We routinely trust organizations that convert belief, truth, health, power, or beauty into money. Nonetheless, we know almost nothing about the corresponding exchange rates. Based on a system theorist concept of functional differentiation and the Bourdieueconomic forms of capitals, the paper...

In this article we discuss the futures of work and robotics. We evaluate key future trends in the field of robotics and analyse different scenarios regarding the futures of human beings and work life. Subsequently, we present a roadmap of robotics, which covers key aspects of industrial and...

The continuous transformation of the industrial society into a service and knowledge society is accompanied by profound change of demand: Customer requests will increasingly focus on individual products, shorter delivery times and appropriate prices. To encounter these challenges under the...

Caucasian societies suffer from a tremendous brain drain to so-called more advanced societies. Against this background, the paper discusses crowdsourcing, a recent trend in open innovation, as a means of reducing or even inverting the brain drain of Caucasian societies

The concept of innovation is as omnipresent in the media, in politics and in the economy as it is intangible and fuzzy. Focusing on its technological dimension, we find a hybrid interplay of technological and social systems. Accordingly, we observe an ongoing and increasingly complex...

This paper explores the potential of big data, such as those compiled by the Google Books project, to inform the dominant theories of the firm that tend to be grounded on strong assumptions about the capitalist nature of the modern society. Combining the novel methodologies of the digital age...

The remarkable feature of the nonprofit sector is its astonishing diversity. This feature gets short shrift in the traditional market or governmental failure theories of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's concept of functional differentiation, we demonstrate that these theories...

If the global brain is a suitable model of the future information society, then one future of research in this global brain will be in its past, which is its distributed memory. In this paper, we draw on Francis Heylighen, Marta Lenartowicz, and Niklas Luhmann to show that future research in...