14 March 2012, 5 pm
17:00 Wednesday March 14th 2012 @The Graduate School of Education, Room 410
'we are still a long way off understanding what is distinctive about social emergence, compared to emergence in natural and technical systems'
Over the past decade it has become increasingly popular to appeal to complex systems language to discuss organisational and social dynamics – seeing these dynamics and the resulting patterns, quite reasonably, as examples of emergence in the social domain. However we are still a long way from understanding what is distinctive about social emergence as compared to other forms of emergence in natural systems. In this session Chris will discuss some of the threshold issues he sees for applying complex systems thinking to understanding social and organisational dynamics. This will include work he has done on norm emergence and orders of emergence, linking the range and type of emergence to human cognitive capabilities. This has implications too for how we simulate social systems through agent based modelling.
Dr Chris Goldspink: Incept Labs, Sydney & South Australia Department for Education and Children's Services
