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Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4
EAN: 9780521606370
ISBN: 0521606373
Label: Cambridge University Press
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 286
Publication Date: November 28, 2005
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Studio: Cambridge University Press
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Editorial Review:
Sociologists have long believed that psychology alone can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that we can explain much about social life with an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them. R. Keith Sawyer argues, however, that societies are complex dynamical systems, and that the best way to resolve these debates is by developing the concept of emergence, paying attention to multiple levels of analysis--individuals, interactions, and groups--with a dynamic focus on how social group phenomena emerge from communication processes among individual members.
Can we understand important social issues by studying individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow more than the people in them? Social Emergence takes a new approach to these longstanding questions. Sawyer argues that societies are complex dynamical systems, and that the best way to resolve the debates is by developing the concept of emergence, focusing on multiple levels of analysis--individuals, interactions, and groups - and with a dynamic focus on how social group phenomena emerge from communication processes among individual members.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Regarding CAM's Essential Science-Ejected Vitalism, 2005:
Vitalism is a profoundly science-ejected concept, though many CAM or 'natural health' cabals falsely claim that vitalism survives scientific scrutiny.
I quote:
"from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, many holists rejected materialism and held to dualist ontologies such as vitalism and organicism. Vitalism holds that living organisms contain a 'vital' force or substance in addition to physical matter [...] as science became more firmly detached from metaphysics, ... Read More
Rating:  - Useful Contribution to Complex Systems Theory
Human society is a prime candidate for analysis as a complex dynamical system, since societies consist in large numbers of very similar agents engaged in overlapping and interdependent interactions. Despite the power of methodologically individualist approaches in understanding human behavior, they cannot go beyond a certain point, because complex dynamical systems have emergent properties that govern the joint behavior of the individuals who constitute society. Such emergent properties cannot be properly ... Read More
Rating: - Overview of Complex Social Systems
This book is a great overview of the state of understanding and research in and around complex social systems. I found this a good foundation for deeper digging, particularly understanding what happens in some of the social networks on the web as they scale. As it is academic in nature (although rather accessible for non-accademics) it is well footnoted and annotated, making it easy to dig deeper on a variety of subjects.
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