publishing partnership with the london school of economics' complexity group
Go to the LSE Complexity Group's articles page
Background to the Complexity Group
The Complexity Research Programme at the London School of Economics was founded by Professor Eve Mitleton-Kelly, who is also its current director. The Complexity Group has been working for eleven years on the theory of complex social systems (complex adaptive systems thinking specifically applied to a social context) and its application to practical problems.
The Complexity Group's business partners include BT, Citibank (New York), GlaxoSmithKline, the Humberside TEC (Training & Enterprise Council), Legal & General, Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (Basque Country), Norwich Union, Rolls-Royce (Aerospace & Marine), Shell (International and Shell Internet Works), the World Bank (Washington DC), AstraZeneca and several companies in the Aerospace industry.
The Complexity Group's academic network includes: anthropology, biology, economics, information systems, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology and philosophy. The Group has strong links with the Santa Fe Institute, NECSI and PLEXUS in the USA and with several universities and research institutions world-wide. The Group Director, Eve Mitleton-Kelly, is also Coordinator of Links with Industry and Government for the new European Network of Excellence Exystence, funded by the EU, which started in April 2002. She is also a Director of the Complexity Society, a UK-based Network of Networks on complex systems.
Research aims
One of the objectives of the LSE Complexity Programme is to help create a community of interest and a community of researchers in the UK, studying complex social systems at different scales: at the individual, organisational, economic, and societal levels. A series of Study Group meetings, conferences, colloquia, etc over the past few years have helped create this community and future efforts will ensure that the community is maintained and further developed.
Definitions
The Complexity Group take complexity to mean the intricate inter-relationships that arise from the interaction of agents, which are able to adapt in and evolve with a changing environment. The theoretical framework being developed is based on work in the natural sciences studying complex adaptive systems (CAS). The work at the LSE is focusing on complex social systems using the generic characteristics of CAS as a starting point, but without direct mapping between the disciplines. In other words, organisations are studied as complex social systems in their own right, not as metaphors or analogies of physical, chemical or biological CASs.
Complexity theory and organizations
In an organizational context, complexity provides an explanatory framework of how organisations behave. How individuals and organisations interact, relate and evolve within a larger social ecosystem. Complexity also explains why interventions may have un-anticipated consequences. The intricate inter-relationships of elements within a complex system give rise to multiple chains of dependencies. Change happens in the context of this intricate intertwining at all scales. We become aware of change only when a different pattern becomes discernible. But before change at a macro level can be seen, it is taking place at many micro-levels simultaneously. Hence micro-agent change leads to macro system evolution.
Publishing partnership
Triarchy Press will occasionally publish research papers and related articles emerging from the group's ongoing research.