Chapter 13 discusses the concept of group behavior. We begin by describing group behavior in the context of a unit our readers can readily relate to, the family. We address the subject of culture and how it influences group behavior. We discuss the concept of systems thinking (viewing a particular situation not in isolation but in connection to and interrelated with other situations) beginning with general systems theory and moving into the realm of complex systems to better understand individual behavior in groups.

Emerging research suggests that young people are more likely to experience climate distress than adults, yet there is little understanding of the factors that influence young people’s experience of climate distress. This chapter uses a social-ecological framework to identify individual, physical, and systemic influences from micro (e.g., family, peers), meso (school, community), techno (technology and media), exo (government), and macro (culture and society) systems on youth climate distress. Factors that may exacerbate climate distress or protect youth well-being are highlighted, as well as recommendations and key considerations for supporting the mental health of young people.

Stop. Take a moment to look around. What do you see? No matter where you are, you are likely perceiving a world consisting of things. Maybe you are reading this book in a coffee shop, and if so, you probably see people, cups, books, chairs, and so on. You see a world of objects with properties, yourself included: white cups are on wooden tables, people sitting in chairs are reading books and talking with one another. At the same time, you are a subject, responding to this world and actively bringing yourself and these objects into interrelation. And yet, the world of objects with properties that you are perceiving is but one slice of a complex reality.

Looking for orientation, it is worthwhile to reconstruct the intellectual trajectory of Rudolf Wiethölter, a radical legal scholar from the Frankfurt school of critical theory. Wiethölter reacts to the disaster of both current liberal and Marxist legal theories. He has the courage to lay out the blueprint for a constitutional utopia. Two distinct phases are discernible. In the first phase, he develops the program of a material constitution – the economic constitution as the constitution of society. In the second phase, after his long march through the three most advanced social theories of modernity, he develops a ’critical systems theory of law’, which, however, he sharply positions against Niklas Luhmann’s functionalist systems theory. Selbstgerechtes Rechtsverfassungsrecht (self-justifying law of constitutional law) – in this condensed formula Wiethölter enigmatises his vision of a future material constitution. No less enigmatic are its two main elements of a novel ’reciprocity’ and an ’impartial partiality’. How can these enigmatic concepts be deciphered? And what prospects do they open up to an ambitious constitutional program?

The first chapter of the book develops a normative theory of court organisation and decision-making. It provides the normative framework to assess the development and state of the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law. The chapter argues that the procedure and organisation of a court should depend on its role in a political system. To develop this argument, it presents three ideal models of court decision-making: a liberal model, a rule of law model and a democratic model. The liberal model is associated with the theoretical work of Christoph Möllers. He sees the role of courts as protecting individual liberty. The litigants need to be at the centre of the judicial process. The rule of law model, which I associate with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the judicial process, sees the role of courts not so much in the service of the individual; rather it sees the judicial process as instrumental for creating normative stability by inducing acceptance for court decisions as authoritative interpretations of the law. Finally, the democratic model, that I associate with the theory of adjudication by Jürgen Habermas, conceptualizes courts as democratic organs of a political community. They need to connect to the will of a political community and aim for a procedure that embeds a court’s work in the public sphere.

The emerging society of networks is no longer tied to territorial differentiation. The network form causes a rupture with established models of liability (individual or organisational liability), undermines the public/private liability divide, and also their regulation, now beyond the state. This third rupture in the knowledge base of society creates profound challenges for tort law. So far, the response in tort law has largely been deferential to definitions of acceptable risk that emerge from governance networks beyond territorial borders. This is explained by the uneven de-territorialisation of functional systems (economy vs law, and politics), and in particular by the failure of tort law to develop a convincing model of ascription for network failures. The chapter has two main tasks; first, it locates these problems within EU law because it is considered an avant-garde experiment in governing a society of networks. It is claimed that its product liability law offers novel solutions to problems of risk-responsibility under conditions of uncertainty. It also deepens our understanding of tort law as a venue for providing contestory, discursive spaces when systems discourses collide.

The Introduction situates the book in a broader context of tort theory. The key argument advanced is that with the rise of transnational regulation and law-making, the settled academic debates in tort theory, whether corrective justice theory or law and economics, are inadequate explanations of the social role and function of tort law today. The Introduction, then, develops an alternative theoretical framework for tort law rooted in Ladeurian systems theory, which focues on the societal role of private (tort) law. The basic argument is that it is not feasible or convincing to present tort law apart from its societal knowledge base from which it draws its models of liability. It is then argued that when tort law is understood in its societal role at a transnational and European level, new theoretical insights and models of liability can be perceived. The new model that emerges at a European level in products’ liability case law is a form of network responsibility, which focuses on the role of peripheral parties to torts, which fulfil normatively secondary roles in the society of networks. This can become a wider template for tort liability in governance networks, and this argument will be deepened in Chapter 4 using examples from value chain liability.

H. Patrick Glenn, Professor of Law and former Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, passed away in 2014. For the past decades, he had been a central figure of legal scholarship, especially in the global discourse on comparative law. This chapter is the introduction to a collection that intends to honour Professor Glenn’s intellectual legacy by engaging critically with his ideas, especially focusing on his visions of a ‘cosmopolitan state’ and of law conceptualized as ‘tradition’. To this end, the collection brings together an international group of leading scholars in comparative law, legal philosophy, legal sociology, and legal history. This introductory chapter situates Glenn’s work within the context of his trajectory as a scholar of comparative law and reflects critically, in particular, on Glenn’s concept of ‘tradition’.

This chapter defines the basic principles of planning within a context of management science. It describes how plans are used for managing modern operations.

This chapter considers how certain values may come to shape the law. It explores the institutions, processes and actors that facilitate the emergence of altruistically oriented legal norms. In doing so, the link between ideology and law will become more apparent. The evolution in international law presented in this book is the product of an underlying cosmopolitan altruistic ideology which coexists with a statist individualistic ideology that shape the content of legal rules. A legal system can be influenced by one or more philosophical ideologies, and the international legal system has been and continues to be shaped by different variations of these two major ideologies. As such, cosmopolitan altruism and statist individualism have a dialectic existence in the formation of law and its interpretation. Despite the fundamental differences in the nature and effect of these ideologies, they are capable of having simultaneous normative influence on the behaviour of states and the formation of international law.

This conclusion weaves together the wide-ranging contributions of this volume by considering data-driven personalisation as an internally self-sustaining (autopoietic) system. It observes that like other self-sufficient social systems, personalisation incorporates and processes new data and thereby redefines itself. In doing so it redefines the persons who participate in it, transforming them into ‘digital’ components of this new systems, as well as influencing social arrangements more broadly. The control that elite corporate and governmental entities have over systems of personalisation – which have been diversely described by contributors to this volume – reveals challenges in the taming of personalisation, specifically the limits of traditional means by which free persons address new phenomena – through consent as individuals, and democratic process collectively.

Machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems arise as images of the posthuman within the discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. From the side of technoscience, advances in cybernetics and systems theory have been the prime movers of the posthuman imaginary. AI and its elaboration in the cultural imaginary is particularly instructive with regard to transhumanist visions of transcendence. Where cybernetics spread across organic bodies, computational devices, and the social dynamics of communication, AI bypassed multiple cybernetic couplings to concentrate on the design, construction, and study of computational agencies. AI discourse ran alongside the development of SETI—the scientific program dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Both AI and SETI foreground how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. The 2015 novel Aurora overcomes the AI imaginary as previously constituted by bringing ecological realism to the relations to machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems.

In this epilogue, we reflect on the prospects for advancing interdisciplinarity in the sciences of culture, mind, and brain. Neuroscience is increasingly applied to address questions of central concern to the social sciences. Social sciences, in turn, can contribute to neuroscience research in a variety of ways, including: (1) the study of social factors that influence the brain across the lifespan; (2) the context-sensitive translation of neuroscience research into applications in clinical and other social settings; (3) critical social analyses of cultural, conceptual, and institutional framing and constraints on neuroscience research, knowledge production, and applications; and (4) integration of each of these approaches in an ecosocial view of the brain in its social-cultural niche. Obstacles to interdisciplinarity stem from institutional structures, methodological strategies, epistemic commitments, and divergent ontologies. We describe strategies to surmount these obstacles, including: (1) institutionally, creating spaces for collaborative work, supporting interdisciplinary career tracks, and ensuring sustained funding; (2) conceptually, borrowing models and metaphors across disciplines, establishing boundary objects of common interest, using system diagrams to locate diverse levels and processes in the same model; and (3) methodologically, establishing convergent validity through mixed and hybrid methods, and creating shared databases and pipelines to facilitate integration of multiple perspectives.