Books on the topic 'Complexity science framework'

What is a complex system? Although “complexity science” is used to understand phenomena as diverse as the behavior of honeybees, the economic markets, the human brain, and the climate, there is no agreement about its foundations. In this introduction for students, academics, and general readers, the authors develop an account of complexity that brings the different concepts and mathematical measures applied to complex systems into a single framework. The book begins with an overview and a brief history of complexity science. Complexity science is relatively new but already indispensable. Many of the most important problems in engineering, medicine, and public policy are now addressed with the ideas and methods of complexity science. The conceptual foundations of complexity science are disputed, and there are many and diverging views among scientists about what complexity and complex systems are. Its origins lie in cybernetics and systems theory and it is related to dynamical systems theory and the study of cellular automata. The book introduces the different features of complex systems and discusses different conceptions of complexity with the authors documenting their own account. In do so, they explain why complexity science is so important in today's world.

The chapter is a mini outlook on the field. The classic achievenments in complexity science are mentioned, and we summarize how the new directions contained in this book might open new doors into a truly twenty-first-century science of complex systems.We do that by clarifying the origin of scaling laws, in particular for driven non-equilibrium systems, deriving the statistics of driven systems on the basis of driving and relaxing processes, categorizing probabilistic complex systems into universality classes, by developing ways for meaningful generalizations of statistical mechanics, and information theory so that they become useful for complex systems, and finally, by unifying the different approaches to evolution and co-evolution into a single mathematical framework that can serve as the basis for understanding co-evolutionary dynamics of states and interactions. We comment on our view of the role of artificial intelligence and our opinion on the future of science of complex systems.

Direct experience, scientific reports, and international media coverage make clear that the breadth, severity, and multiple consequences from climate change are far-reaching and increasing. Like many places globally, the northeastern United States is already experiencing climate change, including one of the world’s highest rates of ocean warming, reduced durations of winter ice cover on lakes, a marked increase in the frequency of extreme precipitation events, and climate-mediated ecological disruptions of invasive species. Given current and projected changes in ecosystems, communities, and economies, it is essential to find ways to anticipate and reduce vulnerabilities to change and, at the same time, promote sustainable economic development and human well-being.The emerging field of sustainability science offers a promising conceptual and analytic framework for accelerating progress towards sustainable development. Sustainability science aims to be use-inspired and to connect basic and applied knowledge with solutions for societal benefit. This approach draws from diverse disciplines, theories, and methods organized around the broad goal of maintaining and improving life support systems, ecosystem health, and human well-being. Partners in New England have been using sustainability science as a framework for stakeholder-engaged, interdisciplinary research that has generated use-inspired knowledge and multiple solutions for more than a decade. Sustainability science has helped produce a landscape-scale approach to wetland conservation; emergency response plans for invasive species that threaten livelihoods and cultures; decision support tools for improved water quality management and public health for beach use and shellfish consumption; and the development of robust partnership networks across disciplines and institutions. Understanding and reducing vulnerability to climate change is a central motivating factor in this portfolio of projects because linking knowledge about social-ecological systems with effective policy action requires a holistic view that addresses complex intersecting stressors.One common theme in these varied efforts is the way that communication fundamentally shapes collaborative research and social, technical, and policy outcomes from sustainability science. Communication as a discipline has, for more than two thousand years, sought to understand how environments and symbols shape human life, forms of social organization, and collective decision making. The result is a body of scholarship and practical techniques that are diverse and well adapted to meet the complexity of contemporary sustainability challenges. The complexity of the issues that sustainability science aspires to solve requires diversity and flexibility to be able to adapt approaches to the specific needs of a situation. Long-term, cross-scale, and multi-institutional sustainability science collaborations show that communication research and practice can help build communities and networks, and advance technical and policy solutions to confront the challenges of climate change and promote sustainability now and in future.

This book examines Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, one of the most powerful science-fiction films ever made, with the goal of unraveling the film’s many intricacies, from its difficult production and inspecting its many cinematic elements. Included are examinations of composition and cinematography, the many philosophies, poetic and literary influences, and the enormity of its influence across the following generations. The film juxtaposes its speculative elements with a gripping tale of human fragility and introspection. It is as much a movie about the complexity of the human as it is the mysteriousness of the film’s labyrinthine landscape: the ambiguous Zone and its epicenter, the Room of Desire. Stalker challenges us to engage with film in a different way: taking the sensuous and the analytical viewers to task and presenting a narrative that is both deeply pessimistic and yet profoundly hopeful and embedded in a framework of the deepest and most sincere form of faith. The resulting experience is a film viewing unlike any the viewer has experienced before, irrevocably altering cinema forever.

The development of pragmatist thought (Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead) in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States deeply impacted political science, semiotics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, education, law. Later intellectual trends (analytical philosophy, structuralism, cognitivism) focusing on rational representations or archetypical models somehow sidelined Pragmatism for three decades. In the world of organizations, they often conveyed the Cartesian dream of rational control, which became the mainstream view in management and organization research. In response to the growing uncertainty and complexity of situations, social sciences have experienced a “pragmatist turn.” Many streams of organization research have criticized the view of organizations as information-processing structures, controlled through rational representations. They share some key theoretical principles: the processual view of organizing as “becoming”; the emphasis on the key role of action; the agential power of objects; the exploratory and inquiring nature of organizing. These are precisely the key theses of pragmatists, who formulated a radical critique of the dualisms which hinder organization studies (thought/action, decision/execution, reality/representation, individual/collective, micro/macro) and developed key concepts applicable to organization studies (inquiry, semiotic mediation, habit, abduction, trans-action, valuation). This book aims to make the pragmatist intellectual framework more accessible to organization and management scholars. It presents some fundamental pragmatist concepts, and their potential application to the study of organizations, drawing conclusions concerning managerial practices, in particular the critique of the Taylorian tradition and the promotion of continuous improvement. To enhance accessibility, each theme is illustrated by real cases experienced by the author.

Beyond Interdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning, heterogeneity, and boundary work of interdisciplinarity. It includes both crossdisciplinary work (encompassing multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as well as cross-sector work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and industry, and communities in the North and South). Part I defines boundary work, discourses of interdisciplinarity, and the nature of interdisciplinary fields and interdisciplines. Part II examines dynamics of working across boundaries, including communicating, collaborating, and learning in research projects and programs, with a closing chapter on failing and succeeding along with gateways to literature and other resources. The conceptual framework is based on an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces, including trading zones and communities of practice. Boundary objects, boundary agents, and boundary organizations play a vital role in brokering differences for platforming change in contexts ranging from small projects to new fields to international initiatives. Translation, interlanguage, and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving intersubjectivity and collective identity, fostering not only pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity, transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with instrumentalities of problem solving and innovation as well as transgressive critique. Yet typical warrants today include complexity, contextualization, collaboration, and socially robust knowledge. The book also emphasizes the roles of contextualization and historical change while accounting for the shifting relationship of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, the ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other constructs, including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team science, and postdisciplinarity.

This book provides a groundbreaking approach to critical epidemiology for understanding the complexity of the health process and studying the social determination of health. It presents a powerful critique of Cartesian health sciences; the flaws of the “functional health determinants” model; and reductionist approaches to health statistics, qualitative research, and conventional health geography. It is a consolidated and well-sustained text that explains the role of social–gender–ethnic relations in the reproduction of health inequity, proposing a new paradigm with indispensible concepts and methodological means to develop a new understanding of health as a socially determined and distributed process. It combines the strengths of scientific traditions of the North and South to bring forward a new understanding and application of qualitative and quantitative (statistical) evidence that goes beyond the limits of conventional epidemiology—public and population health. The book presents alternative conceptions and tools for constructing deep prevention. It provides a neo-humanist conception of the role of health and life sciences that assumes critical, intercultural, and transdisciplinary thinking as a fundamental tool beyond the limiting elitist framework of positivist reasoning. It is an important source of fresh ideas and practical instruments for teaching, research, and agency, based on a renewed conception of the relation between nature, society, health, and environmental problems.

This text explores varied perspectives on teaching, learning, and performing choral music. Authors are academic scholars and researchers as well as active choral conductors. Topics include music programming and the selection of repertoire; the exploration of singer and conductor identity; choral traditions in North America, Western Europe, South America, and Africa; and the challenges conductors meet as they work with varied populations of singers. Chapters consider children’s choirs, world music choirs, adult community choirs, gospel choirs, jazz choirs, professional choruses, collegiate glee clubs, and choirs that meet the needs of marginalized singers. Those who contributed chapters discuss a variety of theoretical frameworks including critical pedagogy, constructivism, singer and conductor agency and identity, and the influences of popular media on the choral art. The text is not a “how to” book. While it may be appropriate in various academic courses, the intention is not to explain how to conduct or to organize a choral program. While there is specific information about vocal development and vocal health, it is not a text on voice science. Instead, the editors and contributing authors intend that the collection serve as a resource to inform, provoke, and evoke discourse and dialogue concerning the complexity of pedagogy in the domain of the choral art.

How can literature enhance, parallel or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Or is literature instead limited to the ancillary role of representing cognitive processes? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Beckett’s narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering cognition and mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology (defined as “introspection by simulation”). Through a detailed analysis of Beckett’s entire corpus and published volumes of letters, the book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) “models” for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind. Marco Bernini integrates models, problems, and interpretive frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett’s modeling practice of a vast array of processes including: the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the hallucinatory quality of inner speech, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the developmental cooperation of language and locomotion, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, the layered complexity of the mind, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett’s “fictional cognitive models” are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively or descriptively report. As such, the study advocates for their relevance to the contemporary scientific debate toward an interdisciplinary co-modeling of cognition.

The book provides a new conceptual framework to explain the interaction of complex systems, specifically humans and their environment. It proposes that human physiology and the environment do not “connect” with each other in a direct, unidirectional manner, like a beaker pouring water into a cup. Rather, the authors propose the Biodynamic Interface Conjecture with the central axiom that complex systems cannot interact directly or exist in isolation due to temporally embedded functional interdependencies within and between systems. The authors propose that human physiology and the environment contribute to the formation of an interface, and by doing so they give rise to an intermediary that guides the interaction by letting some influences pass between the systems while restricting others. This proposition counters many structural approaches that assume that complex systems, such as the environment and humans, can transfer information directly between them while remaining discrete entities. Although developed for environmental health sciences, the conjecture has broader implications for the study of complex system interactions across various levels of organization, and the central role of time and temporal dynamics in system-to-system information exchange. This conjecture also argues against causal paradigms that (incorrectly) assume that systems are distinct entities interacting directly and ignore boundary conditions, and organizational levels, and complexity inherent in biological and environmental systems.