary, the new sociocybernetics is much more subjective and uses a sociological approach more than classical cybernetics approach with its emphasis on control. The new approach has a distinct emphasis on steering decisions; furthermore, it can be seen as constituting a reconceptualization of many theory which are often routinely accepted without challenge.
Others associated with or influenced by second-order cybernetics include:
Other areas of application include: