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Sustainable Development, Social Ecology, and the Quintuple Helix

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Abstract

Society could be designed or understood to consist of different subsystems (or systems). The political system and the economic system are such examples. Politics and the economy are being embedded by society; thus society, in this understanding, is more comprehensive than politics and the economy. For every societal subsystem, the other subsystems of society or society as a whole represents “social environments” (societal environments). In a spatial (spatial-political) multi-level architecture, societies could be located at different levels of aggregation, ranging from sub-national (local, regional) to national and transnational (supranational, global). Society again is being contextualized by the “natural environment” (the natural environments).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A system could be defined as consisting of “elements/parts” and the “rationale/self-rationale” of these system elements (Carayannis and Campbell, 2009, p. 204). Of course, alternative definitions for a system also are possible.

  2. 2.

    See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology (retrieved, November 06, 2009).

  3. 3.

    See also: http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/1860.htm.

  4. 4.

    Government/opposition cycles of the political system find a partial equivalent in the so-called concept of “knowledge swings,” referring to the possibility of a sequential patterning of which modes of knowledge or innovation are dominant in which periods of time (Carayannis and Campbell, 2009, p. 225).

  5. 5.

    This also leads to the question whether Mode 3 encourages that professionals carry hybrid competences and thus qualify as “polyvalence professionals” (see, e.g., Meglic et al., 2009).

  6. 6.

    In earlier historical periods, also variations of a Mode 2 problem-solving existed, but with less or no cross-connections to a science-based Mode 1 knowledge. In that line of thinking, Mode 2 might be “older” than Mode 1 (see also Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000, p. 116).

  7. 7.

    At this point we leave it open, what in the logical continuation of such a conceptual sequence a Sextuple Helix (six-helix model) or a Septuple Helix (seven-helix model) possibly may or could be.

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Carayannis, E.G., Campbell, D.F.J. (2019). Sustainable Development, Social Ecology, and the Quintuple Helix. In: Smart Quintuple Helix Innovation Systems. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01517-6_4

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