No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Place of Complexity
Abstract
This article is an attempt to understand the increasing profile of complexity theory as a geography of dissemination. In the first part I suggest that complexity theory, itself a rhetorical hybrid, takes on new meanings as it circulates in and through a number of actor-networks and, specifically, global science, global business and global New Age. As complexity theory circulates in these networks, so it encounters new conditions, which generate new hybrid theoretical forms. In the second part of the article, I consider how complexity theory might be interpreted as the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. The conclusion offers some words of warning.
... Like Peter John (2003John ( , 2012, this research is also interested in applying and expanding evolutionary ideas on planning thinking. It also has a positive view of complexity theory (e.g., Byrne, 1998;Thrift, 1999) and underlines non-linear dynamics of interaction between the interdependent elements that make up a national planning system. Unveiling the varying truth-claims present in the power plays that shape the evolution of a planning system, the naturalised contingency of its relations with the State, society and science, as well as its selfdescriptions, is a major step in this direction. ...
... EGT speaks of rigidity and flexibility in governance evolution, with dependencies helping to explain rigidity, and flexibility coming from deliberate path creation but also from the interplay between the dependencies. In keeping with systems theory and complexity theory (Byrne, 1998;Thrift, 1999), the pattern of feedback loops which can emerge from such interplay creates its own unanticipated effects, and these can be exploited by actors to shift the path of governance. ...
... Such a multilayered regionalism also emerges in recent research on the business connections of cities: Indraprahasta and Derudder [2017], for example, show that the geography of Jakarta's business connections is characterized by strong connections with major world cities alongside clear-cut Southeast Asian, East Asian, and national connections [33]. It can thus be said that our findings show both the enduring relevance of overlapping regional areal framings and the increasing relevance of what Thrift [1999] has called the 'blizzard of transactions' across the world [82]. ...
... Such a multilayered regionalism also emerges in recent research on the business connections of cities: Indraprahasta and Derudder [2017], for example, show that the geography of Jakarta's business connections is characterized by strong connections with major world cities alongside clear-cut Southeast Asian, East Asian, and national connections [33]. It can thus be said that our findings show both the enduring relevance of overlapping regional areal framings and the increasing relevance of what Thrift [1999] has called the 'blizzard of transactions' across the world [82]. ...
Although world regions continue to be a key feature of the geographical imagination, there has been relatively little innovative research on world regionalization through the lens of city connections. Against the backdrop of an increasingly urban and interconnected world, in this paper, we evaluate the connections between European and Asian world cities. Based on a model conjecturing intercity connections through office locations of globalized producer services firms, we analyze the networks of both regions’ major cities. To this end, we establish frameworks that allow (1) comparison of the level of connectivity of cities and (2) analysis of the strength and orientation of the interactions between cities. We find that both Europe and Asia have a larger number of well-connected cities than any other world region. Both regions are roughly comparable in terms of the distribution of their urban connectivities, but there are some notable differences (e.g., Asia’s system being more top-heavy) and evolutions (e.g., Asian cities gaining more connectivity over the last decade). There are also two geographical dimensions to the interpretations of these patterns of urban connectivity: (1) the variegated importance of state-spaces (e.g., national gateways) and (2) the uneven regional focus of intercity connections (e.g., Luxembourg and Singapore being less dependent on regional connections). We use our findings to argue that the time is ripe for a more nuanced and contextualized answer to the question of how cities (can) act politically on the global scale in general and Asia–Europe relations in particular.
... That the issue was passed between agents and institutions may be indicative of policy-makers simplifying their environment and absolving themselves of responsibility, or a variation on the tragedy of the commons [69][70][71]. ...
... Our findings support previous research in several ways: (i) complexity is seldom understood or used literally [22]; (ii) policy-makers reflexively engage with evidence [59]; (iii) metaphors influence complexity's dynamic meaning [14,24]; (iv) anticipated reactions to complexity are evidenced by the participants' practices [33,69,71]; and (v) increased local co-evolution and adaptation of policies is occurring and desired [33,78]. ...
Background
Complexity theory and systems-thinking are increasingly popular in physical activity (PA) research and policy discourse. The impact of this perspective shift, across many sectors, may be underwhelming. We explore why, by focusing on how these concepts are understood and applied by PA policy-makers. This is of particular interest given the challenges of multisectoral interest and poorly defined stakeholder boundaries that are associated with PA promotion. In this study, we critique key elements of complexity theory and consider how it is understood and put into practice in PA policy-making.
Methods
We adopted a complex realist position. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with national-level policy-makers from United Kingdom government settings (five civil servants, three politicians, two policy advisors). An inductive thematic analysis was conducted, and managed with NVivo 10 software.
Results
Three overarching themes were constructed to reflect policy-makers’ uncertainty about complexity and the application of such perspectives to this policy space, their sense that PA was an unexceptionable yet unclaimed policy issue , and their desire for influence and change . Participants discussed complexity in contrasting ways. Its meaning was context-dependent and dynamic, which generated uncertainty about applying the concept. Participants also perceived an increasingly diverse but ill-defined PA policy system that spans the domains of expertise and responsibility. Collaborative practices may contribute to a previously unobserved sense of detachment from the systems’ complexity. Nevertheless, participants suggested potentially effective ways to stimulate system change, which require passionate and enterprising leadership, and included varied evidence use, a focus on localised implementation and different ways to connect people.
Conclusions
This research highlighted the importance of extending complexity theory and systems-thinking. While emphasizing the prevalence of these ideas across the PA sector, there is uncertainty as to their meaning and implications. This may prevent their use in ways that enhance PA policies and programmes. Participants conceptualised PA as a tool, which was imposed on the system. While this may support participative decision-making and localised implementation, further research is needed to understand how local systems foster leadership, the practical application of complexity and systems-thinking, and how to support system-wide change in the development and implementation of PA policies.
... At these places 'learning practices' (Ibert, 2007) emerge if 'typical artefacts' and 'material infrastructure' are provided (Latour, 1987). Thereby, practices and material or technological artefacts are closely intertwined, as 'practices incorporate the objects that they are enacted with and on the settings in which they are enacted' (Rouse, 1996, 135; see also Thrift, 1999). In other words, practices of knowledge creation transform the places within which they dwell (Ibert, 2007, 108). ...
Great expectations are being projected onto digital transformation as a solution to planning under uncertainty and complexity, while demanding new skills from and posing challenges to professionals. We address the ambivalent inclusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in everyday planning practices. How do ambivalences towards digitalisation as either a transformative process or as an intrusion upon everyday routines play out in urban planning as a situated knowledge practice? We focus on the erratic embedding of digital technologies and data into planning practices. We gather insights from interviews with planners in small and medium-sized cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The analytical focus on knowing in practice and situated knowledge allows for insights on how digital transformations shape planning from professionals’ perspectives. Our research shows that digital transformation requires infrastructure and routines to bring forward innovative ambitions, which in many contexts are disrupted by limited resources and hierarchical decision-making procedures.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
... The role of ecology in conceptions of well-being in Indian and other indigenous healing traditions is often overlooked. As Thrift (1999) indicates, place is a living and dynamic presence that constructs behavior and engagement patterns. At the same time, place also situates and grounds subjective experiences of those engagements and behaviors. ...
The role of ecology in shaping notions of well-being in indigenous healing traditions is often overlooked in contemporary well-being discourse. This study examines how ecological systems contribute to notions of well-being in two Indic healing traditions– Āyurveda and the Māvilan healing traditions. We focus on the ecological place (or eco-place) as a living and dynamic space within which cultures of knowledge emerge, and healing identities become constructed, fostering multiple somatic, psychological, social, and spiritual correspondences between its human and other-than-human members, and through which a variety of well-being experiences emerge. Three lenses are used for this purpose (i) a narrative ecology of healing, (ii) agentic herbs and co-creative healing, and (iii) healing of natural ecological systems. For the first, the concept of narrative ecology is examined, alongside how healing knowledge emerges in both Āyurveda and the Māvilan healing traditions from human and other-than-human understandings of the world; for the second, we examine how, despite significantly differing engagements with forest ecosystems, the notion of plant-agency can recast healing as a co-creative process in both traditions. For the third, we explore ideas regarding other-than-human illness and therapeutics in Āyurveda and the Māvilan healing traditions.
... Page 3968 Harvey (2001) emphasized in his claim that complexity theory focuses on the elements within complex systems, whereas chaos theory focuses on the study of exterior systems. The fundamental tenet of complexity theory is that complex systems, such as a business, an industry, or a manufacturing line, show implicitly ordered behavior (Thrift, 1999;Manson, 2001). Famous author and scientist -David Berreby has stated that rather than being run randomly, systems are organized as a result of natural principles that humans have not been able to completely comprehend and find. ...
This study analyzes the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Vietravel's business recovery plan post-COVID-19. It aims to identify CSR elements, their importance in recovery strategies, and methods for tourism businesses to develop effective recovery plans. Research questions address CSR concepts, their impact on tourism firms' success, and the relationship between CSR and recovery strategies. The study fills a gap in the literature on tourism company recovery strategies, especially in Vietnam, and provides a case study of Vietravel. It also examines how the crisis influences tourism companies' views on sustainability and CSR. The research involves surveying 120 Vietravel employees in Hanoi through online surveys and various communication channels.
... Rather, these images form 'information spaces' that contribute to a narrative of rain, each with its own localized characteristics. Clifford and King (1993) suggest that a local temporal patterning can in turn contribute to local distinctiveness and to 'ecologies of place' (Thrift 1999). Here, for example, five minutes of rain in New York on this day at this place during this time, becomes a print that is both a still visual image and a perpetual flow of data. ...
Contemporary printmaking has introduced unusual combinations of techniques and materials, extreme scales or incorporation into three-dimensional constructions. While some printmakers remain faithful to traditional printing techniques, others have begun to extend practices towards an expanded field, in which printmaking enters into dialogues with other and non-human languages. In this article I investigate the intersection of printmaking and rain in the work of Dutch designer Aliki van der Kruijs. Developing a technique she termed ‘pluviagraphy’ to record visually rain events at particular coordinates of time-space, her ‘Made by Rain’ series probes the relations between weather, matter, colour, time and space. Looking across the prints featured in this article, the question arises how falling rain as part of the material world becomes part of that recorded world when registered as a mark on a surface. Further, how printmakers might work with different surfaces to begin to probe such questions. A key concern of van der Kruijs practice is the reframing of printmaking as a liminal site of interdisciplinarity in the context of examining the surfaces between adjacent disciplines. This manifests in a visual conversation informed by the rhythm of the rainfall and printmaking process. The result is an expanding body of research surrounding interdisciplinary practice, mark-making and how printmaking might function at the boundaries of other disciplines.
... The present complexity shift follows and is at the same time closely related to the so-called processual shift in border studies which allowedin the late 1990s and early 2000sthe transition from the concept of border to that of bordering, reconceiving borders as dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation (Paasi 1998;Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002;Newman 2006;Van Melik et al. 2021). Both the processual shift and the complexity shift in border studies can be related to the so-called complexity turn within the social and cultural sciences in the 1990s (Cilliers 1998;Thrift 1999;Urry 2003). It was the urgency of confronting more complex objects of study in the world system under conditions of contemporary globalization that has helped to generate such a complexity turn (Urry 2005). ...
... With the 'scale turn' in human geography, there has been a shift from a realist to a constructivist understanding of scale, where scale is seen as a product of broader social, political, economic, and cultural processes (MacKinnon, 2011), implying that there is interaction between different levels of scale (Paasi, 2004). With hot topics such as assemblage theory, complexity theory, and actornetworks theory reconfiguring relationships (Müller, 2015;Thrift, 1999), scales are also viewed in terms of fluid and changing relationships. Understanding place brands through the relational lens of scale is influenced not only by the same level of space but also by higher and lower levels of place; spatial levels can also work in reverse when a particular place defines an entire region (Aharon and Alfasi, 2022). ...
Place branding has become a popular strategy to promote place visibility and place image communication and gains attention in the field of city planning, geography, and place management. The contribution of geographical knowledge has been emphasized and discussed in recent place branding studies, including the role of geographical scale in branding strategies and management. However, current research mainly places the issues of scale from the top-down perspective of branding governance, and the bottom-up processes based on local culture and embodied experiences are overlooked. Drawing on participatory-based visual methodology, in the article, a combination of self‐directed photography, photo evaluation, eye-tracking experiment, and interview are employed to the scale transformation performance of place brands from the perspective of embodied experience. Taking Xinhepu in Guangzhou, China as a case study, the results show that both residents and nonresidents do not limit their perception of the Xinhepu brand to a microscale space but point to the city of Guangzhou. Specifically, the process of scale transformation of place brands is characterized by the interaction of temporal and spatial factors that provide possibilities for scale transformation. The physical landscape in space plays a role in place branding, while in time scale, Xinhepu connects Guangzhou’s past and present and is a microcosm of the city’s image and historical development; thus, in people’s embodied perception, Xinhepu can be transformed into a city brand through place culture creation. The article can provide a new explanation for the construction of place branding at multiple geographical scales and explore how the body’s unconscious, nonrepresentational rhythms play a role in place brand scale transformation.
... We then anchor this in the local context of current Northern 90 England and Newcastle and conclude with reflections on the successful application of this methodology 91to uncover if locals have become more engaged in the local public realm as active "citizens of place" 92 rather than aloof spectators. We work here with the conceptualization of place as 'dwelling, affinity, 93 immanence, relationality, multiplicity and performativity;' and of urban planning; and urban design, as a 94 kind of 'magic'(Hillier 2005;Amin 2004;Thrift 1999;. Our thinking also borrows from Deleuze and ...
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed our world. And, the measures required to manage it brought serious disruption to the vibrant, enriching, and healthy social interactions which most humans crave. In the UK, the public health pandemic followed in the wake of an epidemic of austerity that had been with us since 2010. So that today, the landscape is grim: public services have undergone serious decline; privatisations and outsourcing have battered the public realm; and public infrastructures across Britain have been severely eroded. In this work, we go beyond current government rhetoric and its instrumentalised thinking, exemplified by the empty “build back better” soundbite that is seeded through current planning documentation. Instead, we look at urban places that have been left behind: those suffering in terms of overall place quality and poor public realm. Our methodology centres on location-specific “experiments”, co-designed with the local community in the suburb of Blakelaw, Newcastle Upon Tyne, in Northeast England. We strongly feel that if we are to genuinely strengthen the place agenda in such a moment of fluidity of context, our challenge is to develop deep, multi-layered, complex understandings of the public realm of left-behind communities and places. And, we intend to do this by adopting a more radical, disruptive, experimental, yet collaborative, community-led urban design and placemaking approach.KeywordsUrban designPublic realmPlace citizenshipExperimental approachPolitics of recovery
... phases," etc.), through general audience books (Lewin 1992;Gell-Mann 1994;Kauffman 1993;Holland 1996;Axelrod and Cohen 1999;Levin 1999;Holland 2014), to many fields of knowledge (Urry 2005;Grauwin et al. 2012) and to popular culture (Thrift 1999;Taylor 2003). Along with chaos and some other physical theories, complexity has become one of the most mediatized scientific fields of the last forty years and has attracted the attention of many philosophers (Wimsatt 1994;Rescher 1998;Cilliers and Spurrett 1999;Knyazeva 2005;Aziz-Alaoui and Bertelle 2009;Hooker 2011;Fraisopi 2012;Taborsky 2014;Zuchowski 2018) and some social scientists (Helmreich 1998;Williams 2012;Li Vigni 2018a). ...
Complexity sciences have become famous worldwide thanks to several popular books that served as echo chambers of their promises. These consisted in departing from “classical science” defined as deterministic, reductionist, analytic and mono-disciplinary. Their founders and supporters declared that complexity sciences were going to give rise (or that they have given rise) to a post-Laplacian, antireductionist, holistic and interdisciplinary approach. By taking a closer look at their content and practices, I argue in this article that, because of their physicalist, computationalist and mathematical assumptions, complexity sciences have paradoxically produced knowledge at odds with these four tenets.
... We then anchor this in the local context of current Northern 90 England and Newcastle and conclude with reflections on the successful application of this methodology 91to uncover if locals have become more engaged in the local public realm as active "citizens of place" 92 rather than aloof spectators. We work here with the conceptualization of place as 'dwelling, affinity, 93 immanence, relationality, multiplicity and performativity;' and of urban planning; and urban design, as a 94 kind of 'magic'(Hillier 2005;Amin 2004;Thrift 1999;. Our thinking also borrows from Deleuze and ...
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed our world. And the measures required to manage it, brought serious disruption to the vibrant, enriching, and healthy social interactions which most humans crave. In this work we go beyond the empty rhetoric of "build back better," to consider how location-specific urban "experiments", co-designed with the local community in the suburb of Blakelaw, Newcastle Upon Tyne, in Northeast England, might authentically strengthen the place agenda, in the emerging "New Normal."
... Since before the turn of this century, the idea of complexity -as a particular set of approaches, concepts and language -has gained interest across many social sciences (see especially Byrne 1998;Thrift 1999;Urry 2003Jörg 2011). Complexity represents both a scientific field and conceptual perspective, framework or mode of framing, rather than a unified body of theory (see Byrne and Callaghan 2013). ...
... Using one and the same approach (Lovejoy, 2019), one can capture both the individual events (the change), and the invariants (the permanent), which bridges the Parmenides-Heraclitus antagonism. Also, unlike the familiar positivist methodologies, nonlinear theory can be deeply metaphorical (Thrift, 1999): notwithstanding the dangers involved by an inadequate usage of this feature, it can produce imagery that supports a more profound and nuanced kind of communication. ...
... After Jacobs' pioneering work, planning scholars have adopted CAS theories in analysing the development of neighbourhoods, cities and regions, and to explain the emergence of urban socio-spatial patterns (Thrift, 1999;Portugali, 1999;Hillier, 2012;Batty, 2013). This ability to detect emergent patterns makes it possible to intervene when self-organizing processes head in an undesired direction (Rauws, 2015). ...
Editorial
The RSD10 symposium was held at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, 2nd-6th November 2021. After a successful (yet unforeseen) online version of the RSD 9 symposium, RSD10 was designed as a hybrid conference.
How can we facilitate the physical encounters that inspire our work, yet ensure a global easy access for joining the conference, while dealing well with the ongoing uncertainties of the global COVID pandemic at the same time? In hindsight, the theme of RSD10 could not have been a better fit with the conditions in which it had to be organized: “Playing with Tensions: Embracing new complexity, collaboration and contexts in systemic design”.
Playing with Tensions
Complex systems do not lend themselves for simplification. Systemic designers have no choice but to embrace complexity, and in doing so, embrace opposing concepts and the resulting paradoxes. It is at the interplay of these ideas that they find the most fruitful regions of exploration. The main conference theme explored design and systems thinking practices as mediators to deal fruitfully with tensions. Our human tendency is to relieve the tensions, and in design, to resolve the so-called “pain points.” But tensions reveal paradoxes, the sites of connection, breaks in scale, emergence of complexity. Can we embrace the tension and paradoxes as valuable social feedback in our path to just and sustainable futures?
The symposium took off with two days of well-attended workshops on campus and online. One could sense tensions through embodied experiences in one of the workshops, while reframing systemic paradoxes as fruitful design starting points in another. In the tradition of RSD, a Gigamap Exhibition was organized. The exhibition showcased mind-blowing visuals that reveal the tension between our own desire for order and structure and our desire to capture real-life dynamics and contradicting perspectives. Many of us enjoyed the high quality and diversity in the keynotes throughout the symposium. As chair of the SDA, Dr. Silvia Barbero opened in her keynote with a reflection on the start and impressive evolution of the Relating Systems thinking and Design symposia. Prof.Dr. Derk Loorbach showed us how transition research conceptualizes shifts in societal systems and gave us a glimpse into their efforts to foster desired ones. Prof.Dr. Elisa Giaccardi took us along a journey of technologically mediated agency. She advocated for a radical shift in design to deal with this complex web of relationships between things and humans. Indy Johar talked about the need to reimagine our relationship with the world as one based on fundamental interdependence. And finally, Prof.Dr. Klaus Krippendorf systematically unpacked the systemic consequences of design decisions. Together these keynote speakers provided important insights into the role of design in embracing systemic complexity, from the micro-scale of our material contexts to the macro-scale of globally connected societies. And of course, RSD10 would not be an RSD symposium if it did not offer a place to connect around practical case examples and discuss how knowledge could improve practice and how practice could inform and guide research.
Proceedings
RSD10 has been the first symposium in which contributors were asked to submit a full paper: either a short one that presented work-in-progress, or a long one presenting finished work. With the help of an excellent list of reviewers, this set-up allowed us to shape a symposium that offered stage for high-quality research, providing a platform for critical and fruitful conversations. Short papers were combined around a research approach or methodology, aiming for peer-learning on how to increase the rigour and relevance of our studies. Long papers were combined around commonalities in the phenomena under study, offering state-of-the-art research. The moderation of engaged and knowledgeable chairs and audience lifted the quality of our discussions.
In total, these proceedings cover 33 short papers and 19 long papers from all over the world. From India to the United States, and Australia to Italy. In the table of contents, each paper is represented under its RSD 10 symposium track as well as a list of authors ordered alphabetically. The RSD10 proceedings capture the great variety of high-quality papers yet is limited to only textual contributions. We invite any reader to visit the rsdsymposium.org website to browse through slide-decks, video recordings, drawing notes and the exhibition to get the full experience of RSD10 and witness how great minds and insights have been beautifully captured!
Word of thanks
Let us close off with a word of thanks to our dean and colleagues for supporting us in hosting this conference, the SDA for their trust and guidance, Dr. Peter Jones and Dr. Silvia Barbero for being part of the RSD10 scientific committee, but especially everyone who contributed to the content of the symposium: workshop moderators, presenters, and anyone who participated in the RSD 10 conversation. It is only in this complex web of (friction-full) relationships that we can further our knowledge on systemic design: thanks for being part of it!
Dr. JC Diehl, Dr. Nynke Tromp, and Dr. Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer
Editors RSD10
... In these terms, following Edgar Morin's epistemic perspective, as Lima (2010) reaffirms, the objective of knowledge is not to provide an absolute and complete answer in itself as a final word, but rather open the dialogue and not enclose it, as there is no radical epistemological cut, just as there is no pure science, no final truth about any object and no pure logic. Thrift (1999) considers complexity theory as a scientific amalgam, a rhetorical hybrid, also stating further that the main reason for its popularity lies in its anti-reductionist character. Morin (2005a) proposes the recognition of circularity in the simultaneous explanations of the whole by the parts and of the parts by the whole, i.e., both explanations are complementary and none of them is able to annul the antagonistic and competing characteristics of the other. ...
O presente texto, na forma de ensaio, utiliza-se da revisão da literatura para identificar pressupostos epistêmico-teóricos que sejam convergentes com a abordagem territorial. Fazer alusão à abordagem territorial é conceber o território como referência fundamental, ao se propor a análise socioeconômica, cultural e ambiental de um determinado recorte espacial. Concebe-se o território como uma construção social resultante de acúmulos, herdados de um passado longínquo ou mais recente, que se expressam contemporaneamente nas dimensões social, econômica, natural, cultural, institucional, humana e intelectual, as quais constituem o patrimônio territorial. Parte-se da compreensão de que é no campo epistemológico que se evidencia as diretrizes que orientarão o desvelamento do objeto de estudo, situando-o numa dada perspectiva paradigmática. Assim sendo, neste texto prioriza-se o foco em quatro campos epistêmicos, sendo eles, a teoria dos sistemas, a teoria da complexidade, o materialismo histórico-dialético e a perspectiva epistemológica sustentada no descentramento e decolonialidade, além da indicação de pressupostos teóricos, ambos, para serem considerados na análise territorial. O que se pretende é identificar os pressupostos epistêmico-teóricos que orientem a elaboração de procedimentos metodológicos que viabilizem o reconhecimento e análise de contextos socioeconômico-culturais e ambientais, com vistas à prospecção de alternativas inovadoras e sustentáveis de desenvolvimento territorial.
... In a complex system, each part influences the others reciprocally, thereby exchanging information mutually and in accordance with the specific circumstances or contexts . According to these scholars, notions of complexity theory can help planners to address some of the irreversible, irreducible, and non-linear changes they are dealing with, and to understand the interrelatedness, interdependency, diversity, and multiplicity of contemporary planning Thrift, 1999). In order to deal with this complexity, the notion of co-evolution is increasingly being applied. ...
Community engagement is becoming a key part of heritage management processes. Community-heritage engagement, however, also means that heritage management processes become more dynamic and versatile, as participation and community engagement is often complex, multifaceted, open-ended and unpredictable. This paper introduces a third, more radical perspective on community-heritage engagement, which we coin ‘a co-evolutionary heritage approach’. We argue that a co-evolutionary heritage approach is alive to the adaptability, flexibility and complexity that comes with the diversity of heritage valuation by communities.
... For instance, the narrative turn in 1980s social and cultural anthropology cast the "poetic" dimensions of knowledge production into relief (cf. Clifford/Marcus 1986), and the growing interest in complexity theories drew attention to the spontaneous emergence of novelty (Thrift 1999). Along with the surge in feminist and participatory methodologies, the 'turn to affect' of the 1990s and 2000s, and the more recent 'speculative turn,' these engagements have helped reopening the epistemological door to those speculative dimensions of knowledge production that had accompanied pre-World War II epistemologies all along-from Romanticism and Dilthey to Freud, Whitehead or Bergson. ...
This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice.
... While the diagnosis of complexity is indeed not new in relation to governmental problems (c.f. Merriam 1925), the discourse around complex dynamic systems in which prediction is increasingly difficult has gained more currency in defining modern life as such, be it in relation to global governance (Urry 2005, Bevir 2010, Mayntz and Scharpf 2005 or even the work of critical social sciences (Cudworth and Hobden 2010, Thrift 1999, Luhmann 1984. 7 But the definitions of complex problems as wicked suggest something slightly different than the mere inability to govern through expert knowledge. ...
Designers today are part of a global network that aims to radically transform how public policies are formulated and implemented. They take up technopolitical questions in avowedly democratic regimes that have evolved a large bureaucracy of unelected civil servants, many of them scientists and other specially trained experts. Rather than promoting straightforwardly technical measures, characteristic of bureaucratic systems, public sector design seeks to reframe the relationship between government and citizens, promoting greater attention to the users of government by redesigning services, infrastructures, or mechanisms for resource allocation. This movement, bound up with multiple histories of planning and policy analysis throughout the second half of the 20th century, builds on the assessment that governmental problems are “wicked problems.” The term was coined in the 1960s by the mathematician and design educator Horst Rittel to denote the sometimes intractable challenges facing public policy in complex modern societies, where problems are multifaceted and multi-causal. By the 1970s and ‘80s, designers, invoking the idea of wicked problems, began to move into a variety of public policy contexts. Their arrival signaled a shift away from the dictates of social scientists and management experts toward greater consultation with ordinary citizens. Building on successive transformations of design methodology, a new form of participatory interdisciplinary design orientation became prominent in software and service design, and eventually, following a disillusionment with New Public Management, was adopted in government, where today it both builds on existing procedures and seeks to reform them. As a result, public sector design, perhaps unexpectedly and without having its own distinct political vocabulary, has opened up a new perspective on democracy in which embodied experience enables and limits the participation of ordinary citizens in formulating and implementing public policies in various governance domains. As such, it contests the technical nature of public administration and therefore allows for a broader perspective on how democracy continues to become reconfigured in relation to ostensibly technical questions. Public sector design, therefore, renders visible two conflicting tendencies in modern mass democracy: a pragmatic sense of collective problem solving and the generation of a new type of data for government – lived experience.
... This approach is based on the systemic and explicit relation of means and ends, setting well-defined, obvious goals leading to extensive plans or blueprints (Healey, 1983(Healey, , 2003. As such, planning aimed merely to 'tame time and space' instead of resonating with it (Murdoch, 2006;Thrift, 1999). ...
Overstromingen behoren tot de meest voorkomende en duurste natuurrampen in Europa. Onder invloed van de klimaatverandering zullen overstromingen zich in de nabije toekomst wellicht vaker voordoen, en meer schade veroorzaken. De laatste jaren is het overstromingsbeheer verschoven naar overstromingsrisicobeheer. Overheden kunnen steden niet langer volledig beschermen en zoeken naar nieuwe bondgenoten. Ook huiseigenaren kunnen maatregelen nemen om te effecten van overstromingen op hun huis te minimaliseren. Om huiseigenaren beter te informeren over de beschermingsmaatregelen en om hen te motiveren om deze maatregelen te menen, onderzoekt deze doctoraatstudie of overstromingsrisicobeheer kan profiteren van de invoering van een overstromingslabel. Een overstromingslabel kan bijdragen om het gedrag van huiseigenaren te veranderen. Het label zou kunnen informeren over, aanzetten tot en verplichten van de implementatie van maatregelen. De uitkomsten van het onderzoeken tonen aan dat de invoering van een label afhankelijk is van contextuele factoreen, en dat een label inderdaad huiseigenaren kan betrekken in overstromingsrisicobeheer, mits ook nieuwe betrokken partijen hun rol aanpassen. Het overstromingslabel is geen instrument om de verantwoordelijkheid naar de burgers te verschuiven, maar kan een instrument zijn om te bemiddelen tussen deze verantwoordelijkheden van verschillende actoren.
... EGT speaks of rigidity and flexibility in governance evolution, with dependencies helping to explain rigidity, and flexibility coming from deliberate path creation but also from the interplay between the dependencies. In keeping with systems theory and complexity theory (Byrne, 1998;Thrift, 1999), the pattern of feedback loops which can emerge from such interplay creates its own unanticipated effects, and these can be exploited by actors to shift the path of governance. ...
Based on a detailed study of the return of national-level planning in Argentina as embodied by COFEPLAN, the national planning council, we develop a conceptual framework to analyse the possibilities and limits of steering in governance. We lean on the theoretical apparatus of evolutionary governance theory and use the concepts of goal dependency, interdependency, path dependency and material dependency (effects in governance) to analyse the reality effects of strategy (effects of governance). Methodologically, our study relies on archival work and semi-structured interviews with planning scholars and public officials from different levels of government. We show that, although material and discursive reality effects were abundant in the evolution of Argentine planning policies, dependencies and discontinuities undermined both the central steering ambitions of the government and the innovative potential of the new planning schemes. The dramatic history of the Argentine planning system allows us to grasp the nature of dependencies in a new way. Shocks in general undermine long-term perspectives and higher-level planning, but they can also create windows of opportunity. The internal complexity and the persistence of Peronist ideology in Argentina can account for the revivals of national-level planning, in very different ideological contexts, but the recurring shocks, the stubborn difference between rhetoric and reality, the reliance on informality, created a landscape of fragmented governance and often weak institutional capacity. In that landscape, steering through national-level planning becomes a tall order.
... Although there is no 'grand theory of complexity', one can recognise a certain 'economy of concepts' (Thrift 1999) that arranges itself around the characteristics of CAS (see Section 'The features and behaviour of CAS'). Checkland (1993) suggests that it might be better to think of all the endeavours that have notions of complexity and the study of complex phenomena as their main purpose as processes that embrace a 'complexity approach' rather than trying to unite these efforts in a 'grand theory' of complexity. ...
... In a precedent work, I have retraced the history of the SFI and argued its failure in establishing complexity as a new discipline (Li Vigni, 2020c). While its cultural influence is undeniable (Thrift, 1999;Taylor, 2003;Urry, 2005), the generalization of an idiom or a set of metaphors such as "complex adaptive systems", "network", "edge of chaos", "tipping point", "emergence", etc. does not imply we face a scientific field in the Bourdieusian sense (Gingras, 1991). If " [t]he central function of the institutionalization of the disciplinary community consists in preserving the permanence of the disciplinary activity through reproduction of its potential" (Guntau and Latkau, 1991: 21), then complexity cannot be considered as a discipline. ...
Social scientists have proposed several concepts to give account of the way scientific life organizes. By studying “complexity sciences” – established in the mid-1980s by the “Santa Fe Institute” in New Mexico (USA) –, the present article addresses to interdisciplinary studies and emergent domains literature by proposing a new concept to describe this domain. Drawing from Bourdieusian sociology of science and STS, a “scientific platform” is defined as a meeting point between different specialties, which, on the basis of a flexible common ground, pursue together shared or parallel socio-epistemic objectives. Most of the specialties inscribed in complexity suffer from a relative marginality in their disciplinary field. The term “platform” refers to what the heterogeneous members of the collective mutualize, both in cognitive and social terms, in order to exist and expand.
... Bundan dolayı coğrafi dünyadaki düzensizlikler (disorder) ve tutarsızlıkların (inconsistency) çoğunu açıklamak için mekansal dağılımlar dikkate alınmaya başlanmıştır. Aynı şekilde coğrafya tarafından oynanacak rolle ilgili olarak Thrift (1999), mekanın dağılım kavramını içerdiğinde komplike hale geldiğini belirtmiştir (Serban, 2013). Tüm bunların sonucunda şehirlerin kendi kendine organize olmasını, kent hiyerarşisinin oluşumu ile ilgili güç kanunu 2 dağılımının yada sıra büyüklük kuralı (rank-size rule) yaklaşımları gelişmiştir. ...
Bu çalışmanın amacı, mekansal iktisada yeni ekonomik coğrafya yaklaşımı ve mekansal komp- leksite yaklaşımı ile bir bakış sunmaktır. Bu kapsamda mekansal etileşimlere ve kendi kendine organize olmaya bağlı toplaşma süreci ve kendi kendine organizasyon yaratan modeller ele alın- maktadır. Ayrıca mekansal iktisatta teorik ve ampirik araştırma yöntemleri ile karşılaşılan başlıca zorluklar tartışılmaktadır.
... An exact definition of a complex system is difficult to pin down, as it has a different meaning to different people (Thrift 1999). A simple definition is one whereby a small number of rules or laws, applied at a local level and among many entities, are capable of generating complex global phenomena such as collective behaviors, extensive spatial patterns, and hierarchies, in such a way that the actions of their parts do not simply sum to the activity of the whole, due to self-organization, nonlinearities, feedbacks (both positive and negative), and path dependencies. ...
Agent-based modeling is a powerful simulation technique that allows one to build artificial worlds and populate these worlds with individual agents. Each agent or actor has unique behaviors and rules which govern their interactions with each other and their environment. It is through these interactions that more macro-phenomena emerge: for example, how individual pedestrians lead to the emergence of crowds. Over the past two decades, with the growth of computational power and data, agent-based models have evolved into one of the main paradigms for urban modeling and for understanding the various processes which shape our cities. Agent-based models have been developed to explore a vast range of urban phenomena from that of micro-movement of pedestrians over seconds to that of urban growth over decades and many other issues in between. In this chapter, we introduce readers to agent-based modeling from simple abstract applications to those representing space utilizing geographical data not only for the creation of the artificial worlds but also for the validation and calibration of such models through a series of example applications. We will then discuss how big data, data mining, and machine learning techniques are advancing the field of agent-based modeling and demonstrate how such data and techniques can be leveraged into these models, giving us a new way to explore cities.
... For instance, the narrative turn in 1980s social and cultural anthropology cast the "poetic" dimensions of knowledge production into relief (cf. Clifford/Marcus 1986), and the growing interest in complexity theories drew attention to the spontaneous emergence of novelty (Thrift 1999). Along with the surge in feminist and participatory methodologies, the 'turn to affect' of the 1990s and 2000s, and the more recent 'speculative turn,' these engagements have helped reopening the epistemological door to those speculative dimensions of knowledge production that had accompanied pre-World War II epistemologies all along-from Romanticism and Dilthey to Freud, Whitehead or Bergson. ...
This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice.
Purpose
The paper proposes a place-space duality, rather than a dualism, for accounting research.
Design/methodology/approach
The discussion is informed by the literature in human geography, which, while developing the concept of space, has made an important distinction between abstract space and place as a site of experiential learning and memory.
Findings
The lack of a concept of place is a serious omission in the accounting literature and perpetuates an abstract sense of space, which can restrict the scope of accounting research.
Research limitations/implications
The paper calls for further research to study accounting in place and to explore both the collective and individual senses of place, as well as conscious and unconscious place associations. We recognise that there is limited prior accounting research on this topic and that there are challenges in conducting such interdisciplinary research, especially as there is a lack of common ground between research in human geography and accounting and little integration of the two literatures.
Practical implications
The paper proposes an accounting research agenda based on a place-space duality, which reflects the strength of people-place relationships, including place identities, place attachment and place dependence.
Originality/value
The paper provides a critique of the conceptualisation of space in accounting research, identifies place-space as a duality (rather than a dualism) and suggests a novel distinction between studying accounting in context and in place.
This paper explores the relations between the notions of order as developed by philosopher and quantum physicist David Bohm, and the study of cities and urbanism. The paper demonstrates that Bohm's notions of order have the potential to lay the foundations to a unified urban theory; a theory that, firstly, will close the century old gap, and dis-communication, between the two cultures of cities – the social theory oriented hermeneutic culture of urban studies versus the quantitative-analytical, exact sciences oriented, culture of urban science. Secondly, will respond to the need for integrative urban theory in face of disintegration tendencies in twenty-first century urban studies. Such a unified urban theory is a pre-condition for addressing humanity's current challenges, ranging from climate change and sustainability, through poverty alleviation to the crisis of democracy.
Non-Representational Theory (NRT) emphasizes the significance of routine experience in shaping human geography. In doing so, the theory largely eschews traditional approaches that have offered area-based, longitudinal, and synoptic formalisms for geographic inquiry. Instead, NRT prioritizes the roles of individualized and often dynamic lived geographies as they unfold in the moment. To date, NRT has drawn significant inspiration from the synergies that it shares with philosophy, critical geography, and self-referential ethnography. These activities have been tremendous in advancing NRT as a concept, but the theory’s strong ties to encounter and experience invariably call for practical exposition. Alas, applications of NRT to concrete examples at scales beyond small case studies often prove challenging, which we argue artificially constrains further development of the theory. In this paper, we examine some of the thorny problems that present in applying NRT in practical terms. Specifically, we identify ten traps that NRT can fall into when moving from theory to actuality. These traps include conundrums of small geographies, circularity in representation, cognitive traps, issues of mustering and grappling with detail, access issues, limitations with empiricism, problems of subjectivity, methodological challenges, thorny issues of translation, and the unwieldy nature of process dynamics. We briefly demonstrate a novel observational instrument that can sidestep some, but not all, of these traps.
Border studies is seeing more and more discussion about complex borders or the complexity of borders. This article systematizes this discussion and shows that there are different views circulating about what exactly is complex at borders and that the concept of complexity is still used imprecisely. In this article, the concept of complexity will be defined in more detail and border complexities will be proposed as a perspective for an actual complexity shift in border studies. Border complexities stands for a concept that sees borders as relational structures and focuses on the unpredictable, self-dynamic interplay of their event elements and on its emergent effects of dis/order.
Creative encounters with topography and attempts to record and represent the patina of place become of growing importance as we find ways to explore human impact on our environment and to foreground the role of craft as a geo-intervention. Ceramicist Adam Buick maintains an inherently physical connection with the landscape as he walks through the local environment and as he digs for clay and collects materials. His process forms a series of deep maps, which emerge through his ceramic work. Both a concept and a practice, ‘deep mapping’ refers to an approach in which artists, scientists and scholars attempt to capture the different meanings and textures that are associated with particular places. This article discusses the potential of deep mapping as a craft research methodology. To do so, it takes as a case study Earth to Earth (2011–12), in which Buick documents the weathering away of his raw clay moon jar using time-lapse photography. His resulting film and photographic stills tell a story of movement, time and evolution. Buick’s jars draw attention to the matter we manipulate as being subject to its own environmental conversations and witnessing of change. The deep map offers the potential for a methodology that embraces multiplicity, simultaneity and complexity, encouraging a spatially facilitated understanding of our craft stories and products. Framed as a conversation and not a statement, deep maps are inherently unstable, continually unfolding and changing in response to new data and new insights. More than a collapsed or failed pot, Buick’s jars are a deep map of an adventure.
Günümüzde bireylerin internet üzerinden alışveriş yapma alışkanlıkları teknolojik ve dijital dönüşümlerden olumlu yönde etkilenmektedir. Bunu takiben elektronik ticaret (e-ticaret) ekosistemindeki alıcı ve satıcı sayısındaki artışın kentsel alana doğrudan ve dolaylı etkileri vardır. Özellikle ulaştırma, lojistik, perakende ve gayrimenkul sektörlerinde görülen ve haliyle bu sektörlerin uyumlanmasını gerektiren bu yeni gelişmenin kent planlamada yeterince dikkate alınmadığı açıktır. Bu araştırma, pandemi döneminin ardından yükselen e-ticaret faaliyetlerinin kentsel alana olası etkilerini değerlendirmekte ve kent planlamanın bu gelişmeye nasıl uyumlanabileceğine dair politikalar önermektedir. Bu etkiler depolama alanı ve lojistik altyapı ihtiyacı, teslimatların yol açtığı trafik sıkışıklığı, fiziksel perakendenin azalan önemi ve talebin farklı gayrimenkul türlerine kayması olarak özetlenebilir. Bu amaçla araştırmada uyumlanabilir planlama yaklaşımı kuramsal olarak ele alınmakta, e-ticaretin kentsel alana etkilerini değerlendirebilmek amacıyla ilgili literatür taranarak sonuçlar ‘ulaştırma ve lojistik’ ile ‘perakende ve gayrimenkul’ olmak üzere iki başlıkta derlenmektedir. Kuramsal ve kavramsal araştırmalardan yola çıkarak e-ticarete gerek ‘mekânsal örgütlenme’ bağlamında, gerekse ‘politika ve düzenlemeler’ bağlamında uyumlanmaya yönelik politika önerileri içeren bir kent planlama çerçevesi oluşturulmaktadır. Kentsel alanda e-ticaret kaynaklı dönüşümlerin incelenmesinin kalkınma politikalarına ve kent planlamaya yön vermesi beklenmektedir.
Complex phenomena reside between simplicity and randomness. When the laws governing a system are relatively simple, the system's behavior is easy to understand, explain, and predict. At the other extreme, some systems seem to behave randomly. There may be laws governing their behavior, but the system is highly non‐linear, such that small variations in the state of the system at one time could result in very large changes to later states of the system. Such systems are often said to be chaotic . Complex systems are somewhere in between these two extremes: the system is not easy to explain, but it is not so chaotic that understanding is completely impossible.
Transport is one of the largest emitters of harmful
substances that affect air quality. Each transport mode has
different volume of passenger transport and at the same time
has a differentiated negative impact on air quality. That is
why in the European Union has been making special efforts
for many years to create and implement strategies aimed at
improving air quality. The main goal of this paper is to
present a methodology that enables quantification and
analysis of the impacts of each passenger transport mode on
air quality using feed-forward neural networks. The
developed model uses parameters for EU member states in
the period from 2000 to 2014. In addition to the scientific and
practical contribution, the development of model provides a
good basic for the universal platform formation in order to
create and develop strategies, i.e. measures to improve air
quality on global level.
Despite the current proliferation of citizen science projects, the affordances of ecological citizen science to generate transformational thinking amongst project participants are seldom considered. This study investigated citizen science as an experiential ecopedagogic praxis that may provide a context for developing relational perspectives and sensorial engagements between human and non‐human participants. A new humanist, phenomenological standpoint and narrative analysis framework were adopted. The narratives of five river monitoring citizen science participants are presented herein to illustrate an emergent Ecological kin‐making through citizen science framework. Participants’ narratives demonstrate how individuals engaged in caring practices through six embodied stages of ecological kin‐making through citizen science: encountering the river (1); recognising the non‐human world (2); river‐bank identification (3); developing a sense of response‐ability (4); enacting responsibility (5); and enhanced ecological kinship (6). As characterised by the infinity‐loop framework, citizen science emerges from this study as an attuned, ongoing, and caring praxis of ecological kin‐making. New co‐species kinship relationships are formed, maintained, and strengthened through participation. The study highlights that where citizen science projects are designed with a participant community focus, they can create the conditions for self‐directed and lifelong ecopedagogy that could be transformational for humans and non‐humans in times of ecological and climate crisis. The study implies the catalytic validity of citizen science to provide a space‐time context for participants to enact a ‘response‐ability’ toward local environments and human and non‐human dwellers, vital to enabling participants to experience a sense of agency and to take local action on environmental issues.
In this chapter Bull investigates connections between (1) complex serial narration on television, (2) academic interest in ‘complex TV’, (3) the wider popularisation of complexity theory, network theory, chaos theory and the butterfly effect, and finally, (4) post-genomic discourses that increasingly understand molecular life as an indeterminate and complexly interlinked system characterised by non-linearity and uncertainty. The chapter compares the iterative episodic narrative structures of the forensic crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the hospital series House M.D. with the long-form seriality of the science fiction serials Heroes and Fringe. Noting that genetic science functions as a key narrative catalyst in all four programmes, Bull argues that their varying uses of complex narrative devices produce contradictory ideas about DNA.
This chapter examines the genetic imaginary of computer-generated imagery depicting microscopic entities or interior bodily spaces. Bull shows that this type of digital animation has a particularly long and prominent history on television, tracing its use in science documentaries such as Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Ascent of Man, and The Human Body, and across the forensic crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the hospital procedural House M.D. Coining the term ‘microscopic CGI’, Bull analyses the play with size and scale in such visual effects, arguing that the accentuation of smallness contributes to a cultural process of geneticisation. Finally, she considers what impact TV’s oppositional tendencies towards pedagogic simplicity and spectacular televisuality has had on microscopic CGI and its figuration of the DNA molecule.
This article contributes to the debate on secularization and the return of religion by using the social science complexity frame of reference. A trend in many Western countries is the decline in individual religiosity, increase in ‘nones’, growth of non-Christian religions, changes in religion itself, and the visibility of religion in the public sphere. Many sociologists of religion have analyzed the situation by discrediting the theory of secularization and adopting the newer theories of the spiritual turn, desecularization, and post-secularity, while others have maintained that secularization theory is still valid. The complexity frame of reference offers a toolkit that can be useful in resolving this theoretical dilemma. This article contributes to the theorizing of multiple religious trends at various analytical levels. It criticizes the current approaches before it introduces the concept of religious complexity. Finally, it explores the implications of religious complexity for analyses of multiple and varied religious trends.
For many decades, scholars working within the broad paradigm of complexity studies/theory have explored the nonlinear dynamics that contour physical and social systems. In doing so, radical theories that contest both Newtonian and neo-Darwinian understandings of reality have been posited, augmenting how we think about processes of change. But throughout these developments, the modern idea of progress has arguably remained insufficiently contested. This article seeks to show how the framework of complexity can offer conceptual resources for rethinking progress. Key characteristics of complexity are articulated and critically examined with the aim of pinpointing how they might contribute to a conception of progress that is worthy of the name yet divergent from its dominant ‘modern’ form.
With a background of globalization and urbanization, the population agglomeration puts tremendous pressure on the ecosystem inside and around the city. Compared with ordinary cities, ecological protection for resource-based cities is more urgent. The construction of green infrastructure can alleviate the environmental constraints of urban development to a certain extent., and it contains a vital landscape element, ecological node, which is of great significance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss ecological nodes based on different threshold selections of shape and distance to changes landscape network connectivity. Regarding the service accessibility of the green infrastructure network, a new cognition is to break the traditional land-use map and patches, while providing a new reference to enhance network connectivity by ecological nodes depicted as circles as the core, 400 m as the optimal threshold as transmission distance for ecosystem service evaluation and optimization. This new optimization method of ecological nodes strengthens the connectivity of green infrastructure networks through small changes within ecological nodes, reduces the ecological resistance of key positions of green infrastructure networks through land-use change of ecological nodes, in order to improve the ecosystem service connectivity for Wu'an or other resource-based Cities.
資本と大学の重なり合いが深まっていくのが見られるようになった、ここ二〇年のあいだに
価、利益、近年の経営戦略論の研究者たちは。特定しようとするものである—批判理論のなかに—起きる地点を
これらと同じ存在。プロセス的存在論や関係的存在論に目を向けた、成長をめぐる論理を新たに作り直すために、値
本稿は経営。批判地理学者によって好んで用いられてきた、論が空間を固定されないものとして再考する手法として
不明瞭、必然的に搾取の構造を再生産し、学の文献におけるドゥルーズの流用をケーススタディとして参照しながら
。こうした存在論がどのようにして前提視しているのかを示すものである、なものにもする生命論を
林凌訳/マクファーレン・キー
New technologies, complex problems, interconnectedness between different actors: All these are challenges of our today’s society and characteristics of complex systems. Simulation games are a suited approach to analyse complex systems. The process of designing and developing those games for complex systems follows certain steps. One of such steps is the definition of the underlying problem. Deriving a concrete problem statement under consideration of the changing complexity of today’s society is crucial for the validation of a simulation game. Therefore, the following paper will introduce IDEAS, an approach to derive a specific problem statement as one part of the simulation game design process. In general, IDEAS consists of four steps: interviews, discussion rounds with experts, moscow analysis and gamestorm. The approach itself as well as a case study, where this approach has been used, will be presented. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the approach and give recommendation for future work.
Purpose
This article contributes to the debate by arguing that addressing the core concept underpinning accelerationism and helps to unpack a number of key assumptions on the nature of capitalism, identifying areas offering new and productive insights into organisation and organisations. The scope of the article will be to examine the accelerationist literature, in particular, the core principles first emerging in the prehistory of accelerationism and further developed through the various waves and iterations of the concept.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper offers a conceptual approach to accelerationism. It develops a critical literature review and uses a process of exemplification to highlight insights for organisation and organisations.
Findings
The paper concludes that the underpinnings of accelerationism are not well understood and thus much of the critique misses the more intriguing and interesting insights from the cluster of ideas at its core.
Originality/value
The scope of the paper is to provide a coherent and accessible way to navigate through a complex and demanding series of concepts. The value of the paper is that it helps to identify potential insights relevant to management, marketing and organisational scholars.
The opening of King Lear evokes a series of mathematical operations: Lear seeks a multiplication of love in exchange for the division of the kingdom, but rejects the equals sign given to him by Cordelia in pursuit of the triangular “more than” offered by Goneril and Regan. These are the signs that comprise the play’s inventory, articulating a complex equation whose effects reverberate throughout the play. Drawing upon analogies from contemporary chaos and complexity theories, I read the play-world of Shakespeare’s King Lear as a complex system which demonstrates features including disproportionality between cause and effect, and patterns which are, to borrow James Gleick's description of chaotic structures, “locally unpredictable, globally stable”. I map these patterns onto the distinction between sin and folly in the play, outlining how Lear’s foolish actions in the opening scene catalyse a chain of disproportional consequences. These events are experienced as “locally unpredictable” disorder by characters described as possessing the attribute of folly, but the sinful characters including Goneril, Regan and Edmond participate in a complex and “globally stable” order. Lear’s apparent undoing of pattern is, on another level, a pattern of undoing.
The unique breed of particle physicists constitutes a community of sophisticated mythmakers--explicators of the nature of matter who forever alter our views of space and time. But who are these people? What is their world really like? Sharon Traweek, a bold and original observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674063488
Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth- century writing Gillian Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of chance, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of essays centres on Darwin and the incentives of his thinking, from language theory to his encounters with Fuegians. Other essays include Hardy, Helmholtz, Hopkins, Clerk Maxwell, and Woolf. The collection throws a different light on Victorian experience and the rise of modernism, and engages with current controversies about the place of science in culture.
Time and Commodity Culture is a set of four linked essays on the cultural systems of postmodernity. Rather than taking modernity and postmodernity as real historical epochs, however, it understands them as strategies for organizing time and social order by means of a `nostalgic' division within them. Each essay explores a particular dimension of this organization of time, especially in relation to the anxieties and the possibilities created by the commodification of culture. The central essay, `Gift and Commodity', studies two areas in which the speed of commodification has increased markedly in recent years: That of the person, and that of information. Using a mix of anthropological, legal, economic, and historical materials, it investigates the privatization of the commons in information by way of such things as the development of markets in human DNA, the trade in human organs, and the creation of property rights in `personality'. `What Was Postmodernism?' analyses the structured anxiety about the commodification of culture that is called `postmodern theory'. A further essay explores tourism as a figure of modernity, and a final essay on memory explores the phenomena of `recovered memory' and of Holocaust remembrance as ways of constructing temporally ordered forms of the real.
This is an important, critical analysis of Derrida's theory of writing, based upon close readings of key texts ranging from his stringent critique of structuralist criticism to his sympathetic and dialogical analysis of Freud's scriptural models. It reveals a dimension of Derrida's thinking which, although consistently present in his works, has been neglected in favour of those 'deconstructionist' clichés used in much recent literary criticism. Christopher Johnson highlights the special character of Derrida's philosophy that comes from the fertilising contact that Derrida has had with contemporary natural science and with systems theory. In addition, he shows how Derrida's philosophy of system and writing rejoins an atomist and materialist tradition repressed by centuries of idealist metaphysics. This study casts fresh light on an exacting set of intellectual issues facing philosophy and critical theory today.
Possibilities haunt history. The force of our explanations of events turns on the alternative possibilities these explanations suggest. It is these possible worlds which give us our understanding; and in human affairs we decide them by practical rather than theoretical judgement. In his widely acclaimed account of the role of counterfactuals in explanation, Geoffrey Hawthorn deploys extended examples from history and modern times to defend his argument. His conclusions cast doubt on existing assumptions about the nature and place of theory, and indeed of the possibility of knowledge itself, in the human sciences.
There is a traditionnal opposition between the time/space categories of physics and the lived space and time of phenomenology. The paper, using Piaget's understanding of formalism as an anti-model, explores how this dichotomy has been devised, why it cannot be sustained as soon as the study of scientific and technical practice re-embeds time and space production inside metrological networks, and, finally, offers an alternative account of time and space production that is based on another theory of "the exploration" of Being.
Religious paintings offer an excellent testing ground to compare the various kinds of displacements or translations. The paper focuses on two such displacements: the repetition of the message of Jesus versus the movement of immutable mobiles allowed by perspective. These two regimes offer completely different definitions of what it is to ‘represent’ something: to the re-presentation of the Presence is opposed the accurate representation of distant places and times. In between 1450 and 1520 these two regimes of displacement first merge, then collide, and later go their separate ways. Religion on the one hand, and Science on the other ignore each other. Going to Heaven, and going through the Sky are two different movements of representation that generate different space-times.
New technologies have stimulated the rehearsal of old debates about what is new and what is old in descriptions of social life. This article considers some of the current uses to which the concepts of `hybrids' and `networks' are being put. It could be seen as following Latour's call for a symmetrical anthropology that gathers together modern and nonmodern forms of knowledge. In the process, the article reflects on the power of analytical narratives to extend endlessly, and on the interesting place that property ownership holds in a world that sometimes appears limitless.
Goodwin, B., [Temporal Organization of Cells], Moscow: Mir, 1966.
Charles Jencks has the uncanny capacity to announce a new movement in architecture before it has begun. With Post-Modernism, he was looking to the past. Now, for the first time, with his new book on morphogenesis he is taking a look at the future. There is no question that his argument will have an important critical effect on architecture at the beginning of the new millennium. Peter Eisenman. Architect A new paradigm is sweeping through science, changing both our view of the universe and of mankind. Charles Jencks is one of a handful of thinkers with the courage to embrace the emerging paradigm and interpret it architecturally. This inspired synthesis of art, design, science and philosophy charts a bold new course not only for architecture, but for Post-Modern thought. Paul Davies, Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of Adelaide, author of The Cosmic Blueprint, Superforce, The Mind of God and other books on contemporary science. Who else could have written a book that opens up such cosmic per
This article is concerned with exploring some of the connections between time and leisure, arguing in particular that leisure patterns are especially significant for changing notions of time. It is further argued that the once hegemonic clock-time is being supplanted in `disorganized capitalism' by a mix of instantaneous and glacial times. A variety of empirical indices of these are developed. It is then shown that contemporary leisure patterns are transformed through processes of de-traditionalization and increased reflexivity, processes that presuppose these newer forms of time. In conclusion, some implications for place are briefly developed.
Business schools constitute large and important elements of the modern academic system throughout the world. The experiences in Sweden show that this position has not been reached without resistance. The development of the discipline there has occurred particularly during the last three decades as a result of governmental support to business education. Before that, several efforts to prevent the introduction of business administration in the traditional universities could be observed. Early in the present century there were barriers to entry from established departments in the universities, which, however, were overcome by supporters of business education through the creation of private business schools in Stockholm and Gothenburg. These two institutions eventually opposed new proposals to introduce business administration at the universities. They abandoned their resistance, however, as government support was necessary for their own survival. The pattern from Sweden seems to have counterparts in several other countries.
List of contributors Acknowledgements Part I. The Natural and the Social: 1. Doing what comes naturally: four metanarratives on what metaphors are for Philip Mirowski 2. So what's an economic metaphor? Arjo Klamer and Thomas C. Leonard Part II. Physical Metaphors and Mathematical Formalization: 3. Newton and the social sciences, with special reference to economics, or, the case of the missing paradigm I. Bernard Cohen 4. From virtual velocities to economic action: the very slow arrivals of linear programming and locational equilibrium Ivor Grattan-Guinness 5. Qualitative dynamics in economics and fluid mechanics: a comparison of recent applications Randall Bausor 6. Rigor and practicality: rival ideals of quantification in nineteenth-century economics Theodore M. Porter Part III. Uneasy boundaries between man and machine: 7. Economic man, economic machine: images of circulation in the Victorian money market Timothy L. Alborn 8. The moment of Richard Jennings: the production of Jevons's marginalist economic agent Michael V. White 9. Economics and evolution: Alfred James Lotka and the economy of nature Sharon E. Kingsland Part IV. Organic Metaphors and their stimuli: 10. Fire, motion, and productivity: the proto-energetics of nature and economy in Francois Quesnay Paul P. Christensen 11. Organism as a metaphor in German economic thought Michael Hutter 12. The greyhound and the mastiff: Darwinian themes in Mill and Marshall Margaret Schabas 13. Organization and the division of labor: biological metaphors at work in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics, Camille Limoges and Claude Menard 14. The role of biological analogies in the theory of the firm Neil B. Niman 15. Does evolutionary theory give comfort of inspiration to economics? Alexander Rosenberg 16. Hayek, evolution, and spontaneous order Geoffrey M. Hodgson Part V. Negotiating over Nature: 17. The realms of the Natural Philip Mirowski 18. The place of economics in the hierarchy of the sciences: Section F from Whewell to Edgeworth James P. Henderson 19. The kinds of order in society James Bernard Murphy 20. Feminist accounting theory as a critique of what's 'natural' in economics David Chioni Moore Index.
