The science of complexity is concerned with the study of complex, adaptive systems. Its insights have in recent decades been applied with gusto by social scientists and other thinkers.
As research in and around the application of complexity science flourishes as never before, this new five-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing—and ever more complex—corpus of literature. Edited by leading scholars, the collection gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.
With a full index, together with new introductions to each volume, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Complexity is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For researchers, students, practitioners, and policy-makers, it is as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
Contents
PROVISIONAL CONTENTS
Volume I
Origins of Order-Creation Science: Complexity Science From Basic Disciplines
Part 1: Prologue
1. H. A. Simon, ‘The Architecture of Complexity’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1962, 106, 467–82.
2. M. Gell-Mann, ‘What is Complexity?’, in A. Q. Curzio and M. Fortis (eds.), Complexity and Industrial Clusters: Dynamics and Models in Theory and Practice (Physica-Verlag, 2002), pp. 13–24.
3. P. Cilliers, ‘Approaching Complexity’, in Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1-24.
Part 2: Beginning in Physics
4. G. Nicolis and I. Prigogine, ‘Complexity in Nature’, in ExComplexity: An Introduction (1977/1989), pp. 5–44.
5. P. Allen, ‘Evolution, Modelling, and Design in a Complex World’, Environment and Planning B, 1982, 9, 1, 95–111.
6. R. Swenson, ‘Emergent Attractors and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production: Foundations to a Theory of General Evolution’, Systems Research, 1989, 6, 3, 187–97.
7. L. D. Kiel, ‘Lessons from the Nonlinear Paradigm: Applications of the Theory of Dissipative Structures in Social Sciences’, Social Science Quarterly, 1991, 72, 3, 431–42.
8. B. J. Zimmerman and D. K. Hurst, ‘Breaking the Boundaries: The Fractal Organization’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 1993, 2, 4, 334–55.
9. A. Juarrero, ‘Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics’, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (1999), pp. 119–30.
Part 3: Beginning in Biology
10. W. R. Ashby, ‘Principles of the Self-Organizing System&rsq...