The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
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This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Garbis, Zoe
Year 2026
Publisher Lund University, Department of Human Geography (master's thesis, SGEM08)
Kind of work thesis
Discipline Geography
Secondary disciplines Agriculture & Food, Public Policy
Kind of engagement scholarly
Applied false
The author sets out to examine how preparedness is understood and enacted across Sweden's food supply chain, and to test the Swedish government's approach of placing substantial responsibility for food-system preparedness on private actors.
Thirty-two semi-structured interviews conducted in Swedish between January and March 2026, 45 to 90 minutes each, purposively sampled across primary production, manufacturing, distribution, public meal service, and public policy.
A single-case study in an interpretivist, abductive design, with DSRP incorporated into both study design and analysis. The case is bounded to four vital societal functions, which the author presents as the distinctions step. Interviews used a border-closure scenario and were designed to elicit each actor's view of its own preparedness and of other actors', which the author presents as the perspectives step. Flows and dependencies between actors are mapped in the results as the relationships step. Analysis is thematic, with investigator triangulation.
The author finds that preparedness is unevenly understood and enacted along the supply chain. Many private actors express confidence, often citing past crises they survived, and treat preparedness largely as problem-solving, while appearing less prepared for severe scenarios and lacking the stockpiles or inputs they themselves identify as necessary. Priorities are misaligned: private actors want guidance and funding from public agencies, while resisting storage and investment on grounds of cost and competition. Material, temporal, and spatial asymmetries produce dense interdependencies, so that no single actor can make the system prepared. The author argues this challenges a policy approach that assigns heavy preparedness responsibility to private food actors.
A Lund University master's thesis that builds its research design on DSRP, citing Cabrera and Cabrera (2023), and uses the four patterns to bound the case, shape the interview protocol, and organize the analysis of preparedness across Sweden's food supply chain.
Garbis takes DSRP as the theoretical basis of the thesis rather than as background citation. Section 2.2.2 introduces the theory and states each tenet with attribution to Cabrera and Cabrera (2023): distinctions entail defining the boundaries of the phenomenon under consideration, systems are composed of many types of dynamic interaction between parts, and attempts to understand a system are made from particular perspectives. From these she derives four implications for her own study, the first being that studying the preparedness of a system requires drawing analytical boundaries, and she pairs the Cabreras with Bergström and Dekker on emergence as the central tenet of the approach. The framework then does methodological work. In Section 2.4 she uses the perspectives tenet to question how stakeholder-perspective research is ordinarily designed. Section 2.5 states that DSRP is incorporated into both the study design and the analysis. Section 3.2.1 treats bounding the case as integral to the theory, and the case is bounded to four vital societal functions. The interview protocol asks each actor both about its own preparedness and about other actors', so that misalignment between vantages becomes visible data rather than noise; the finding that private and public actors want incompatible things from each other falls out of that design. The relationships tenet appears in the results as a mapping of material, temporal, and spatial flows and dependencies between actors, and it carries the thesis's central claim: because the dependencies are dense and asymmetric, preparedness is a property of the whole that no single actor can secure. DSRP is not used as a coding scheme, and individual analytical steps are not labeled with the pattern they draw on.
The thesis is a clean example of DSRP used as a research design rather than as a vocabulary. Garbis gets the distinctions tenet right in a way that applied work often misses: she treats boundary-drawing as something the analyst does, and is explicit that bounding her case to four vital societal functions leaves part of the system outside the study. The perspectives tenet earns its place too, since designing interviews to capture how each actor views the others is what turns misalignment into a finding. The part-whole argument that no single actor can make the system prepared is systems reasoning doing real work against a policy position. One caveat on what the study demonstrates: because DSRP shapes the design but the analysis is thematic and unlabeled, the thesis cannot show which of its findings depended on the framework and which would have emerged from the interviews regardless. The citation to Cabrera and Cabrera (2023) for emergence is also shared with Bergström and Dekker, so the thesis does not rest the claim on DSRP alone.
Patterns it shows D, S, R, P
Shows it makes a difference
Added 2026-10-22
How to cite this Garbis, Zoe (2026). Beyond Stockpiles: Preparedness in Sweden's Food System. Lund University, Department of Human Geography (master's thesis, SGEM08).