Toward Resilient, Just, and Ethical Viable Systems: Cybernetics, Resilience, and Socio-Ecological Futures
SYSTEMIC PRACTICE AND ACTION RESEARCH
This special issue invites contributions that explore how the Viable System Model (VSM) and its cybernetics principles can strengthen societal and organisational responses to complexity by enhancing resilience, supporting regeneration, and enabling democratic and ethically grounded governance.
The issue is motivated by a recognised need for utilising the powers of management cybernetics to address today’s intertwined challenges of systemic fragility, ecological disruption, and organisational injustice. The VSM (Beer 1979, 1981, 1985) provides a recursive, self-organising architecture for diagnosing and designing viable systems. While widely applied in organisational and policy settings, its potential to address normative, ethical and relational dimensions of complex systems, such as trust, belonging, psychological safety, empowerment, shared purpose, and inclusive participation, remained underdeveloped. Its capacity to facilitate organisational learning and strengthening resilient, democratic, autonomous, and critically engaged practices also warrants deeper theoretical and empirical exploration.
Aims and Scope
This special issue welcomes theoretical developments and practice-based insights that extend or reinterpret the VSM in light of contemporary socio-ecological challenges. We encourage contributions that engage critically with the VSM's architecture, integrate it with complementary methodologies, or present empirical cases that generate theoretical insights. Work that bridges the technical precision of organisational cybernetic with philosophical, normative, pedagogical, qualitative, or quantitative approaches is particularly encouraged.
The special issue is oriented around four intersecting themes:
1. Resilience and Viability under Complexity
This theme examines how the VSM conceptualises and operationalises resilience, especially in conditions of high environmental volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). We invite contributions explore viability, adaptability, purposeful evolution, and how different recursive levels respond to disruption. We particularly encourage studies addressing the affective and sensemaking processes that shape resilience, such as trust, psychological safety, collective learning, and shared purpose. We welcome comparative perspectives of resilience, viability and adaptive learning across diverse global contexts.
2. Democratic Governance and Ethical Cybernetics
This theme explores how organisational cybernetic principles support inclusive, participatory, and ethically grounded governance. We invite reflections on the VSM as an emancipatory approach that amplifies distributed intelligence and self-organisation. Submissions may examine justice-oriented relational processes including belonging, diversity and inclusion, ethical climate, empowerment, voice, and legitimacy. We also welcome analyses of values, power relations, and contextual histories shaping cybernetic interventions.
3. Multi-Methodology and Theoretical Integration
This theme focuses on combining the VSM with complementary frameworks such as problem structuring methods, decision theories, philosophical foundations, agent‑based modelling, or sustainability science. We welcome theoretically grounded proposals for methodological pluralism, metatheoretical integration, and extensions of Beer's cybernetic theories.
4. Cybernetics for all (Barefoot Cybernetics)
This theme highlights approaches that democratise and make widely available cybernetic tools and principles. We welcome contributions on workshops, digital platforms, pedagogic innovations, artificial intelligence, and community‑based initiatives that broaden public understanding, creative practice, and accessible learning and application of organisational cybernetics.
Topics of Interest
Submissions are invited on topics including, but not limited to:
- Resilience, adaptive capacity, and systemic viability in organisational and societal contexts
- VSM applications to disaster response, crisis management, and emergency governance
- Ethical governance, democratic, and emancipatory cybernetics
- Socio-ecological systems and sustainability
- Multi-methodology and philosophical or normative integrations
- Regenerative governance and post-crisis recovery
- VSM in AI, digital transformation, and smart systems
- Recursive governance structures in public and community organisations
- Critical appraisals and theoretical extensions of the VSM
- Participatory action research using VSM
- Pedagogic innovations for disseminating Beer’s theories
- Affective and relational processes in viable systems
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts should follow the Systemic Practice and Action Research author guidelines (Springer) [Read Guidelines Here]. Submissions will undergo double‑blind peer review and should typically be 7,000–10,000 words (including references).
Key Dates
- Abstract submission: July 17th, 2026
- Full manuscript submission deadline: February 28th, 2027
- First-round review decisions: March 31st, 2027
- Revised manuscript submission: June 30th, 2027
- Anticipated publication: September 25th, 2027 (tbc)
Guest Editors
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Bucaramanga, Colombia
amartinez368@unab.edu.co
Al Ain University, United Arab Emirates
ch.iffat@yahoo.com; iffat.sabir@aau.ac.ae