Atlas of Social Complexity

Brian Castellani, Professor and Director, Durham Research Methods Centre, Co-Director, Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing, Durham University, UK, Visiting Professor in Humanities, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, Northeastern Ohio Medical University, USA and Lasse Gerrits, Professor Governance of Complex Urban Transformations, Academic Director, Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

‘Many have observed that in the social sciences, everything is connected to everything else but so far we have been singularly unsuccessful in attempting to explain the richness and diversity of this interconnected world. Glimpses of such explanations have come from the sciences of complexity but much of this reasoning has been contained within the traditional straitjacket of the physical sciences. What Castellani and Gerrits have done is to produce an Atlas of this world, through a series of maps that guide the reader to a great array of disciplines that can be informed by a multitude of ideas that they define as social complexity. This is a remarkable commentary on our progress in dealing with complex systems in all their guises and it is essential reading for everyone who seeks an understanding of our interconnected world.’

• Acknowledgments vii1 Theme 1: The Social Complexity Imagination 82 Origins of the Study of Social Complexity 233 Thirteen Situations 434 Cartography and Constructing the Atlas 635 Theme 2: Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness 706 Autopoiesis and Cellular Cognition 777 Bacteria and the Brain 828 Immune System Cognition 889 Brain-based Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness 9910 The Self 12011 Human-machine 14012 Theme 3: dynamics of human psychology 14913 Human psychology as dynamical system 15714 Psychopathology of Mental Disorders 17315 Healing and the therapeutic process 19216 Mindfulness, imagination, and creativity 20517 Theme 4: living in global-ecological social systems 21618 Complex social Psychology 23219 Collective behaviour, social movements and mass psychology 24320 Configurational Social Science 26121 The local and the global: complexities of place 29722 Socio-technological life 32123 Governance, politics and technocracy 342vi The atlas of social complexity24 The challenges of applying complexity 35825 Economics in an unstable world 37226 Resilience and all that jazz 38427 Theme 5: charting a new methods territory 39628 Make love, not models 39829 Revisiting complex causality 40730 Mapping the new methodological terrain 42531 Getting philosophically real 45532 Theme 6: the unfinished space 464Appendix 1: list of respondents 486Appendix 2: speculative references 488