Bücher der Reihe Translational Systems Sciences

The objective of this book, the second volume of this monograph series, is to respond to the calls from front-line managers, entrepreneurs, and scholarly researchers to reconstruct the theories of economics and business so that the new theories will be more relevant to real life than the prevalent ones. Differing from what is presented in the first volume, this second volume emphasizes the development of systemic principles underlying a whole series of empirical discoveries and theoretical conclusions in more applied business studies. By employing the concepts, methodology, and logical reasoning of systems science, this volume addresses important issues about value creation and capture, managerial decision making in the modern business world, and the management of large-scale business forces.The book particularly targets graduate students and scholarly researchers who are looking for opportunities to develop new territory in the world of applied economic and business knowledge. In addition, it aims at front-line decision-making managers and entrepreneurs who want sounder theories and more reliable methods than the commonly available ones on which to base their critical decisions. By masterfully employing the concepts, methodology, and logical reasoning of systems science, readers can expect to become better able to discover the previously unfamiliar essence of business practices and insightful opportunities for profit.

The objective of this book is to answer the calls from front-line managers, entrepreneurs, and scholarly researchers to reconstruct the theories of economics and business. Their request is for new theories to be more relevant to real life than the now-prevalent ones. To provide that answer, the book proposes to develop elementary postulates at the level of the four natural endowments of a business firm or an individual: self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and free will. Then, conclusions based on these postulates can be established through logical reasoning. On this realistic footing, the book employs the concepts, methodology, and logical reasoning of systems science to answer a full list of theoretically and practically important questions. Those queries involve such topics as rationality, the meanings of optima and choices of optimization methods, the relationship between micro- and macro-phenomena, consumption preferences, and utility representations. The target audience of the book includes graduate students and scholarly researchers, particularly those who look for opportunities to develop new territories in the world of economic and business knowledge. The book also aims at front-line decision-making managers and entrepreneurs who seek sounder theories than the commonly available ones on which to base their critical decisions. By competently employing the systemic intuition¿yoyo model, graduate students, scholarly researchers, decision-making managers, and entrepreneurs can attain new conclusions. In addition, they will gain insightful understanding of market signals without unnecessarily expending other resources of limited availability.

This book focuses on the establishment process of the Japanese style of management (JSM). Traditionally, it has been widely believed that the JSM is native to Japan and consists of three pillars: lifetime employment, a seniority-based wage system, and company unions. This book opposes these traditional views on the JSM and argues that it has been shaped by the influence of management theories and ideas of other countries. The JSM has not only adopted the ideas and concepts of other countries, but also has refined, translated, and customized them to make such ideas and concepts acceptable in Japan. The hypothesis presented here is that in the postwar period of rapid growth, the JSM was a hybrid set of management theories and techniques greatly influenced by American ideas about management.This book concentrates on the impact of American management theories and ideas on the JSM. Taking the historical point of view, it clarifies that impact not only for academics but also for business people. The hypothesis propounded here is that some of those theories and ideas have been accepted whereas some of them have been rejected and eventually made irrelevant. The following issues are discussed: scientific management, the human relations school, Barnard's organizational theory, Drucker's management thoughts, strategic management, human resource management, and corporate culture.

This book introduces methods to analyze legal documents such as negotiation records and legal precedents, using computational argumentation theory.First, a method to automatically evaluate argumentation skills from the records of argumentation exercises is proposed. In law school, argumentation exercises are often conducted and many records of them are produced. From each utterance in the record, a pattern of "e;speech act +factor"e; is extracted, and argumentation skills are evaluated from the sequences of the patterns, using a scoring prediction model constructed by multiple regression analyses between the appearance pattern and the scoring results. The usefulness of this method is shown by applying it to the example case "e;the garbage house problem"e;.Second, a method of extracting factors (elements that characterize precedents and cases) and legal topoi from individual precedents and using them as the expression of precedents to analyze how the pattern of factors and legal topoi appearing in a group of precedents affects the judgment (plaintiff wins/defendant wins) is proposed. This method has been applied to a group of tax cases.Third, the logical structure of 70 labor cases is described in detail by using factors and a bipolar argumentation framework (BAF) and an (extended argumentation framework (EAF) together. BAF describes the logical structure between plaintiff and defendant, and EAF describes the decision of the judge. Incorporating the legal topoi into the EAF of computational argumentation theory, the strength of the analysis of precedents by combined use of factored BAF and EAF, not only which argument the judge adopted could be specified. It was also possible to determine what kind of value judgment was made and to verify the logic.The analysis methods in this book demonstrate the application of logic-based AI methods to the legal domain, and they contribute to the education and training of law school students in logical ways of argumentation.

This book has unique features that set it apart from conventional books on the prevention of system failures in that it provides a method that views human activities from a meta-methodological perspective based upon an inter-disciplinary understanding of human activities. With these characteristics, the book also proposes a common methodological basis to apply to various problems surrounding society today such as an aging social infrastructure; the safety of food, medicine, and public transportation; and the creation of sustainable electricity and cybersecurity. Furthermore, since the failure of human activities is expressed in a three-dimensional space and the topological metrics are implemented, the failure trajectories can be quantitatively monitored in time series to take effective preventive measures. Considering the implementation of the topological metrics, the causes of each failure are classified into two dimensions of the degree of coupling between system elements and theinteraction between the target system and the external environment. Owing to the nature of the introduction of topological metrics, all individual and diverse systems can share general topological metrics. Consequently, understanding various failures over cross-industries is possible with the use of common meta-systemic language and mutual learning between different industries, and the solution of social problems can be effectively achieved. A system of system failures (SOSF) proposed and confirmed the effectiveness of this meta-methodology for information and communication technologies (ICT) systems and the SOSF is extended to human activity systems (SOHAS: system of human activity systems) as a whole. Therefore, the SOHAS becomes an academic foundation for theoretical research on meta-methodology, and it has an impact on practitioners to prevent system failures by accumulating knowledge of failures and learning from other industries.

This book discusses the growing interest in realism in social sciences of the twenty-first century. The first part of this book provides recent discussions on realism in philosophy. The second part describes specific problems that have returned to realism in various fields of the social sciences, such as economics, cultural anthropology, management science, and statistics. This book clarifies what kinds of movements are taking place and consequently the direction in which the social sciences are heading in the future. Readers would also find that there is great diversity in the way realism and reality are perceived and understood, depending on the objectives and circumstances of each field of social science. This suggests that rather than having a unified view (stance) of realism and reality, it may be more meaningful to value the differences, diversity, and range itself. Therefore, this book does not present a unified view of realism, reality, and actuality. Although the definitions of realism and reality may differ from chapter to chapter, this represents a corner of the current state of the social sciences. This book is unique in that it examines how the issues of realism and reality are viewed, understood, and dealt with in the various fields of social science, instead of examining them by philosophers and philosophers of science. This would clarify how philosophical discussions have been translated into the various fields of social science.

This book is in honor of Yasuhiko Takahara, a first-class researcher who has been active for some 50 years at the global level in systems research. Researchers and practitioners from Japan and other countries who have been influenced by Takahara have come together from far and wide to contribute their major research masterpieces in the field of systems research in the broadest sense.While the roots of Takahara's systems research are in general systems theory and systems control theory, he developed his research and teaching in diverse directions such as management information science, engineering, social simulation, and systems thinking. As a result, many of the researchers and practitioners he supervised or influenced have established their own positions and are now active around the world in a wide range of systems research.Volume II is a collection of their masterpieces or representative works in the fields of systems management theory and practice.

This book is in honor of Yasuhiko Takahara, a first-class researcher who has been active for some 50 years at the global level in systems research. Researchers and practitioners from Japan and other countries who have been influenced by Takahara have come together from far and wide to contribute their major research masterpieces in the field of systems research in the broadest sense.While the roots of Takahara's systems research are in general systems theory and systems control theory, he developed his research and teaching in diverse directions such as management information science, engineering, social simulation, and systems thinking. As a result, many of the researchers and practitioners he supervised or influenced have established their own positions and are now active around the world in a wide range of systems research.Volume I is a collection of their masterpieces or representative works in the field of systems theory and modeling.

This book is the first one to describe the entire history of the video game industry in Japan. The industry consists of multiple markets¿for PCs, home consoles, arcades, cellular phones and smart phones¿and it is very difficult to see the complete picture. The book deals comprehensively with the history of the Japanese game industry from the beginning of the non-computer age to the present.The video game industry in Japan was established in the arcade game market when Space Invaders was released by Taito in 1978. Game markets for both PCs and home consoles followed in the early 1980s. The platform that occupies a central market position started with the arcade and shifted, in order, to the home console, handheld consoles, and smart phones. In the video game industry in the twentieth century each platform had a clear identity, and the relationships among platforms were "interactions". In the twenty-first century, with the improvement of computer performance, the platform identity has disappeared, thus the relationship among platforms is highly competitive. Since the "crash of 1983" in the United States, the Japanese game industry has one of the largest market shares in the world and has developed without being influenced by other countries. It reached its peak in the late 1990s, and then its relative position declined due to the growth of foreign markets and the failure of emerging markets such as online PC games. Even today, Japan's gaming industry holds a dominant position in the world, but it is not the superpower it once was.Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, game research has become active worldwide. Among game researchers, there is a large demand for research on games in Japan, but there is still little dissemination of research in English. The original version of this book published in Japan is highly regarded and received an award for excellence from the Society of Socio-Informatics in 2017.

This book discusses technology and systems to create valuable ideas from data through the construction of knowledge. The primary concern is to make better decisions about economic and management issues in today¿s information-flooded society. Human creative activity is in the realm of soft technology, with no physical entity to operate. Focusing on the ability of knowledge as judgment power, this definition results: ¿Knowledge technology is soft technology that underpins the human creative activities of converting data and information into knowledge, creating new ideas based on that knowledge and validating those ideas.¿ That definition includes a wide range of soft technologies developed in informatics, management studies, and systems science.The knowledge system creates ideas from data and knowledge through knowledge technologies. Based on the proposition that knowledge emerges by the interaction between explicit and tacit knowledge, another definition is possible: ¿The knowledge system is a system that promotes interaction between codified and personalized knowledge and creates ideas for solving a specific problem.¿ Codified knowledge includes data and information, while personalized knowledge is empirical knowledge or wisdom that is difficult to put into words.Building a knowledge system requires mathematical or intelligent knowledge technology and participatory knowledge technology to create or manage codified knowledge and personalized knowledge. For example, a company builds cross-sectional knowledge systems by gathering human resources from various departments, according to the purpose, as in new product development or sales promotion. Chapter 1 defines knowledge technology and the knowledge system and organizes the challenges in their development, while Chapters 2 through 9 introduce mathematical or intelligent knowledge technologies by researchers at the forefront of knowledge technology development.

This book provides a multilateral view of Japanese management control systems (MCS), presents the frameworks of MCS theory, and integrates those systems based on quantitative and qualitative research. Readers will learn how Japanese MCS were investigated by researchers and why they chose the existing frameworks. Not only are the topics clarified with regard to Japanese MCS; empirical evidence from Japan is also provided. At the outset, the frameworks of MCS used by Japanese researchers are explained, and the reasons they choose those frameworks are investigated. Following that exploration, readers are shown a close examination of MCS, which are thought to be difficult to understand in Japan. In Japanese companies, however, these systems are generally used, so in other words Japanese companies use MCS without considering its frameworks. It is a baffling phenomenon, thus a fine topic of research. After a comprehensive review of the literature, the current status of Japanese MCS is presented by using both quantitative and qualitative research. By the end of the book, readers will have a firm grasp of how Japanese firms use MCS and what MCS means for Japanese companies.

This book is about the "benefits of inconvenience (BoI)", providing a new approach to designing innovative systems and opening an alternative viewpoint to readers for looking at the world. BoI says that convenient living has ¿black boxed¿ the processes we used to rely on, while BoI is about looking at the benefits that were originally provided by these actions that have been black-boxed. Consider the relationship between humans and artificial objects, or things, newly created by engineering technology. In the past, things were ¿extensions¿ of people, but before we knew it, things began to substitute for people. BoI can be a keyword for thinking about the relationship that should come after ¿substitution¿. It is a principle of systems design, one that requires time and effort rather than being convenient without any bother. Leading system scientists, technology creators, service producers, and product designers have contributed to this volume. In the first half of the book, manyresearchers describe their theory of BoI from the perspectives of systems engineers, value engineers, designers, and innovators. In the second half of the book, examples of implementing BoI are introduced in various fields, such as product design, service design, social robotics, tourism engineering, and human activity support systems. They will support innovations in systems or services. It is generally said that necessity is the mother of invention. In that belief, inconveniences should be eliminated, which can be a motive force for new technological development. On the other hand, this book shows that inconveniences are not something to be eliminated, but, on the contrary, are essential to obtain some benefit, and shows us how to create beneficial inconveniences.

This book is a collection of research articles that deal with three aspects of simulation and gaming for social design: (1) Theory and methodology, including game system theory and agent-based modeling;

This unique book provides a platform for resilience research, combining knowledge from various domains, such as genetics, primatology, archeology, geography, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, medicine, ecology, psychology, risk management and systems science, in order to examine specific concepts.

This book discusses management philosophy based on case studies in companies in Japan, Korea and China.

This book provides tips to teachers for moving toward active learning by using simulation and gaming. The book is a rare reference for teachers who wish to initiate active learning by applying many real experiences from world experts in simulation and gaming.

This book demonstrates that innovative ideas are systematically constructed in the creative space spanned by the dimensions of systems thinking and knowledge management.

Chapter 1. Theoretical Foundations: Informatics and Translational Systems Science.- Chapter 2. Shared Context-in-motion: Translational and Transformational Aspects of Information.- Chapter 3. Triad Translational continuum and Translational Leadership.- Chapter 4. Informatics and Electronic Health Records and Patient Care.- Chapter 5. Inter-Professional Approach to Health Informatics.- Chapter 6. Tele Nursing and Health Informatics.- Chapter 7. Communication Robot in the Care Provision.- Chapter 8. Big Data and Machine Learning: Lessons from Intensive Care Medicine.- Chapter 9. Medicine in the Age of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.- Chapter 10. Data Science to Improve Our Understanding of Health and Disease.- Chapter 11. Big Data and Quality Improvement in Healthcare.- Chapter 12. Application of Machine Learning Methods to Drug Discovery.-Chapter 13. Informatics of Intensive care Patient Database.- Chapter 14. Nursing and Informatics: Fall Prevention Integration by Adjusting for the Risk of Falling with a Propensity Score.- Chapter 15. Nursing and Informatics.- Chapter 16. Academic Support for Effective Drug Development for Drug-resistant Bacteria-effects of Concomitant Drug Use of Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide (BPO) on Propionibacterium acnes.-  

This unique book provides a platform for resilience research, combining knowledge from various domains, such as genetics, primatology, archeology, geography, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, medicine, ecology, psychology, risk management and systems science, in order to examine specific concepts.

This book provides a timely overview of the impacts of digitalization from the perspective of everyday life, and argues that one central issue in digitalization is the development of new types of services that digitalization enables, but which are often overlooked due to the focus on new technologies and devices.

This volume represents the first attempt in the field of language pedagogy to apply a systems approach to issues in English language education.

This book presents a general conceptual framework to translate principles of system science and engineering to service design. The primary focus is on the part of the service system that can reproduce such processes, called here a Service Machine, and methodological guidelines on how to analyze and design them.

This book introduces a Digital Social System Praxis Framework (DSSPF) integrating Computational Media, Evolutionary Systems Thinking and Design Thinking approaches to E-transformation practice, also called Community Informatics Design (CID). The DSSPF framework is intended to create communication spaces dedicated to knowledge production and sharing for social and organizational change. It allows social systems researchers and practitioners to recognize their synergistic roles in the praxis process to shape their future through social innovation projects. This transdisciplinary text provides potential students and practitioners fundamental concepts and tools for such design. It offers resources from the Pragmatic and Systemic philosophy of science for the co-construction of social architectures and infrastructures, and multi-aspectual design methodologies by which government, organizations and civil society can learn to ethically co-design common ground. This approach provides complementary and common patterns from known methods, models, and theories of social systems interventions that could support a generic framing of large scale sociotechnical systems: digital social innovation ecosystem, living Labs, Fab Labs, enterprise collaborative networks.There will be a particular focus on understanding and addressing the dimensions that make people from different communities of practice able to communicate and collaborate through multiple digital media, design platforms, worldviews and modeling approaches.

As digitalization and social media are increasingly blurring the boundaries between traditional societal, political, and economic institutions, this book provides a cross-disciplinary examination of value co-creation. From various standpoints, it examines how institutions contribute to service ecosystems and how digitalization is transforming value co-creation in these ecosystems. Further, the book shares new perspectives on relational dynamics among government, companies, and citizens. These insights fill the gaps between service science and political science by integrating institutional logics into the concept of value co-creation.The book subsequently examines society as an interaction space. Topics discussed include the new logic and transformation mechanisms of economic activities, citizen participation, governance, and policy-making in the face of technological innovations, market-based reforms, and the risk of disconnect between citizens and policy-making. Here the focus is on value co-creation in complex adaptive systems where institutions, individuals, and businesses negotiate value and interests in networked relations.In closing, the book presents a range of empirical case studies on value co-creation, which provide examples of active networked citizenship, innovative governance and policy-making, democratic leadership, and trust-building dialogue among institutions. The studies address the context of Nordic countries, recognized as world-leading democracies. Pursuing a systems approach, the book articulates a social reality composed of interacting and interconnected elements that cannot be captured with only micro or macro levels of analysis. Service ecosystems are considered as configurations of people and technologies embedded in institutionalized rules, cultural meanings, and practices, offering valuable insights into the service-centered view of markets and society. Given the breadth and depth of its coverage, the book offers a valuable resource for all students and scholars interested in understanding and envisioning the future democratic landscape.

This book discusses management philosophy based on case studies in companies in Japan, Korea and China.