David Byrne
Biographic Data
| ID | 3582015 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Byrne |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Byrne |
| SIGNATURE | BYRNE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3885-6915 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 411 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Price Coordination with Asymmetric Information Sharing
Platform-based information sharing among competing firms presents challenges for antitrust authorities, yet effective remedies remain unclear. Drawing inspiration from the Informed Sources retail gasoline antitrust case, we develop a theoretical model that offers policy guidance for disrupting anticompetitive coordination facilitated through price-sharing platforms. Removing only one firm from a platform may be ineffective for disrupting such coo…
A cluster randomised crossover trial of single resilience and professionalism tutorials among undergraduate medical students
While we found increased self-efficacy and professionalism scores, these could not be related to the efficacy of respective single tutorials, suggesting that multiple tutorials are required to impact these outcomes. While cross-over designs are feasible to implement, logistical issues may detract from their efficacy. Tutorials could potentially be improved by introducing more interactive learning methods
Response to Hammersley
Class politics
Causation in complex systems where human agency is in play
Conventional approaches to causation in the social sciences draw on approaches in the Philosophy of Science in which a causal force acts on cases and generates change in the form of events. This relies on just one of the Aristotelian conceptions of cause – efficient cause – what brings the effect in to being. We should also pay attention to Final Cause – purpose and Formal cause, what makes something what it is and no other.The somethings are com…
Complexity theory and the qualitative research programme
This chapter begins by discussing how complexity understanding of what scientific knowledge is, and can do, can be set in relation to the qualitative programme of work. This has real strengths in developing our understanding of the social world but works in a different and far superior way to positivist approaches. We make no apology for this insistence on the significance of epistemological understanding. We do not dismiss quantitative work at a…
Conclusion
In this chapter we first reiterate a red thread which runs through the whole of the argument of this book – the social world as the place of human society in the natural world is facing a crisis immediately of increasing inequality in high-income and high–middle-income countries and in the medium term a crisis in the relationship of human society with the natural world. The latter is first a matter of global warming but that, a product of the imp…
Explicit complexity evaluation
This chapter will look at some direction that work with complexity theory has taken in the field of evaluation. It will begin by acknowledging significant interest shown by evaluators who have used it retrospectively to reflect on how it might illuminate earlier studies undertaken outside of the complexity frame. This seems the most significant shift in evaluation thinking in terms of complex systems, setting aside positivist measures and binary …
Quantitative methods for exploring, understanding, and possibly predicting complex social systems and their intersection with natural systems
This chapter applies the complexity frame of reference to modes of quantitative investigation in general and then presents accounts of methods which specifically work in a complexity consistent fashion. We begin with a complexity take on measurement identifying quantitative measures not as properties of variables which have causal powers external to complex systems but as attributes describing systems but not properly abstractable from them. Meas…
Beyond disciplines and fields
Here we want to explore how the complexity frame of reference can help us to understand a domain which in intellectual terms has been informed by the applied social sciences since the development of a systematic interest in public health, that is, the health of social systems, as opposed to the health of individual human beings which was the historical focus of attention of the physician. We do this in the second edition in a very specific contex…
Evolutionary social theory
This chapter will look at explanations in social theory of an evolutionary character. It will review some major theoretical approaches that use an evolutionary frame to identify one of the ways in which systems concepts have been central to social explanation. Spencer’s, Parsons’s, and Luhmann’s approaches will be used to reflect on issues of structure, function, stability, and change and to distinguish between developmental and mechanism of chan…
Time and place
This chapter considers development in theory dealing with time and place that moves them out of their common usage in a Newtonian frame as setting or background and recognizes their active role in social reproduction. It examines concepts of time and place that have engaged with non-linearity and whose development can accommodate the recognition of emergence and co-evolving systems. Time is discussed in its irreversibility, rhythms, and iteration…
Modes of governance
This chapter is in three sections. The first engages with what academic writing and the policy documents of governance agencies of all kinds themselves have to say about the complexity frame of reference as a guiding principle for what they do with special attention paid to how they confront issues in a context of crisis. The second part of the chapter takes up the issues raised by the complexity frame of reference for the actual management of th…
Complexity and mixed methods
This chapter begins with a review of how a mixed methods approach to social research can be understood in relation to the complexity frame of reference. It notes that the turn to mixed methods demonstrates that the ‘paradigm wars’ between quantitative and qualitative approaches are over and done with in the social sciences. The chapter takes up the idea of synthesis as proposed by Abbott (1991) who wanted to see the insights of historical sociolo…
The complexity frame of reference and action
This chapter examines how the complexity frame of reference is the essential mode for both understanding the world and acting within it in the era of the Capitalocene. It establishes what is meant by calling complexity a ‘theory’ – that is neither a grand social theory nor a Mertonian theory of the middle range but rather a frame of reference which follows Reed and Harvey’s (1992) integration of the scientific ontology of complexity and Bhaskar’s…
Evaluation in a complexity frame
In this chapter we seek to understand evaluation in terms of approaches to application of complexity-consistent or -congruent approaches. This shift to complexity framing is the most significant development because of its fundamental implications for the construction of the research and the interpretation of findings. We review a set of approaches that are consistent with complexity that have been much more widely applied than in the explicit com…
Social theory and macro system transformation
This chapter considers the way that macro social theory has dealt with systems concepts to explain reproduction in complexity terms. Four theorists are reviewed briefly here as demonstrating a recognition of complex causation and developing ways to respond to it. We look at Marx to think about the role of abstraction, the relationship between material and ideal, and the relevance of micro foundations. Weber’s use of ideal type illustrates methods…
A manifesto for interdisciplinarity founded on the complexity frame of reference
This chapter begins by drawing on the Gulbenkian report on the future of the social sciences (1996) to trace the historic emergence of the distinctively social sciences across the last 200 years. It shows how this was more than a matter of disciplinary differentiation but was, in large part, based on a distinction made between hard sciences which could work in a positivist Newtonian framework and soft sciences which could not do so in a direct fa…
Shaping research and policy
This chapter is an examination of what people have been doing with the complexity frame of reference across key academic disciplines and fields. It is a critical examination but the primary purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how complexity has become part of what might best be called the intellectual culture: how the episteme is now ‘complexified’. Database searches yield very large numbers of articles, chapters, and books across the whole…
Structure and agency
This chapter will consider how reproduction and change can be understood in complex social systems through a complexity lens. It will examine an abiding problem for social theory of describing reproduction in terms of shaping structures or alternatively as the active production of agents. The need to incorporate both is clear but difficult to achieve. The chapter will review work on structure and individual and collective agency particularly rela…
Doing complexity science
This chapter asserts that the complexity frame of reference makes the actual doing of meaningful and useful science possible. We begin by developing our discussion of the limitations of micro-emergent accounts of complexity by engaging with the arguments of Sawyer and DeLanda. In particular, we focus on the contrast between complex realism’s conception of interwoven systems as ontology and flat ontologies as proposed by DeLanda. Next, we endorse …
Developing a scale to assess post-primary educators’ attitudes with regard to the promotion of student wellbeing
Over the last number of years, there has been an increased move towards attending to the social and emotional wellbeing of students in Irish post-primary schools. Several studies have indicated that educators’ positive attitudes toward health and wellbeing education are crucial to achieving whole-school implementation in terms of the promotion of student wellbeing. However, as of yet, no test instrument exists that is designed to quantify the att…
A worked example of Braun and Clarke’s approach to reflexive thematic analysis
Since the publication of their inaugural paper on the topic in 2006, Braun and Clarke’s approach has arguably become one of the most thoroughly delineated methods of conducting thematic analysis (TA). However, confusion persists as to how to implement this specific approach to TA appropriately. The authors themselves have identified that many researchers who purport to adhere to this approach—and who reference their work as such—fail to adhere fu…
Recruiting and Engaging Women of Reproductive Age with Obesity
Engaging women with obesity in health-related studies during preconception is challenging. Limited data exists relating to their participation. The aim of this study is to explore the experiences and opinions of women participating in a weight-related, preconception trial. This is an explanatory sequential (quan-QUAL) mixed-methods Study Within A Trial, embedded in the GetGutsy randomized controlled trial (ISRCTN11295995). Screened participants c…
Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences
This expanded and updated edition of Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art revisits the use of complexity theory across the social sciences and demonstrates how complexity informs approaches to various contemporary issues in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, widening social inequality, and impending social and ecological catastrophe wrought by global warming. The book reviews complexity theory in the practice of the …
Complexity, Configurations and Cases
How can we make complexity work as part of a programme of engaged social science? This article attempts to answer that question by arguing that one way to do this is through a reconstruction of a central tool of a distinctively social science - the comparative method - understood as a procedure for elucidating the complex and multiple systems of causation that generate particular trajectories towards a desired future from the multiple sets of ava…
Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences
This expanded and updated edition of Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art revisits the use of complexity theory across the social sciences and demonstrates how complexity informs approaches to various contemporary issues in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, widening social inequality, and impending social and ecological catastrophe wrought by global warming. The book reviews complexity theory in the practice of the …
Chaos, Complexity and Sociology
Industrial culture in a post-industrial world
In this article David Byrne takes a theoretical and empirical look at the formation and development of industrial urbanization. Specifically, he looks at two urban industrial city regions and suggests that rather than being doomed by their industrial pasts, they are complex systems which have multiple future trajectories. Here, Byrne's paper explores the experiences and cultures of the North East region in the UK and the Katowice industrial regio…
Evaluating complex social interventions in a complex world
The social world is complex and emergent. Inquiry, directed towards establishing universal empirical regularities (i.e. nomothetic inquiry), cannot establish causality in such a world. We can never assign a causal effect to any intervention without assessing the whole context of that intervention. However, we can develop generalizable knowledge if we adopt research approaches that recognize both the implications of assigning causal powers to cont…
SPSS as an 'Inscription Device
This paper examines the development of SPSS from 1968 to 2008, and the manner in which it has been used in teaching and research in British Sociology. We do this in order to reveal some of the changes that have taken place in statistical reasoning as an inscription device in the discipline over this period. We conclude that to characterise these changes as a shift from 'causal' to more 'descriptive' modes of analysis is too simplistic. Such a shi…
UK Sociology and Quantitative Methods
This piece responds to the Benchmarking Review of UK Sociology's assertion that the discipline has a deficit in quantitative methods and that the solution involves a recognition that: '... statistical methods form the core of social science.' It argues that whilst a quantitative programme is essential and we can agree that there are problems in relation to the quantitative competencies of sociologists at all levels in the UK, a turn to convention…
Complexity Theory and Planning Theory
A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of factors associated with trends in narrowing health inequalities in England
This study explores why progress with tackling health inequalities has varied among a group of local authority areas in England that were set targets to narrow important health outcomes compared to national averages. It focuses on premature deaths from cancers and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and whether the local authority gap for these outcomes narrowed. Survey and secondary data were used to create dichotomised conditions describing each area.…
Deindustrialisation and Dispossession
This article reviews the arguments about the possible existence of a spatially segregated underclass in urban industrial contexts in Britain, with reference to the propositions about the nature of the 'ghetto poor' advanced in the United States by W. J. Wilson. Data from censuses of population and employment, and from the annual Cleveland Social Survey, are used to explore the nature of changes in the socio-spatial structure and the character of …
Class, Culture and Identity
The New Politics of the Welfare State
The 1930 'Arab riot' in South Shields
Social exclusion and capitalism
This article was stimulated by Levitas's (1996) reminder that we need to consider the fundamental nature of capitalism when dealing with the issues currently identified in European social politics under the rubric of 'social exclusion'. It draws on accounts of the simultaneous processes of development and underdevelopment as capitalist strategies in order to understand the apparent bifurcation of the contemporary social order. A critique of 'regu…
Respiratory conditions
The public health movement has been concerned with the relation between housing and health for well over a century. Nevertheless the Black Report still identified housing as one of the major causes of ill-health and suggested, on one indicator at least, that council housing is the least healthy form of tenure. An exploratory study concerning housing and health in a north eastern local authority area is described. It was found that smoking, work e…
Developing Evidence for How to Tailor Medical Interventions for the Individual Patient
We aim to answer the question: How can we develop an evidence base that will assist tailoring health interventions to individual patients? Using social theory and interview data from people living with chronic illness, we developed a new approach to analysis. Individuals were considered as emergent complex systems, adjusting and adapting within their environment and sometimes transforming. The notion of illness trajectory brought our attention to…
Defining unemployment in developing countries
Complex Systems
Class and the local state
Representing Complex Places
The authors argue that narratives-the plural being very important-are crucial for the representation of complex urban spaces. They do this by drawing on first-hand empirical examples from a previous examination of people's understanding of 'postindustrial transformation' from the past through the present to the future, and earlier work on children's understanding of their own places in the present and the future. In so doing, they propose that th…
Some Intra-Regional Variations in Educational Provision and their Bearing Upon Educational Attainment—The Case of the North East
This paper is concerned with the influence of the policy of local education authorities upon educational attainment. We suggest that the influence of local policy has been neglected in the sociology of education and hypothesize that policy variables are likely to be of major importance as determinants of attainment. Evidence drawn from correlations of policy, provision and social-class variables with each other and with various measures of attain…
Class and Ethnicity in Complex Cities-The Cases of Leicester and Bradford
The author is concerned with exploring the relationship between patterns of ethnic residence in 'complex' cities and the character of social division in class terms in such cities. Data from the 1991 UK Census are analyzed in order to examine the patterns of social division and ethnic residence in two large manufacturing cities in the United Kingdom-Leicester where the main ethnic minority is of Indian origin, and Bradford where it is Pakistani. …
Divided Spaces - Divided School
Recent actions by Labour politicians have highlighted the degree of differentiation among UK state secondary schools. This article uses data describing the characteristics of schools and the academic achievements of the children attending them to generate a typology. This is related to recent sociological discussion dealing with the increasing saliency of 'cultural capital' and the way in which families manage educational access as a way of maxim…
Dublin - a case study of housing and the residual working class
Response to Fugard and Potts
This is an interesting and provocative paper but in my view it is not really about thematic analyses. This response was provoked by the paper, and provocation is always a good thing since it leads
Some Intra-Regional Variations in Educational Provision and their Bearing Upon Educational Attainment—The Case of the North East
This paper is concerned with the influence of the policy of local education authorities upon educational attainment. We suggest that the influence of local policy has been neglected in the sociology of education and hypothesize that policy variables are likely to be of major importance as determinants of attainment. Evidence drawn from correlations of policy, provision and social-class variables with each other and with various measures of attain…
Models of Educational Attainment
The 1930 'Arab riot' in South Shields
The Deindustrialization of Northern Ireland
Critical Social Policy
Class and the local state—a rejoinder to a reply
Class and the local state
Dublin - a case study of housing and the residual working class
Respiratory conditions
The public health movement has been concerned with the relation between housing and health for well over a century. Nevertheless the Black Report still identified housing as one of the major causes of ill-health and suggested, on one indicator at least, that council housing is the least healthy form of tenure. An exploratory study concerning housing and health in a north eastern local authority area is described. It was found that smoking, work e…
Just haad on a minute there
Many on the left have welcomed Gorz's book Farewell to the Working Class. This article argues that such enthusiasm is misplaced. Gorz's analysis is seen to rest on a capital-logic approach that denies the possibility of any form of collective proletarian action and hence provides only individualistic solutions. Whilst rejecting Gorz's particular Utopia, the article endorses the development of utopian proposals, where these are collective projects…
Sociotenurial polarization — issues of production and consumption in a locality
Class, race and nation
This study examines the experiences through the inter‐war years of the Arab seamen based in South Shields and the community associated with them. It focuses on the way in which those experiences reflected the historic role of ‘alien seamen’ in one of the North Sea ports in which modern seagoing trade unionism was established, and pays particular attention to the issue of the ‘ Britishness’ of the Arabs and the Arab descended. This is set in the c…
Les propriétaires-occupants marginalisés dans les villes anciennes. Le piège de la propriété invendable
Au Royaume-Uni, la dégradation soudaine de certains centres urbains devient une ressource pour l'accession à la propriété des habitants à faible revenu. Les nouveaux propriétaires de ces secteurs en déshérence sont très divers : marginaux occupants, bailleurs-racketteurs, transitaires assistés, etc. Seule une intervention globale de la puissance publique a quelque chance d'enrayer la dégradation
Radical Geography as Mere Political Economy
David Byrne argues that both the structuralist 'new geography' and the poststructuralist 'new new' geography ignore or deny the role of class as a creative agency in the formation of urban life. New perspectives on class, which reduces it to an essentially cultural position, reinforce this tendency to allocate all creative capacity under capitalism to capital and capitalists. The consequent pessimism has informed the collaborative politics charac…
Deindustrialisation and Dispossession
This article reviews the arguments about the possible existence of a spatially segregated underclass in urban industrial contexts in Britain, with reference to the propositions about the nature of the 'ghetto poor' advanced in the United States by W. J. Wilson. Data from censuses of population and employment, and from the annual Cleveland Social Survey, are used to explore the nature of changes in the socio-spatial structure and the character of …
Divided Spaces - Divided School
Recent actions by Labour politicians have highlighted the degree of differentiation among UK state secondary schools. This article uses data describing the characteristics of schools and the academic achievements of the children attending them to generate a typology. This is related to recent sociological discussion dealing with the increasing saliency of 'cultural capital' and the way in which families manage educational access as a way of maxim…
Social exclusion and capitalism
This article was stimulated by Levitas's (1996) reminder that we need to consider the fundamental nature of capitalism when dealing with the issues currently identified in European social politics under the rubric of 'social exclusion'. It draws on accounts of the simultaneous processes of development and underdevelopment as capitalist strategies in order to understand the apparent bifurcation of the contemporary social order. A critique of 'regu…
Chaos, Complexity and Sociology
Class and Ethnicity in Complex Cities-The Cases of Leicester and Bradford
The author is concerned with exploring the relationship between patterns of ethnic residence in 'complex' cities and the character of social division in class terms in such cities. Data from the 1991 UK Census are analyzed in order to examine the patterns of social division and ethnic residence in two large manufacturing cities in the United Kingdom-Leicester where the main ethnic minority is of Indian origin, and Bradford where it is Pakistani. …
Ruth Levitas, The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour, London
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Exploring Environmental Change Using an Integrative Method
Social exclusion, the poor and the world of work
2000). Social exclusion, the poor and the world of work: New times, old times. Contemporary Politics: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 395-402
Books Reviewed
Class, tax and spending
Interpreting Quantitative Data
Sociology (51 works) · Computer Science (38 works) · Political science (36 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Law (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Social science (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Law (12 works)