Documents Room, Graham 4 results

"Graham Room argues that conventional approaches to the conceptualisation and measurement of social and economic change are unsatisfactory. As a result, researchers are ill-equipped to offer policy advice. This book offers a new analytical approach, combining complexity science and institutionalism.

Part 1 is concerned with the conceptualisation of socio-economic change. It integrates complexity science and institutionalism into a coherent ontology of social and policy dynamics.

Part 2 is concerned with models and measurement. It combines some of the principal approaches developed in complexity analysis with models and methods drawn from mainstream social and political science.

Part 3 offers empirical applications to public policy: the dynamics of social exclusion; the social dimension of knowledge economies; the current financial and economic crisis. These are supplemented by a toolkit for the practice of ‘agile policy making'.

This is a stimulating, provocative and highly original book. It will appeal to academics and students in social and policy studies and to a wide range of scholars in other disciplines where complexity science is already well-developed. It will also be of major interest for decision makers coping with complex and turbulent policy terrains. "

"Social policy research deploys a variety of approaches for analysing processes of dynamic change but these face major limitations. This article argues for an institutionally grounded complexity analysis, bringing together the historical institutionalism of Pierson (2004) and Crouch (2005) and the treatment of dynamically coupled adaptive systems by Kauffman (1993; 1995) and Potts (2000). It concludes that, at the very least, social policy researchers will need to make a considered assessment of these complexity-based approaches, as they invade an increasing area of the social sciences."

"This article starts with three commonplace judgements on the European Union – its success in healing the wounds of war, its failure to win democratic engagement and its vulnerability now to the seeds of disintegration. Setting these against the background of the High Middle Ages, and the original making of Europe, the article argues that each of these judgements is overly simplistic and for reasons that are closely interconnected. They are, moreover, the ‘high politics' of European integration, expressing the concerns of political elites. Against these, the article proposes a rather different agenda, in relation to the following: social and economic justice; the turmoil, dislocation and hurt that European integration produces; the critical questioning of political elites; and the creative diversity of the Union. These are the ‘hot politics' that matter to ordinary citizens."