Agile Actors on Complex Terrains

Transformative Realism and Public Policy

Graham Room

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317338055
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sociology

This book assesses the value and relevance of the literature on complex systems to policy-making, contributing to both social theory and policy analysis. For this purpose it develops two key ideas: agile action and transformative realism. The book takes some major themes from complexity science, presents them in a clear and accessible manner and applies them to core problems in sociological theory and policy analysis. Combining complexity science with perspectives from institutionalism and political economy, this book is the first to integrate these fields conceptually, methodologically and in terms of the implications for policy analysis and practice.

Room shows how the models and methods of social and complexity science can be jointly deployed and applied to empirical areas of public policy. He demonstrates how complexity science can provide insight into the nonlinear dynamics of the social world, but why these need to be understood by reference to the unequal distribution of power and advantage. Among the sociological debates with which the book engages are those concerned with causation and explanation, rational action and positional competition, and the place of evolutionary concepts in accounts of social change. Among the policy debates are those concerned with evidence and policy, the dynamics of inequality, and libertarian paternalism.

The book will appeal to final year undergraduates and postgraduate students in social sciences; scholars in social and policy studies broadly defined; policy-makers who want to go beyond conventional discussions of evidence-based policy-making and cross-national lesson-drawing, and consider how to approach complex and turbulent policy terrains; and a wider range of scholars in other disciplines where complexity science is already well developed.

Part I

Transformative realism

1 Complexity and the social sciences

1.1 Introduction

Sociology has long been concerned with the relationship between social action and agency at the micro-level and social structure and order at the macro-level.

New insights into this relationship are offered by the literature on complex systems (Room, 2011a). A complex system involves elements that interact with each other but also with their larger environment. The complexity literature lays bare the conditions under which these micro-interactions can generate order or structure at the macro-level, even in the absence of any overarching system of control. This may explain the eagerness of social scientists, over the last decade, to apply these insights to the social world.¹

The literature on complex systems springs largely from the natural and informational sciences. This chapter examines the distinctive contribution which the literature on complex systems may offer to the social sciences. Unsurprisingly, some of the same questions posed in earlier methodological disputes around the social and natural sciences reappear here.

The first step is to examine the dynamics of complex systems in relation to the natural and informational sciences. The second is to interrogate some of the major sociological debates on the emergence of macro-patterns from micro-interactions and to clarify in what respects the social world is different. Later sections of the chapter consider the implications for theory-building and method.

1.2 The emergence of order in complex systems

Complex systems, to repeat, involve elements that interact with each other, but also with their larger environment. These are, therefore, not closed but open systems, which encounter both positive and negative feedback from the larger environment in which they are embedded, and which they simultaneously reshape. Negative feedback tends to mean that the system stays the same: this is what is assumed in models of static equilibrium. Positive feedback means that any change will tend to be self-reinforcing, irreversible and path-dependent. These negative and positive feedbacks can involve the emergence of orderly patterns across the system and the larger environment in which it sits. This is what complexity writers refer to as ‘self-organisation’.

The micro-level interactions among the elements of such systems mean that the emerging patterns are in various degrees non-linear: they involve more than the simple aggregation of changes in the individual elements. These patterns can be quite counter-intuitive and their contours may change dramatically, if the interactions shift even in quite small ways. The complexity literature offers a variety of models for making sense of such non-linear processes and the dramatic alterations in dynamics that they can display: these have been powerfully and fruitfully applied across many different fields. Nevertheless, not everything interacts with everything else: there is much in the world that is stable and predictable and that linear models are well able to illuminate.

The literature on complex systems has captured the interest of a wide variety of social scientists. However, in order to assess this promise, we must first notice what is involved in its use within the natural and informational sciences. Only then can we assess its possible application, mutatis mutandis, to the social world, and the perils and benefits this may bring.

The following photograph (Figure 1.1) was taken in Svalbard. Here is a hillside whose upper reaches are continuously being turned into gravel by erosion. Gravity moves the gravel downwards, so that it piles up along the horizontal escarpments that run along lower reaches of the hillside.

Figure 1.1 Svalbard

In many places along these escarpments, the particles now begin to spill over, forming small fissures as they do so. Some fissures develop more quickly than others: it is these that ‘capture’ flows of material that might have escaped along other routes and, in doing so, they become bigger still. This is a form of positive feedback. The result is a process of self-organisation in terms of these striations, distributed at regular intervals along the escarpment.

This self-organisation has come, we might say, at a price: the elimination of all those mini-fissures that began forming, but were then swamped and incorporated by their more developed neighbours, as they dragged in material from the larger hillside. In this way the process of self-organisation has ‘simplified’ the escarpment, as lots of mini-fissures were eliminated and a starker and more sharply defined topography ‘emerged’.

The size of the intervals between fissures depends on such factors as the typical size of the gravel particles and their coefficients of friction. Change these and the interval would be different: indeed, the topography and dynamic development of the whole hillside might well change. In the language of complex systems, these variables are the ‘control parameters’ of such dynamics.

A second example taken from the physical world might be the development of our Solar System, as planets formed out of stellar dust (Stewart, 2003). The more massive the planets that form, the more they warp the space-time environment in which other celestial bodies find themselves, dragging those other bodies towards them, by what for shorthand we call ‘gravity’. The concentration of matter thereby confers increasing structure on the space-time environment. These are self-reinforcing processes that warp ever-wider expanses of the universe. At the same time, the process hoovers up a host of minor bodies. This parallels the emergence of an orderly pattern of striations on the hills of Svalbard.

To conclude: These processes of dynamic change, within open and complex systems, involve self-organisation and the emergence of structure: at the same time, however, they also involve the obliteration and recycling of alternative bases of organisation.²

Biologists have been no less eager, mutatis mutandis, to apply the ideas behind complex systems to the living world. Living systems are, of course, physical systems and subject to the laws of physics. But they are more than that. Here we ask: in what sense do living systems encounter positive and negative feedback from the larger environment in which they are embedded, and which they simultaneously reshape? The answer is given in part by evolutionary science, concerned with the dynamic transformation of an ancient world (Crutchfield and Schuster, 2003). Here the driver is not gravity but what Darwin described as the ‘struggle for existence’, as a vast number of organisms compete desperately for food and mates. They also produce new generations of offspring: some of these exhibit variations which confer advantage in the struggle, within the particular environment in question. Here, as before, is a system whose elements are interacting more or less vigorously with each other and with the larger world.

Just as the downward flows of sand-like material on Svalbard’s heights produce the regular striations described above, the selective environment of the ‘struggle for existence’ produces, over many generations, an ecosystem of species finely adjusted to their habitats. Flannery (1994) compares the evolutionary biology of the lands of Australasia. In New Zealand, birds came to dominate; in New Caledonia, reptiles; in Australia, marsupials. Across these different ecosystems, Flannery identifies equivalent niches for particular birds, reptiles and marsupials, respectively, the counterparts of the major species of placental mammals on the Eurasian landmass. These, he argues, are regularities set by the interdependence of evolutionary niches. This is what Kauffman (1993, 1995), one of the principal writers on evolutionary biology as a complex system, calls ‘order for free’.

This process of selection also includes the dynamics of co-evolution. This involves positive dynamic synergies and feedback, for example between flowering plants and insects. These progressively come to dominate the ecosystems in which they are involved, limiting the scope for other species to thrive or even rendering them extinct. It is the latter that are the ‘waste’ of these self-organising dynamics, the alternative bases of organisation that are obliterated and recycled. Here again apparently small changes in such ecosystems – the disappearance for example of a particular species – can mean a dramatic shift in the system’s dynamics. Even so, ecosystems can also display long periods of stability and resilience in face of fluctuations within their environment (Solé and Bascompte, 2006).³

From the natural world we turn finally to the application of the literature on complex systems to the study of human societies. Human societies involve living systems and living systems are made up of physical systems. They are, therefore, subject to the laws of both physics and evolutionary biology. But they are more than that.

Here are social actors interacting vigorously with each other and with the larger social world: they are the ‘animating principles’ of the social (Popper, 1994). Here also are social structures and patterns at the macro-level. How far can these be explained by reference to processes of emergence analogous to those we have described for the physical and biological worlds; and what are the limitations of such explanations?

This provides the agenda for the rest of this chapter. Nevertheless, in exploring these disciplinary affinities, we do well to take into account, more than has sometimes been done by those applying complexity ideas to the social world, the cautions developed through earlier methodological disputes around the social and natural sciences.

1.3 Social emergence and explanation

We need to look at how human actors and human societies encounter positive and negative feedback from the larger environment in which they are embedded, and which they simultaneously reshape. We must see how far forms of self- organisation emerge. And we must see in what ways this involves the obliteration and recycling of alternative bases of organisation. Such processes are well represented in Kuhn’s account of how natural science itself develops, centred as this is on the emergence of new paradigms of scientific thought and practice – and their corollary, the disorganisation, obliteration and recycling of the orthodoxies they replace (Kuhn, 1970). Now, however, we widen our interest to social dynamics more generally.

In broad terms it is not difficult to see these basic elements of complex systems reflected in a variety of social science writing. Sociology, in particular, has long been concerned with the relationship between social action and agency at the micro-level and social structure and order at the macro-level. Thus, for example, Marx, Parsons and Giddens grapple with how to combine agency and social structure in a dynamic analysis that recognises their interdependence: and these questions maintain their relevance within contemporary debates.

How social science conceptualises ‘macro’ – and its relationship to the micro-level – is, however, not unproblematic. For orthodox economics, the macro-level is a marketplace of perfect information and perfect competition, driving the behaviour of micro-actors towards equilibrium. Such equilibrium thinking has long been the target of criticism by a wide range of heterodox economists (see, for example, Kaldor, 1985). Very different is the perspective of evolutionary economists such as Dopfer and Potts (2008), who approach the macro-level instead in terms of the co-evolutionary dynamics of the economy as a whole. This resonates closely with our earlier account of open systems.

In sociology, Dawe (1970) identified two main perspectives. He described, first, the ‘sociology of order’. Here the macro-level is a fixed, exogenous and more or less coherent ‘context’, constraining the micro-behaviour of individual actors. Thus, for example, Durkheim portrayed the ‘macro-level’ as constituted by a variety of social forces, including the ‘suicidogenic currents’ that govern rates of suicide and give them their stability (Durkheim, 1897/1952). These currents can arise from various forms of breakdown in social cohesion, including those associated with rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. Dawe then contrasts the ‘sociology of order’ with the ‘sociology of control’. This centres on the efforts of social actors to construct and reconstruct the social order in which they find themselves and to impose their meanings and purposes upon it. Here the macro-level is the outcome – at any particular moment – of the struggles for control and emancipation in which individual actors are involved. It may exhibit some degree of order but there is likely to be plenty of disorder also.

In what follows we focus on some of the more empirically focused attempts at a sociology that spans micro and macro, social action and social structure. All adopt a broadly Weberian approach to the explanation of social patterns and regularities: accepting Weber’s dictum that such explanations must on the one hand be consistent with the statistical regularities at macro-level that empirical research adduces (‘causal adequacy’), ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Agile Actors on Complex Terrains
• Complexity in Social Science
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Transformative Realism
• PART II Agile Actors
• PART III Public Policy
• Conclusion
• Index