COMPLEXITY PERSPECTIVES IN INNOVATIONAND SOCIAL CHANGE
LANE, D. / PUMAIN, D. / LEEUW, S.E. / WEST, G. (EDS.)
Innovation is nowadays a question of life and death for many of the economies of the western world. Yet, due to our generally reductionist scientific paradigm, invention and innovation are rarely studied scientifically. Most work prefers to study its context and its consequences. As a result, we are as a society, lacking the scientific tools to understand, improve or otherwise impact on the processes of invention and innovation. This book delves deeply into that topic, taking the position that the complex systems approach, with its emphasis on emergence, is better suited than our traditional approach to the phenomenon. In a collection of very coherent papers, which are the result of an EU-funded four year international research teams effort, it addresses various aspect of the topic from different disciplinary angles. One of the main emphases is the need, in the social sciences, to move away from neo-darwinist population thinking to organization thinking if we want to understand social evolution. Focus on invention and innovation as socio-technical processes Applied complex system perspective Innovative social science theory
INDICE: From the contents Introduction.- Section 1: From biology to society.- Chapter 1: Lane, Maxfield, Read and van der Leeuw, From population to organization thinking.- Chapter 2: Read, Lane and van der Leeuw, The innovation innovation.- Chapter 3: van der Leeuw, Lane and Read, The long-term evolution of social organization.- Chapter 4: Ginzburg, Biological metaphors in economics: Natural selection and competition.- Chapter 5: White, Innovation in the context of networks, hierarchy and social cohesion.- Section 2: Innovation and urban systems.- Chapter 6: Bretagnolle, Pumain, The organization of urban systems.- Chapter 7: Bettancourt, Lobo and West, The self similarity of human social organization in cities.- Chapter 8: Pumain, Paulus and VacChapteriani-Marcuzzo, Innovation cycles and urban dynamics.- Section 3: Innovation and market systems.- Chapter 9: Lane and Maxfield, Building a new market system.
