Complexity Theory and Systems Thinking

Description

The course aims to provide students with a general introduction to a theoretical field that has emerged in recent decades from the natural sciences and which has since penetrated both the management sciences and more recently certain sections of the social sciences. As the new paradigm for rethinking the connection between natural and social systems within the wider context of sustainability, it is essential that course participants have mastered the basic concepts of this approach. Central themes will include:

• history of systems thinking, with special reference to the emergence of conceptions of complexity, chaos and dynamic self-organising systems;
• complexity, post-structuralism and the rethinking of science;
• the organising principles of all life forms;
• complexity and post-modernism;
• implications of complexity theory for an understanding of the relationship between natural and human systems;
• applications within the management and social sciences;
• complexity and sustainability.