Gillian Callaghan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3928464 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Gillian Callaghan |
| NOMBRES | Gillian |
| APELLIDO | Callaghan |
| FIRMA | CALLAGHAN G |
| AFILIACIONES | Durham University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 20 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 78 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 20 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
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 …
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 Theory and the Social Sciences
For the past two decades, ‘complexity’ has informed a range of work across the social sciences. There are diverse schools of complexity thinking, and authors have used these ideas in a multiplicity of ways, from health inequalities to the organization of large scale firms. Some understand complexity as emergence from the rule-based interactions of simple agents and explore it through agent-based modelling. Others argue against such ‘restricted co…
Publics, Patients, Citizens, Consumers? Power and Decision Making in Primary Health Care
This article uses theoretical approaches to the discussion of power in order to consider the role of public and patient participation in primary health care organizations in the UK. There is considerable evidence to suggest that, despite major national initiatives to extend participation in health services, the role of participation in decision making remains underdeveloped. The primary purpose of this article is to understand how and why this sh…
Governance and public involvement in the British National Health Service
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 …
Publics, Patients, Citizens, Consumers? Power and Decision Making in Primary Health Care
This article uses theoretical approaches to the discussion of power in order to consider the role of public and patient participation in primary health care organizations in the UK. There is considerable evidence to suggest that, despite major national initiatives to extend participation in health services, the role of participation in decision making remains underdeveloped. The primary purpose of this article is to understand how and why this sh…
Governance and public involvement in the British National Health Service
Publics, Patients, Citizens, Consumers? Power and Decision Making in Primary Health Care
This article uses theoretical approaches to the discussion of power in order to consider the role of public and patient participation in primary health care organizations in the UK. There is considerable evidence to suggest that, despite major national initiatives to extend participation in health services, the role of participation in decision making remains underdeveloped. The primary purpose of this article is to understand how and why this sh…
Governance and public involvement in the British National Health Service
Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences
For the past two decades, ‘complexity’ has informed a range of work across the social sciences. There are diverse schools of complexity thinking, and authors have used these ideas in a multiplicity of ways, from health inequalities to the organization of large scale firms. Some understand complexity as emergence from the rule-based interactions of simple agents and explore it through agent-based modelling. Others argue against such ‘restricted co…
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 …
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 …
Computer Science (11 obras) · Sociology (8 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras) · Complex Systems and Decision Making (5 obras) · Critical Realism in Sociology (5 obras) · Philosophy (5 obras) · Political science (5 obras) · Frame (networking) (3 obras) · Chaos, Complexity, and Education (2 obras) · Chaotic behavior in systems (2 obras)