Tadeja Jere Jakulin
University of Primorska
Biography
Tadeja Jere Jakulin is Full Professor of Systems Theory in Tourism at the University of Primorska, Faculty of Tourism Studies – Turistica (Portorož, Slovenia), where she serves as Vice Dean for Internationalisation and Quality and heads the Department of Cultural Tourism. She is President of the Slovenian Society for Systems Research and a member of the AIEST (International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism). Her research applies general systems theory, systems thinking, cybernetics, and system dynamics to tourism, cultural heritage, and pilgrimage. In her latest research, she began working with the Viable System Model, the Object–Subject–Model epistemological triad, and Peircean semiotics, using the Škofjeloški pasijon -Slovenia's UNESCO-listed passion play -as an empirical case. At Metaphorum 2026, she examines how the VSM illuminates the governance and long-term viability of this living heritage performance. She has published in Kybernetes, PLOS ONE, Sensors, Brain Sciences and the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, with chapters for Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, and Edward Elgar. She co-edited Law, Humanities, and Tourism (Cambridge Scholars, 2026) and received the 2026 IRTP Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sessions
The Škofja Loka Passion Play as a Nexus of System, Culture, Art and Religion
Purpose: In 'World in Torment: A Time Whose Idea Must Come', Stafford Beer diagnosed a civilisation governed by low-variety ideologies, losing the identities that hold societary units together. The paper asks what cybernetics contributes to interpreting the Škofja Loka Passion Play – the oldest preserved dramatic text in Slovenian, inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List in 2016. Cybernetics renders visible the structural conditions of the Play’s three-hundred-year viability; the Play is a living counter-example to the torment. Methods: The stance is stated plainly. The Viable System Model (VSM) belongs to organisational cybernetics; a passion play is not a firm. Nothing is prescribed. It is applied as Beer applies it in World in Torment – to any societary unit, “a village or a company, a state or the whole of humankind” – as a diagnostic instrument for evaluating identity, that “highly complex ethos of self-recognition”. A hermeneutic reading of the Play as cultural-spiritual text disciplines the cybernetic one; a case study maps actors, roles and flows. Findings: The study shows that the Škofja Loka Passion Play can be read through the lens of Beer’s Viable System Model. The scenes and processions correspond to the operational level of System 1, while the municipality, local associations, and the monastery jointly assume the coordinating and managerial roles of Systems 2 and 3. Scholarly engagement with the Play functions as System 4, and the religious tradition surrounding it fulfils the System 5 role of articulating and maintaining collective identity. With the involvement of roughly 1,500 volunteers, the production offers abundant leadership potential and, instead of sidelining parts of the community, brings a wide spectrum of people into meaningful participation, countering typical patterns of social exclusion. Implications/contribution: In contrast to enterprise diagnosis (Espejo, Schwaninger, Pérez Ríos, Hoverstadt) and community applications (Leonard; Espinosa and Walker), the paper extends the World in Torment reading of identity to living heritage and the scenic arts – where the idea whose time must come has quietly been coming for three centuries.