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 range of social sciences. There has been a continuing upward trend since the first edition and a notable penetration into the grey literature of policy documents and corporate communication. The growth has been so rapid that it would require at least one book on complexity-informed work for every discipline and field in the social sciences. In the first edition of this book, we tried to give a flavour of the way the complexity frame of reference is being put to work by ranging across as many disciplines and fields as we could. In the second edition, we are adopting a different approach. The chapter ‘notices’ some key recent complexity-informed work in disciplines but pays special attention to economics’s confrontation with complexity through an examination of the impact of environmental-focused approaches on that discipline. The implications of the interface between the social and the natural are crucial and the nature of this interface for economics demonstrates this clearly. We then focus on ‘the urban’ as a field of scholarship, policy, and social action and draw on material from a wide disciplinary range operating in relation to what now is best understood as the field of urban studies in relation to urban policy.

Political science · Artistic and Creative Research · Psychology · Science, Research, and Medicine · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance