1,721,400 research outputs found
Introduction : From simplicity to complexity
No full textThis chapter introduces the idea of complexity and illustrates it in several ways. It begins with a suggestive example of what may be a real world example of the famous ‘butterfly effect’ in which small changes in China caused a political upheaval in the US which then reverberated on China. The chapter then summarizes some essential concepts which it illustrates using the earlier narrative of the interactions of policy changes and politics in the US and China. Next it explains how politics and politicians naturally simplify complexity. The chapter continues by explaining the difference between government and governance and their roles in policymaking for complex social systems. Two versions of football illustrate the difference in organization between orderly government and complex governance. The chapter ends with an outline of the book and a summary of each chapter
Governing Global Politics
No full textMost thinking about the relations between states is stuck in an orderly perception of reality. The objective of theory and practice is commonly to create order out of the ever-changing natural disorder of self-interested states competing in a self-organised system. After summarising this thinking and the salient literature this chapter outlines the complexity thinking version of global politics which more accurately reflects the dynamic nature of global reality. Depending on the issue-area this may require accepting an ontology of global politics that privileges processes over entities and the rules of interaction over the characteristic of states and organizations that is notably the case in global environmental issues. The chapter then applies this process-based complexity thinking to the global climate issue, demonstrating that the approach is readily applicable and produces a more reasonable description of reality and a better explanation for the failure of states to agree on an effective mitigation strategy. However, the emergent scientific consensus has been an effective stimulant to action at lower scales. This section is followed by a short conclusion
From Order to Complexity in Policy and Governance
No full textThis chapter moves from exploring the impact of complexity in the social sciences to examining its growing influence in policy and governance. It begins with a review of the attractions of orderly social science to the policy world and reviews some of the various forms that these have taken from New Public Management to Evidence-based Policy Making. It then goes on to explore the rise of ‘governance’ thinking as a way of reshaping conceptualisations of government and policy making and examines how this overlapped with the rise of complexity thinking and perspectives. The chapter concludes with a detailed but partial overview of the substantial emergence of complexity and policy-oriented research centres and the impressive growth of complexity-based research in most major areas of policy
Health, Complexity and Governance : The case of the COVID-19 pandemic
No full textThis chapter begins the transition towards a more applied approach in the book. It starts by briefly noting the affinity between complexity and health and well-being and the significant growth in complexity inspired health policy research. It then turns to an examination of the Chinese, European Union and USA governments responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this, it applies a complexity perspective to evaluate and compare the responses noting the importance of initial conditions, chance and localism as well as the problematic nature of learning from others, the long term future of the pandemic and the fundamentally interconnected nature of the pandemic and our socio-economic systems
Governing Economy
No full textThis chapter considers governance of dynamic economies and their complex entanglements with social and ecological systems. It begins by briefly summarising the defects of conventional economics and then compares its ability to comprehend dynamic systems with that of an economics founded in complexity thinking. It illustrates this with a discussion of the ways that social and economic systems interact, especially through technological innovation. While complex systems usually cannot be steered to a specific goal, it is relevant to question the social purpose of economies. The chapter then suggests a social goal as a principle which economic governance can use to guide economic policy and how this may be best achieved by devolving governance to lower scales. A short conclusion summarises the governance of economic complexity
History, Complexity, and Governance
No full textIn addition to our policies, orderly and linear approaches also affect our understanding of history and time. This chapter explores the linkages between linearity and history, particularly as exemplified by the ideas of Isaac Newton, post-Newtonians, and Karl Marx. It then examines how this vision of linear human history and development shaped much of the broader 19th and early 20th century thinking. Next, it tracks the emergence of complexity in history from the work of Edward Carr to John Lewis Gaddis and the rise of chronometric, relational and course grained history. In concludes with a review of the continued appeal of linear directions to history and progress and then uses a ‘complexity cascade’ tool to visualise a more open and emergent vision of history and time and its implications for governance
Advancing the methodological frontiers of research into teaching in higher education
No full textNo abstract is available for this editorial
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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