Complexity

Organisational Development in Practice: A Complexity Approach draws on conventional, critical and complexity thinking in relation to organisational development with a view to exploring what's useful and what's not.This book proffers an approach to organisational development that helps to develop, support, and maintain more democratic, collaborative, inclusive and sustainable ways of learning, working, and living. The author explores the practicalities of working with the frustrations and inconsistencies involved in coping with the patterns of human interaction that inevitably make up organisations, where planned and emergent approaches co-exist, whether we would like them to or not. Woven in between the substantive chapters are vignettes from a range of international practitioners reflecting on their own experiences in the field.This book is a radically different approach to organisational development suitable for advanced students and researchers of organisation and organisational dev

There has been a rapid expansion of academic interest and publications on polycentricity. In the contemporary world, nearly all governance situations are polycentric, but people are not necessarily used to thinking this way. Governing Complexity provides an updated explanation of the concept of polycentric governance. The editors provide examples of it in contemporary settings involving complex natural resource systems, as well as a critical evaluation of the utility of the concept. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, this book makes the case that polycentric governance arrangements exist and it is possible for polycentric arrangements to perform well, persist for long periods, and adapt. Whether they actually function well, persist, or adapt depends on multiple factors that are reviewed and discussed, both theoretically and with examples from actual cases.

This collection of essays explores the different ways the insights from complexity theory can be applied to law. Complexity theory – a variant of systems theory – views law as an emergent, complex, se

This text reflects the immense current growth in interest in agroecology and changing approaches to it. While it is acknowledged that the science of ecology should be the basis of agroecological plann

This text reflects the immense current growth in interest in agroecology and changing approaches to it. While it is acknowledged that the science of ecology should be the basis of agroecological plann

Uniquely reflects an engineering view to social systems in a wide variety of contexts of application Social Systems Engineering: The Design of Complexity brings together a wide variety of application

Being socially competent is essential in late modern society. We expect people to find their own accommodation, partner, job, community and lifestyle and struggle to find answers for those who are not

Descriptive complexity theory establishes a connection between the computational complexity of algorithmic problems (the computational resources required to solve the problems) and their descriptive complexity (the language resources required to describe the problems). This groundbreaking book approaches descriptive complexity from the angle of modern structural graph theory, specifically graph minor theory. It develops a 'definable structure theory' concerned with the logical definability of graph theoretic concepts such as tree decompositions and embeddings. The first part starts with an introduction to the background, from logic, complexity, and graph theory, and develops the theory up to first applications in descriptive complexity theory and graph isomorphism testing. It may serve as the basis for a graduate-level course. The second part is more advanced and mainly devoted to the proof of a single, previously unpublished theorem: properties of graphs with excluded minors are decid

Urban Governance in the Realm of Complexity discusses the role of urban information systems; public, private and community partnerships; and co-operation between governmental, NGOs and CBOs. It displa