Social Complexity

An Overview
Social Complexity: An Overview

 Contents

1. Social Complexity

2. Social Systems

3. Social Agents

4. Social Interdependency Theory

5. Institutions

6. Functions

7. Social Structure

8. Nonlinear Social Science

9. Self-Organization

10. Synchronization

11. Feedback Loops

12. Attractors & Chaos

13. Edge of Chaos

14. Social Dynamics

15. Self-Organized Criticality

16. Social Network Science

17. Network Communities

18. Network Structure

19. Network Diffusion

20. Fitness Landscape

21. Adaptive Capacity and Resilience

22. Evolution
 Preface

This book is an accessible introduction to the application of complexity

theory to the social sciences. The book will be primarily focused on the
domain of sociology, but we will touch upon elements of psychology,
anthropology, political science, and economics. The aim of the book is to
introduce you to the variety of models from complex systems and illustrate
how they apply to these different domains.

This book is a first of its kind and somewhat experimental in nature, where
we will be drawing upon research from many different areas and using
complexity theory to contextualize it into a coherent paradigm, giving us a
fresh perspective with which to interpret some of the core questions within
the social sciences.

Content

The content is organized into four underlying parts, in each part we will
apply one of the major modeling frameworks from complexity theory to
interpreting social phenomena.

We will firstly give an overview of this area of social complexity before

starting our first part on systems theory. As we lay down a basic model of a
social system, we will go on to use this model in helping us understand,
social structure and institutions.

Next, we will take an overview of nonlinear social science, as we discuss

the process of self-organization, feedback loops, chaos theory and self-
organized criticality.

The third part of the book is dedicated to social network analysis, we will
cover the main topics in this new area as we talk about the basics of social
graphs, clustering, network structure and the process of diffusion.

Finally, we will be looking through the lens of complex adaptive systems

theory, exploring the model of a fitness landscape, talking about adaptive
capacity, social resilience and the process of evolution.
 Audience

This book is designed to be accessible to a broad audience but will be of

particular interest to researchers and students within the various social
sciences wishing to apply complexity theory within their own work. Some
background in social theory and complexity theory would be an advantage
but not a prerequisite.
 Social Complexity

This book is about introducing you to a new approach or paradigm for

modeling and analyzing social phenomena based on complex systems.
Complexity science represents an alternative approach to our traditional
scientific framework. As such, it brings with it a coherent alternative
paradigm, a new set of theoretical models based upon that paradigm, and
a new set of computational methods. So in this chapter, we will be taking a
very high-level view of this whole approach to social science and try to give
an outline of how it differs from a more traditional approach taking within
the social sciences. First, we will talk about this more traditional approach
to make it explicit before discussing social complexity.

Social Science

We can loosely define social science as the study of human beings and the
relations between those individuals that give rise to macro patterns of
social organization called society. Like all empirical sciences, it is engaged
in the enterprise of trying to describe some subset of phenomena in our
world. In this case, the phenomena of interest is human society, and we do
this by amassing empirical data and developing logically consistent
theoretical models to effectively interpret patterns within that data.

But this scientific enterprise does not happen in a vacuum, it happens

within a certain cultural context and depends upon a certain set of
philosophical assumptions about the way the world is. Physicists don't go
into the laboratory every day and question whether there really is such a
thing as some objective universe out there, this is a philosophical question
rather than a scientific one. So what really happens is that researchers go
into their lab every day and operate based upon a certain set of
assumptions about the way the world is. What important questions to ask,
what valid processes of reasoning there are, etc. and as long as the whole
community of researchers shares those assumptions then they have the
supporting context within which to conduct their collaborative research
enterprise.
 Paradigms

This set of assumptions that support a scientific domain and constitutes the
whole philosophical framework within which they work is called a paradigm.
The Oxford dictionary defines a paradigm as "a worldview underlying the
theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject". The paradigm
or set of assumptions within which the enterprise of modern science
operates was born approximately five hundred years ago with the massive
cultural transformation of the Renaissance and scientific revolution that
gave us the cultural foundations of our modern world.

The Clockwork Universe

This new paradigm really came together and first found its most coherent
full expression within the work of Sir Isaac Newton, whose work was
extremely influential for centuries to come and laid the foundations of
modern science and of course, built into this foundation was a set of
assumptions about how the world works. This whole set of assumptions is
called the Newtonian paradigm or the clockwork universe; in slightly more
technical terms it can also be called linear systems theory. Linear systems
theory forms the backbone to all of modern science. It is used in every
domain from physics to biology to economics to psychology.

The Newtonian paradigm is materialistic and atomistic in nature. It sees the

world as a set of isolated objects that interact in a linear cause and effect
fashion. The Newtonian clockwork universe receives its name because
within this paradigm the universe is seen to be compared to a big
mechanical clock. It continues ticking along like a perfect machine with its
gears governed by the laws of physics, making every aspect of the
machine perfectly orderly and predictable. Within this paradigm, we can
understand and know this whole machine of the universe by understanding
all the parts and the simple linear interactions between these parts. The
whole clock is clearly nothing more than the sum of its parts and thus, to
understand it we can use the process of inquiry called reductionism, also
called analysis. Whereby we break the whole thing down into these isolated
individual parts and study the properties of those parts in isolation and how
they interact with each other. If we can then create a set of equations that
describe this, then it is game over. We have completed this process of
inquiry and now know everything that is there to know.
 Methodological Individualism

This approach to the scientific inquiry called analysis was very successful
within classical physics and came to define what modern science is
considered to be and got applied to many different areas throughout the
18th, 19th and 20th century. Its application within the social sciences has
given us what is called methodological individualism used in many different
areas of the social sciences, most prominently within standard economics.

Methodological individualism is the requirement that causal accounts of

social phenomena explain how they result from the motivations and actions
of individual agents. It considers that the only thing in the social world that
is real are the things that you can touch and see, which is individual
humans. This is the materialistic and atomistic nature to the Newtonian
paradigm. All phenomena have to be traced back to some discrete tangible
entity that can be defined in isolation and described in terms of a set of
properties. Within this paradigm, when all is said and done, society can be
nothing more than all of its constituent individuals.

This paradigm of methodological individualism then gives us a whole

approach to studying social phenomena, one that is focused on the
properties of the individuals and their linear interactions. So in using this
approach, we are going to want to amass data about the properties of the
individuals, like a national census where you fill in your age, gender,
occupation, etc. Once we have all of this data, we are then going to look for
linear interactions between the variables called correlation analysis, which
is a statistical technique that can show whether and how strongly pairs of
variables are related. For example, we might ask if there is a linear
correlation between an individual's level of education and their income. We
would then collect the data about individuals and do a scatter plot to see
how closely the values of these properties move together.

This approach can describe simple linear interactions, the interaction

between two, three or four variables. It works well on the micro level, and
this was the primary focus of science before the eighteen-hundreds where
we were dealt with things like the relations between temperature and
pressure, population and time, production and trade etc.

During the eighteen-hundreds, scientists developed methods for dealing

with macro systems composed of many parts by using statistical methods
and probability theory, with most of this happening within the domain of
statistical mechanics, where they were trying to model such a phenomenon
as a gas in a chamber with billions of atoms. Phenomena of this kind are
sometimes called disorganized complexity. In such cases, we are dealing
with systems composed of many disorganized parts, that is to say, a large
set of random variables; the variables have to be independent and
identically distributed called I.I.D. If each random variable has the same
probability distribution as the others and all are mutually independent, then
these statistical methods will work. These assumptions only hold within
linear systems but by imposing them we can say things about the macro
system without actually getting our hands dirty and looking at what is really
going on inside. We can say that it will follow the law of large numbers, the
central limit theorem. We can use mean field theory and make estimations,
talk about the average normal person and so on. And this is a very
important and useful shortcut. But it has its limitation.

Complexity

We won't go into any more of the detail to this approach but sufficed to say
linear systems theory works well for simple linear systems, that is, systems
that have a finite amount of independent homogeneous elements
interacting in a well-defined fashion with a relatively low level of
connectivity. But this is often not what we see when dealing with social
phenomena. Many social phenomena such as whole economies, social
institutions, cultures, and the human psychology to name just a few are
fundamentally complex in nature. By complex, we mean that they consist of
many, autonomous, diverse components that are highly interconnected and
interdependent. In these complex systems, the scientific underpinnings of
our traditional formal approaches begin to break down.

And this leaves the social sciences somewhat divided in its response to the
question of whether we go on using these formal methods whose
assumptions when applied to social systems are floored, or do we abandon
formal methods altogether. For example, we can see this divide between
economics and sociology where standard economics has fully embraced
linear systems theory, giving it quite powerful formal mathematical models.
But in order for it to do that, it has to package up quite subtle and complex
social phenomenon into a relatively simple set of assumptions, leaving it
subject to continuous critic surrounding its foundational assumptions. While
much of sociology and other social sciences, feels this approach is
throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and continue to pursue their
enquiry without the support of any real coherent formal system. However,
this leaves certain doubts surrounding their status as science, as formal
languages are an integral part of the whole enterprise of science. And this
is giving us what is called economic imperialism where economics, the only
social science that has a formal basis, increasingly dominates the others.

Complexity theory is fundamentally a set of formal models, so we will just

make a quick side note about formal methods before moving on. Formal
languages are what make a scientific domain coherent and robust, as the
scientist Ernest Rutherford once said: "All science is either physics or
stamp collecting.” This is clearly a very arrogant statement, but there is
some truth to it. Physics is by far the most robust and advanced domain of
science, largely because it is directly supported by the sophisticated formal
language of standard mathematics. The higher mathematics used in
fundamental physics is not about the x's and y's that you learned in algebra
at school. It is about fundamental and powerful concepts that describe
patterns of organization in terms of symmetries, transformations, and
invariance. It is these very abstract and powerful concepts that are
captured within the language of mathematics that give physics the tools to
tackle very difficult phenomena in a coherent fashion. The social sciences
often lack these abstract formal methods that are powerful tools for solving
difficult questions. A formal language is what gives a scientific domain the
capacity to speak with one voice. Without the support of a formal language,
you end up with many different subdomains speaking many different
languages without any capacity to relate them. And when someone comes
looking for an answer, you end up giving them a hundred different models.

Complexity Theory

Over the past few decades, we have seen the formation of the beginnings
of a formal language for modeling the complex systems that social
scientists study without resorting to reductionist methods, it is called
complexity theory. Complexity theory is based upon very abstract formal
mathematical models, but probably not the kind you are used to. And we
should be clear that although a lot of complexity theory really originates in
mathematics and physics is not another excuse for trying to reduce social
life to little particles of matter that get moved around on mass by forces. It
starts with a recognition that these reductionist methods have their
limitation.
So complexity theory starts with an alternative paradigm to that of analysis.
This paradigm is really inherited from systems theory. Systems theory is
based upon a process of reasoning called syntheses, which is the opposite
of analysis and reductionism. This paradigm is referred to as being what is
called holistic, meaning that it is characterized by the belief that the parts of
something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to
the whole. Syntheses mean the combination of components or elements to
form a connected whole. It is a process of reasoning that describes an
entity through the context of its relations and functioning within the whole
system that it is a part of.

Thus, syntheses focus on the relations between the elements, that is to

say, the way those elements are put together or arrange into a functioning
entirety. Within this paradigm, we are trying to identify the complex of
relations within which an entity is embedded, and its place and function
within the whole. Within systems thinking this context is considered the
primary frame of reference for describing something. We are then not
particularly interested in breaking things down and talking about the
properties of the parts, but we are more interested in these interactions and
what emerges out of them.

Paradigms like this are always quite abstract, so let's take a quick example.
Let's say we are trying to understand the origins of the First World War.
Well, from an analytical perspective we would talk about how Archduke
Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo and how this effect caused a
reaction from Russia which caused another reaction from Germany which
in turn caused England to react and so on. In this paradigm, we would talk
about the properties of the parts and the cause and effect interactions.
Now, from a systems perspective, we would focus on quite the opposite.
We would be looking at the whole context both in space and the process in
time, the nexus of relations out of which this phenomenon emerged. We
might then talk about how, through industrialization and nationalization, the
international political environment within pre-war Europe self-organized into
a critical state and it was out of this whole context that we got the
emergence of the First World War. The assassination didn't then cause the
war; nothing directly caused the war. It was out of the nonlinear interactions
of many different factors that we got a critical state of the system and out of
that critical state we got these emergent phenomena.
 New Models

So this gives us some insight into this alternative paradigm. But how does
this actually translate into models that we can use? Complexity theory
represents a combination of a number of different modeling frameworks
that have developed in different areas in order to deal with complexity. All of
which have in common a focus on the interactions between parts and how
these interactions give rise to emergent phenomena on the macro level.
Agent-based modeling is one good example of this. Agent-based models
are a class of computational model for simulating the actions and
interactions of autonomous agents in order to try and model their effect on
the system as a whole. As an example, we could think about trying to
model the spreading of some virus within a population. We have a
traditional equation-based model called SIR which will describe this
process in a top-down fashion, but we can also describe this with agent
models where we ascribe simple rules to the agents and then run the
program to see what aggregate phenomena emerge from the bottom up.

Another major modeling framework within complexity theory is that of

network theory that is focused on the connections between actors and how
the structure of those connections affect the actors and the system as a
whole. Network theory gives us a formal language to model such things as
power and influence within social systems. By looking at the structure of
connections that surround an individual, network theory gives us a
language for talking about how things spread through a network. Nonlinear
systems theory is another major modeling framework that helps us talk
about the non-additive interactions between agents in space and over time.
How through these nonlinear interactions of synergies or interference we
get the emergence of macro level non-equilibrium phenomena that make
the whole more or less than the sum of its part. This language of feedback
loops and chaos helps us in talking about non-equilibrium processes of
change where the whole system moves rapidly in one direction. And this is
just a quick sample of some of the topics we will be covering in this book.

Tools

Finally, we will talk about the new set of practical methods and tools that
complexity science uses. Complexity science is a science fundamentally
based on computation. The rise of computation within the social sciences is
one of the quiet but major revolutions taking place in contemporary
science. let’s will quote the social network scientist, Duncan Watts in
describing this phenomena as such: "Up until about ten years ago it was
impossible to observe these (social) interactions and it is very, very hard to
do science when you can't observe things, it is very hard to do science
when you can't measure the things you are interested in. And what has
changed in the last ten years or so and why it is so exciting for people like
me to be at the intersection of social and computation science is that the
internet has really unveiled, has really made the invisible visible, has really
given us the capacity to measure the interaction between even hundreds of
millions of people in real time and over extended periods of time. .. it feels
like for many of us in the social sciences, like we have stumbled upon our
equivalent of the telescope, the device, the technology that makes the
invisible visible and historically that has lead to dramatic improvements in
science."

To date, the primary sources of data for social scientist were survey
research, government statistics and one off in-depth studies of particular
people. The statistical databases of governments and the World Bank are
full of information about individual people and their properties. They tell us
almost nothing about the connections between those individuals because
up until very recently we didn't have the computation capacity to manage
and utilize large complex databases of that kind. But with the rise of the
internet and particularly online social networks, this is all changing. We are
going from a limited amount of randomly selected historical data on
individuals to a mass of real data about the connections between people.
This big data is set to revolutionize our insight into human interaction. The
future of the social sciences is a lot to do with the new opportunities that
are arising from these new computational capabilities and data sources.
With these new opportunities for the first time, we have the capacity to not
just model society in terms of individuals and simple statistical interactions,
but instead in terms of context. We have for the first time in a rigorous way
the capacity to map and model context, the context of a choice, the context
of a behavior, and the complex interplay of a lot of different free parameters
all at once. This has always been very difficult because of lack of data and
computational intractability.

These new tools of computation and new data sources are very important,
but at the end of the day they are just tools, they will not in themselves,
help us solve difficult problems within social theory - age-old questions
about the relationship between individual agency and social structure,
questions about the exercise of social power, about the formation of the
individual, about the rise and fall of civilizations. But with these new
computational methods and a new set of sophisticated theoretical tools
from complexity theory, we can apply them to see what fresh insight we can
get on these perennial challenges within the social sciences.

Summary

In this chapter, we have given a quick overview of the application of

complexity theory to the social sciences - what we called social complexity.
We started off with a very broad discussion surrounding the scientific
enterprise as we talked about paradigms in general and the Newtonian
paradigm in particular, how it forms the basis for modern science and how
this approach of reductionism gets translated into methodological
individualism within the social sciences - an approach that is focused on
the properties of the components within the system and linear cause and
effect interactions between them, with the whole being a simple summation
of its parts, allowing us to use statistical analysis.

We talked about how the basic assumptions underpinning our traditional

formal approaches begin to fail when we start to deal with more complex
systems consisting of many autonomous, diverse components that are
highly interconnected and interdependent, as often is the case within the
social sciences. We briefly introduced complexity theory as an alternative
approach to modeling these complex systems, an approach that is based
upon a paradigm inherited from systems theory that uses synthetic
reasoning instead of analysis. We briefly touched upon some of the major
modeling frameworks that operate within this paradigm, including agent-
based modeling, network theory and nonlinear systems theory. Finally, we
touched upon how complexity science is based upon a new set of
computation methods and how big data is set to have a transformative
effect on the social sciences in the coming decades.

 Social Systems

A social system is a set of individuals and relations between them through

which they form part of some interdependent organization as a whole. The
basic model of a social system consists of social actors, called agents and
a set of relations between them that bind them into some state of
interdependence where the actions and state of one effect the state of
others. Social actors have what is called agency, meaning an individual or
organization that acts to produce a particular result. Game theory can
define social actors interactions in terms of positive, negative or zero-sum
games. These, in turn, give rise to different relations of cooperation, conflict
or exchange with associated social structure and dynamics. The idea of a
system is central to dealing with social complexity as it offers us a very
abstract model and solid basis on which to structure our reasoning about
complex social systems.

Social Systems

A system is a set of parts called elements, and the connections between

these parts called relations. Through these relations, the elements are
interdependent in affecting a joint outcome. By interdependent, we mean
that if we change the state of one element this will affect the state of other
elements within the system. We can contrast a system with a set, where a
set consists of a group of independent elements such as a bowl of fruit. If
we change one of the fruit, this would not affect any of the others because
the variables associated with each element are independent.

A social system is then a set of social actors and the relations or ties
between them. Again, we could contrast a social system with a simple set
of people, such as a group of people waiting for a bus, which are simply a
collection of unassociated individuals. But now imagine when the bus
arrives, there is an elderly lady who needs help to get on the bus, so one
person comes to hold the door open and two others give her support on
each side. Now, we have a social system because the individuals are
interrelated and interdependent in affecting the joint outcome. All the
individuals are arranged in a particular fashion or occupy a particular state
in order to perform a collective function; as such the individuals are
interdependent. And this is the same for all social systems, such as a
corporation that has well-defined roles and relations between those roles
through which they perform a collective function of producing some goods
or services. A government is another example of a social system with well-
defined differentiated roles that relate to each other and are interdependent
in performing the collective function of social governance.

Social Actors

Social systems are made up of social actors or what are called agents
within complexity theory. Agents are abstract models of individuals or
organizations which have agency, meaning the capacity to make choices
and to act independently on those choices to affect the state of their
environment. In order to make choices, agents need some set of rules
under which to make those choices. This set of instructions or rules can be
based on some simple linear cause and effect model, such as a trader
choosing to sell a stock if it goes below a certain price. This basic set of
linear rules we call an algorithm. But these choices may be much more
complex such as when choosing whether to change carriers or not. These
more complex decisions are the product of many interacting factors. They
are not the product of simple cause and effect dynamic but they emerge
out of the agent’s representation of its environment and some set of values
called a schema. With this capacity of agency comes autonomy. In choices
and actions, agents define themselves as independent from other things
and thus define their own identity with associated responsibility for their
actions.

Organizations

Agency is not then just a property of an individual but organizations can

have agency, that is to say, we as individuals can give over our agency to
other people or organizations. For example, take the case of Kate who is a
shop owner making an inventory she realizes that she needs more stock so
she sends one of her employees James to make this order. James is now
acting on the behalf of Kate; he is a legal agent, a party that is legally
authorized to act on the behalf of another. Kate is considered the principal
in this relationship, meaning she has given authority to another to act on
her behalf, both principal and agent can be individuals or organizations. Or
to take another example this agent-principal relation is the one that we
have with our politicians within a democratic republic. We hand over our
choices within the political decision-making process to our representatives.
In the same way that we empower organizations with agency and in doing
so, we hand over our choices and actions to them. The reverse is also true
once organizations have agency, they then endow this upon roles within
that organization. The individuals fulfilling those roles are then empowered
with that agency; they can make choices and act on behalf of the
organization. A commander of an army can tell his troops what to do
because they have given that organization their agency, that is to say, their
independent choices and actions and the organization has endowed
anyone occupying the role of the commander with the authority to make
choice and guide their actions for them.

Complex Interdependency

Agents within social systems have agency; they act based upon their
representation of the world or schema in order to affect some desired
outcome. And thus, as soon as we have two or more agents, we may have
some form of interaction between them as they both follow their agendas.
In this interaction, agents become interdependent. This dynamic of
interdependence is described within social interdependence theory, which
posits two different types of social interdependence, positive and negative.
Positive interdependence exists when there is a positive correlation among
individuals’ goal attainments, meaning that individuals perceive that they
can attain their goals if and only if the other individuals with whom they are
cooperatively linked attain their goals. Negative interdependence exists
when there is a negative correlation among individuals’ goal achievements;
individuals perceive that they can obtain their goals if the other individual
with whom they are competitively linked fail to obtain their goals. Along with
these two types of interaction, we may also have an interaction of simple
exchange which is described within standard economics by ration choice
theory. Here, agents are simply swapping one thing for another in a linear
fashion. These interactions can be formalized within game theoretical
terms. Positive interdependencies are zero or positive sum games,
meaning the whole pie may get bigger through cooperation. Negative
interdependencies are zero or negative sum games, meaning the whole
pies may get smaller through the interaction. Exchange interactions give us
zero-sum games; the whole is not changing, we are simply moving around
who gets what. These different types of interdependencies create attractors
towards fundamentally different types of interaction between agents; that of
cooperation derived from positive interdependence and that of conflict
derived from negative interdependence and trade from interactions of
exchange.

Conflict & Cooperation

Conflictual relations are zero or negative-sum interactions where the

interests of one are pitted against those of other. Relations of conflict arise
when agents with divergent agendas interact over some rival resource. By
rival, we mean that the resource that each agent desires is exclusive where
only one agent can own or occupy that resource at any given time. This
may include some physical resources, some social status, ideology etc.
This interdependence coupled with excludability means one agent can
obtain more of some rival resources by reducing another’s access to it,
which creates a dynamic of conflict. When agent’s agendas are aligned
towards a common outcome we can get cooperative relations. Cooperation
is the process of groups of social actors working or acting together for their
common mutual benefit or that of others. Cooperation is often the product
of needing to perform some function that requires individuals with different
capabilities to coordinate their activities towards a common outcome. In
such a dynamic for any one agent to achieve the desired outcome, every
other agent has to also achieve it, meaning that each agent will be equally
interested in the fulfillment of their own role and agenda as that of other.
For example, if a father or mother is interested in providing a good family
context for raising their child, they will have to be equally interested in the
fulfillment of their role as much as the fulfillment of the role of their partner
and this creates a very strong attractor towards cooperation. When agents
with different capabilities coordinate their activities we get what is called a
synergy.

Exchange

Exchange involves a two-sided, mutually rewarding process involving a

trade like transactions where agents simply swap things. It is formed out of
the agent’s subjective cost-benefit analysis and their comparison of
alternatives. As self-interest and rationality are central properties in an
exchange interaction, social exchange theory features many of the main
assumptions found in rational choice theory. Whereas the two firstly cited
types of interaction will typically give us nonlinear results, meaning conflict
or cooperation will add or subtract significant value from the whole system,
Exchange instead will typically give near-linear results since we are simply
swapping things around. No great value to the whole system is being
added or subtracted through the exchange and the whole will remain more
or less a simple summation of its parts. Because exchange can be best
described with reference to linear models it is understood very well within
Standard Economic Theory.

Social Structure

Out of these different types of relations, develops some form of enduring

structure to that system called social structure. In the social sciences,
social structure is the pattern of social arrangements in society that are
both emergent from and determinant of the actions and relations between
agents. As enduring patterns of behavior and interaction, they define some
form order to the overall system. Again, the type of social structure that
emerges is largely a product of the type of interaction between agents.

Hierarchy

With relations of negative interdependence, because resources are

excludable, the net result will always be one some agents assuming a
dominant position while others a subordinated position, thus defining a
power dynamic. By power, we mean the capacity to direct or influence the
behavior of others irrespective of their personal agenda. The power
dynamics that hold a particular social structure within a configuration are an
organic product of agonistic interactions between agents over excludable
resources. The social structure that emerges out of this competition will be
the formation of some kind of stratified social system based upon access to
the rival good. This may also be called a hierarchy which arises when
members of a social group interact to create a social structure with a linear
or nearly linear ranking system, with that ranking system directly correlated
to the distribution of some underlining desired resources within the system
such as economic value, social prestige, decision-making power, etc. The
conflictual relations that are an inherent part of this type of social system
are a constant potential for disorder, and it is seen that there needs to be
some counter prevailing force exerted in order to maintain the social
structure. The order is seen to derive through the exercising of authority in
a top-down fashion through some centralized control system.
 Collaboration

Cooperative relations give rise to collaborative organizations where agents

self-organize around a common function. Cooperation gives rise to peer
dynamics. When the realization of each agent’s agenda is recognized as
being important in the realization of the combined agenda and when there
are limited hierarchical structures based on consumption, then relations are
horizontal in nature, creating a network structure. Order within this type of
system is seen to derive from the interconnections and the positive
interdependencies between agents. It is these interdependencies that bind
the system into an integrated whole and thus maintain some form of
structure and coherence. From this perspective, the greater the
differentiation and specialization between the agents, the greater the
positive interdependency between them and the greater the glue binding
them into a state of order.

The net result of collaboration is what is called emergence. The synergistic

relations are nonlinear, they add value to the whole system and out of this
added value, we get the emergence of a new level of organization, a
collective function. For example, through all the ants performing
differentiated functions and coordinating these individual functions within
the whole colony, we get the emergence of a complex society whose
capability and structure is qualitatively different from that of any of its
components, that is to say out of these synergies a new level of
organization has emerged. This phenomenon of emergence is ubiquitous
across all types of social systems, from families to communities to business
organizations. This emergent phenomenon creates a structure that is not
associated with any of the individual properties of the parts that form it.

Utilitarian Organization

Relations of exchange give us a market like social structure. This social

structure will often have some centralized third party that mediates and
facilitates the exchange, like a bank that takes in deposits and hands out
loans. All three parties are engaging in this interaction out of their own
interests and the net result is a market structure that has some kind of
equilibrium representing a balance between all of the different parties self-
interests, like that between supply and demand.
 Dynamics

These different social structures have very different internal dynamics, that
is to say, processes through which the internal social structure changes
over time. The dynamics of hierarchical social systems composed
predominantly of competitive relations are described within sociology by
conflict theory. Conflict theory posits that the dominant strata within the
hierarchy will use their position and resources to maintain their privileged
position. In doing so, they will reduce social mobility and people of merit will
not be able to rise, meaning those in the upper stators become less
competent and there is also the accumulative effect called the rich get
richer, as the whole system becomes more polarized, ultimately leading to
an abrupt discontinuous change. As such conflict is seen as an inherent
part of the social dynamic, as Karl Marx put it “without conflict no progress:
this is the law that civilization has followed to this day.” From the conflict
perspective societies develop, because for every action of oppression there
is an equal and opposite force that accumulates over time as the two
become more diametrically opposed, ultimately leading to a state of
complete conflict and an ensuing regime shift. And this is considered the
primary dynamic which drives this type of social system as it develops over
time.

Adaptation

Cooperative relations can be adaptive when the ultimate aim is not to

maintain one’s status and access to rival goods, but to enable the operation
of a shared function, elements can adapt their role and relation to that of
other agents in order to best facilitate the joint outcome. When the ultimate
aim of the agent or organization is to perform some collective function, the
emphasis is on a person’s competency in performing that function, resulting
in a more meritocratic system, an important mechanism for social mobility
and integration between different levels within the social system.

Evolution

This whole social system exists within some environment and is subject to
long term evolution as that environment changes. This change may be in
technology and economic conditions, such as the rise of the capitalist
system during the early modern era. It may be some change within the
natural environment or changes within the culture and beliefs of that
society, either way, the whole system goes through long-term processes of
change where new functions are required to be performed while others
become redundant.

Through this process of evolution the system has to adapt by producing

new variance to see which of these are best suited to the changing context,
new roles within organizations, new jobs and intuitions within society or
new ideas within a culture, with those new social phenomena that are most
functional in enabling people and organizations to adapt to the new context
being retained, integrated and shared with those that are not becoming less
prevalent within the future lifecycle of the system. In such a way the whole
social system can evolve in a distributed fashion. Through this process of
evolution, the society can successfully adapt to new changes and it
develops newly specialized subsystems, as it becomes both more
differentiated and integrated leading to what we might call greater
complexity.

 Social Agents

What we wish to do in this chapter is give some basic account of what we

mean when we talk about social actors or agents. This book is focused on
social systems, as such delving into the psychology of individuals would
take us into a new area that is a whole book in itself, so we will be just
touching on the subject here to get a basic model to human agency.
The first thing that we should note when discussing human agency is that
humans are complex system in themselves, that far exceed any kind of
rigorous models we currently might have. Thus what we are describing
here are social agents which are models. If they are good models then they
should capture some essential features of this phenomenon that we are
trying to describe, but we should always remember that models are not
real, thus we should recognize the significant disparity between this model
of an agent and the actual real world phenomena. Our scientific tools are
really quite basic in the face of something as complex and subtle as an
individual person. However, that is not to say that we cannot gain some
traction on this phenomenon, but we should always recognize the
limitations of our models and the complexity of the real world phenomenon
that we are dealing with.

Agents

As we have previously discussed, agents are the basic building blocks of

social systems. From the perspective of the study of social systems, we are
then interested in individuals inasmuch as they have the capacity to act and
affect the state of the system. In the social sciences, agency is the capacity
of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. As
such we should first recognize that this idea of human agency entails a
certain assumption or claim that humans do in fact make decisions and
enact them on the world and in so doing they have some degree of
autonomy. Agency is then normally contrasted to natural forces, which are
causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes.

The concept of agency has become a major paradigm within modern

thought as it underpins many of our contemporary social institutions, the
idea of democracy and the Declaration of Independence, the idea of a legal
agent, human rights etc.
This idea of the autonomous agent is in many ways a direct consequence
of the Age of Enlightenment and the idea that every human has the
capacity to reason, that in this capacity of reason they have autonomy, they
are individual agents.
Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying
logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices,
institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information. One's agency
is one's independent capability or ability to act on one's will. This ability is
affected by the cognitive structure which one has formed through one's
experiences.

Agents Complexity

Individual human agents are most rigorously studied within philosophy and
the behavioral sciences and we will broadly define two different accounts or
approaches to understanding individual social agents. Firstly that of the
behavioral sciences where people are primarily defined by their physiology.
That is, people are understood through their manifest behavior within some
physical environment in terms of motives and logic that transfer inputs from
the senses to outputs of behavior towards desired ends.

The second more complex representation of human actors comes from

philosophy, where people are represented in more subjective conceptual
terms. A person is seen to be a complex system of conceptual models,
values, ethics, identity etc. out of which they have the capacity to shape
their own lives independent from external forces.

Linear Model

Firstly we will briefly outline the paradigm of the behavioral sciences that
follows the method of empiricism primarily within behavioral psychology
and cognitive science. Within this paradigm, social actors are essentially a
product of their environment. The behavioral sciences, as their name
implies, give us an account of social actors through their manifest behavior.
This is an account of people in terms of their senses, motives, physiology
and basic processes of reasoning. More recently, with the rise of cognitive
science, the computational model to human agents has become more
popular.
The fundamental concept of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be
understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and
computational procedures that operate on those structures." This
understanding of agents in terms of their behavior within a physical
environment is adopted as the primary model within mainstream economics
where it has widespread appeal due to its amenability to linear
mathematical models. It is essentially a linear model to how social agents
operate, as a function of stimulus from their environment, cognitive inputs
and outputs and goal-orientated behavior.

As the psychologist Albert Bandura put it: “Much of the early psychological
theorizing was founded on behavioristic principles that embraced an input-
output model linked by an internal conduit that makes behavior possible but
exerts no influence of its own on behavior. In this view, human behavior
was shaped and controlled automatically and mechanically by
environmental stimuli. The individual is a simple product of all these forces
shaping and reinforcing behavior and thus people are seen to have little or
no free will. For decades, the reigning computer metaphor of human
functioning was a linear computational system in which information is fed
through a central processor that cranks out solutions according to
preordained rules. The architecture of the linear computer at the time
dictated the conceptual model of human functioning“

Regulatory System

This basic model to social agents is most clearly expressed through the
idea of a regulatory system, which is a system for effecting, regulating or
controlling its environment. This capacity to regulate its environment gives
the agent the capacity to counterbalance or alter the influence that its
environment has on it, making it at least somewhat independent from its
environment. As such, the capacity to control or influence one’s
environment is a key component in defining the most basic level of
autonomy and agency.

Cybernetics is the science of the control of complex systems of various

types — technical, biological, or social. The term cybernetics comes from
the ancient Greek word kybernetikos (“good at steering”), referring to the
art of the helmsman. This image of a person steering a boat along some
predefined course is a good illustration of the whole process of regulation,
the helmsman (or helmswoman) is continuously receiving information about
the trajectory of the boat, processing this information and then adjusting the
rudder accordingly.
This model of control applies to all types of social actors, from nation
states, to businesses, to local communities and individuals.

Regulatory systems of all kind require some capacity to sense, process and
actuate. A regulatory system is then the actual apparatus through which the
agent receives information, processes it and then acts, for example for an
individual person this is our senses, that receive information, our brain that
processes that information and our muscles that perform the action. Or we
could also take a government as another example receiving information
about the state of the nation from the bureau of statistics, media and other
sources, with many different government officials analyzing and processing
this information to create a set of actions that are then put in into law and
enforced, acted out by government and social workers and supported by
law enforcement agencies. All of these different components to a regulatory
system need to be working and working together, in order for the agent to
be capable of affecting its environment. If I lose the strength in my muscles
or if a government loses the support of its armed forces it will lose its
capacity to act, which will reduce its autonomy and agency.

Nonlinear Model

By using this model of a regulatory system to describe social actors we get

a very narrow vision of human agency where people would behave like
weather vanes, constantly shifting direction to conform to whatever
influence happened to impinge upon them at that moment. In actuality,
people can display considerable self-direction in the face of competing
influences. People are not just on looking hosts of internal mechanisms
orchestrated by environmental events, they are agents of experiences
rather than simply undergo experiences. The sensory, motor, and cerebral
systems are tools people use to accomplish the tasks and goals that give
meaning, direction, and satisfaction to their lives. The human mind is
generative, creative, proactive, and reflective, not just reactive. Agency thus
involves not only the deliberative ability to make choices and action plans
but also the ability to give shape to appropriate courses of action and to
motivate and regulate their execution.

In order to get this more complex form of agency, we will need a number of
different components. Agents will need to be endowed with some model or
representation of their environment. Agents will also need to have some
system of logic in order to process information. To able to make
independent choices, they will need some form of a value system on which
to base their choices and in order to act out those choices and affect their
environment, they will need a control system as previously outlined. With
this full capacity of agency comes autonomy. In their choices and actions,
agents define themselves as independent from other entities and thus
define their own identity with associated responsibility for their actions. We
will quickly go over each of these separately.

Schema

The first thing we will need to get agency is some form of what we call a
schema, which is a conceptual model or representation of the agent’s
environment, what might also be called an ontology, a set of conceptual
categories and relations between them. For example, a culture consists of
some body of shared knowledge, such as in Western culture where we
have science as our shared body of knowledge that defines different
categories and how they relate to each other. Along with an ontology, we
also need an epistemology, which is a mechanism for defining and
validating new information. An example of this might be the peer review
system within the scientific community. It is designed to filter new
information, designating it as either valid and incorporating it into the
ontology or invalid and rejecting it. As an example of this on the individual
level, we might think about how we are constantly receiving new
information and cross referencing it with what we already know to check if it
is valid before incorporating it into what we consider to be a fact. This
process is often modeled within computer science using some form of
Bayesian inferences.

Logic

In order to process information, an agent needs some form of logic. A set of

instructions or rules that define valid processes of reasoning. This can be a
very simple algorithmic logic, such as someone working on a production
line might use to assemble the parts through a set of well-defined stages.
This simple set of rules is in many ways objective as we could write it down
and share it, but this set of rules may also be a more complex nonlinear
logic. Think about the combined logic under which a board of directors of a
company might decide the future trajectory of the enterprise, this complex
form of logic is more implicit and subjective.

Choices

Agents not only have a schema but they also make choices. In order to do
this, they have to evaluate options. That is to say, they have to have some
form of a value system which defines what is of greater and lesser value to
that agent, this is called an axiology, a system for defining the value of
different entities. These value systems give rise to desires, needs and
wants, that motivate agents into action what is called a teleology. When we
say that agents are teleological, it means that they exhibit goal-orientated
behavior. Their actions are not random, they are specifically designed for
the pursuit of the things they place positive value on and in avoidance of
the things on which they place negative value. This value may be of any
kind: social capital, cultural capital, financial capital etc. This teleological
behavior is also what we call an agenda, that is to say when agents act in a
goal orientated fashion they are said to be pursuing an agenda, which may
be defined as the underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or
group.

Identity

In having independent choice and action, an agent has autonomy. With this
autonomy, come both identity and responsibility. When something is
autonomous, it is identified as a distinct class and in the process of
classifying things we give them an identity, that agent’s identity is then
associated with and held responsible for its actions. Thus with agency and
autonomy of action comes responsibility and the ethics and morals
associated with responsibility. Thus to have full agency we also need to
have some system of ethics, a moral code that defines what is correct or
incorrect behavior in maintaining some responsibility, those responsibilities
can, of course, be of many different kind: social, cultural, economic etc. and
also context dependent.

Efficacy

Efficacy beliefs are the foundation of human agency. Unless people believe
they can produce desired results and forestall detrimental one’s by their
actions, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of
difficulties. Whatever other factors may operate as guides and motivators,
they are rooted in the core belief that one has the power to produce effects
by one's actions. Efficacy beliefs play a central role in the self-regulation of
motivation through goal challenges and outcome expectations. It is partly
on the basis of efficacy beliefs that people choose what challenges to
undertake, how much effort to expend in the endeavor, how long to
persevere in the face of obstacles and failures, and whether failures are
motivating or demoralizing. When people feel disempowered they may
actively manipulate uncertainty and lack of information towards a pattern
that promotes their stability, religion, and ideology.

Proxy & Collective Agency

In many spheres of functioning, people do not have direct control over the
social conditions and institutional practices that affect their everyday lives.
Under these circumstances, they seek their well-being, security, and valued
outcomes through the exercise of proxy agency. In this socially mediated
mode of agency, people try by one means or another to get those who
have access to resources or expertise or who wield influence and power to
act at their behest to secure the outcomes they desire.

People also turn to proxy control in areas in which they can exert direct
influence when they have not developed the means to do so. They believe
others can do it better, or they do not want to saddle themselves with the
burdensome aspects that direct control entails. Personal control is neither
an inherent drive nor universally desired, as is commonly claimed. There is
an onerous side to direct personal control that can dull the appetite for it.
The exercise of effective control requires mastery of knowledge and skills
attainable only through long hours of arduous work.

All too often, they surrender control to intermediaries in activities over

which they can command direct influence. They do so to free themselves of
the performance demands and onerous responsibilities that personal
control entails. Proxy agency can be used in ways that promote self-
development or impede the cultivation of personal competencies. In the
latter case, part of the price of proxy agency is a vulnerable security that
rests on the competence, power, and favors of others.

Through individuals combining their agency, we create some form of

collective agency. The organization’s capacity to act as an integrated
whole, to have agency is a function of the individuals giving over their
choices and actions to that organization. For example, when we go into
work we give over our agency to that of the organization allowing it to make
choices as to how we act when part of that organizations and out of that
emerges the combined agency.

Excerpts taken from: Social cognitive theory an agent perspective - Albert

Bandura.

 Social Interdependency Theory

In the previous chapter, we gave a high-level overview to social systems,

briefly touching on the different types of relations between agents. In this
chapter we want to dig a bit deeper into these qualitatively different types of
interaction between agents within a social system as we discuss further the
theory of social interdependency.

As we previously discussed the essence of a social system is the

interdependence among members, which results in the group being a
dynamic whole so that a change in the state of any member or subgroup
changes the state of any other member or subgroup. Group members are
made interdependent through common goals.

In social interdependence theory, the nature of the interdependence

between two individuals is contingent upon the manner in which each can
influence what happens to the other during the course of the social
interaction, and this is called "outcome interdependence".

The basic premise of social interdependence theory is that the way in

which goals are structured determines how individuals interact, that is to
say, the types of relations between them. The theory posits two different
types of social interdependence, positive and negative. Positive
interdependence exists when there is a positive correlation among
individuals’ goal attainments; individuals perceive that they can attain their
goals if and only if the other individuals with whom they are cooperatively
linked attain their goals. Negative interdependence exists when there is a
negative correlation among individuals’ goal achievements; individuals
perceive that they can obtain their goals if and only if the other individual
with whom they are competitively linked fail to obtain their goals.

Negative Interdependency

Negative interdependence creates relations of competition and conflict.

Conflict arises when agent’s agendas are mutually exclusive. In order to
get this dynamic, agents must be acting under different agendas over the
same rival goal. The agents must be acting under their own personal
agenda or that of a group that the other agent or agents are not acting on
behalf of. Conflictual relations define boundaries around the personal
interest of an agent and the conflict is always between the agents that are
internal to the boundary and those external to it, as such, they work to
define borders and differences between social actors.

Conflict

Conflictual relations are an inherent part of negative interdependence,

Wikipedia has a good definition for social conflict: “Social conflict is the
struggle for agency or power in society. Social conflict or group conflict
occurs when two or more actors oppose each other in social interaction,
reciprocally exerting social power in an effort to attain scarce or
incompatible goals and prevent the opponent from attaining them. It is a
social relationship wherein the action is oriented intentionally for carrying
out the actor's own will against the resistance of other party or parties“

Because conflictual relations are over a rival good where only one person’s
agency can prevail, in every interaction of conflict agents are defining who
has agency and who does not, or who controls the combined agency.
There is always a reduction in one agent’s possibilities and set of choices.
With the master-slave dynamic being a good example, we are reducing the
slave’s agency, possibilities, and choices, in order to enable those of the
master. This dynamic was first fully describe by G. W. F Hegel’s in his book
The Phenomenology of Spirit, where he noted that when two conscious
beings, who believe themselves to be absolutely free and unrestrained,
encounter each other, there is a struggle for recognition, leading to the
“master-slave dialectic”, where one member ultimately has to submit to the
other and become the lesser party (constrained) in the combined agency.

Power

This creates a power dynamic between agents. Power is the ability to make
others do things they would not otherwise choose to do, that is to say, the
capacity to control the agency of another. We tend to think of power as
being the property of a person, but this is really shorthand. Power is really a
relation between two people. Power only exists in one’s capacity to
influence another’s attainment of some positive goal or avoidance of some
negative event. As such, power only really exists in our dependency on
another in achieving (or avoiding) a certain outcome. This is what is called
the dependency theory of power, which posits that the basis of power is
dependency. A depends on B if A has goals and needs that B can fulfill. For
example, an employee depends on her company for a paycheck. Similarly,
a company depends on its employees for their work.

Dependence power indicates that those who are dependent on their

relationship or partners are less powerful, in this way power is a force that
is exerted over the potential difference of dependency between nodes
within a relation. The power dynamic can be changed by the lesser agent
not being dependent upon the more powerful agent, or in no longer wishing
to obtain the desired outcome upon which the power dynamic is based.

Dependency

The dependency of A on B is a function of two things: supply and demand.

Demand is defined as the motivational investment by A in goals mediated
by B. In other words, how much A needs what B controls and there are a
number of parameters to this including availability, quality and cost of
alternative means of satisfying needs. In other words, how easy it is for A to
go elsewhere to get what B controls. Supply is inversely related to
dependency (A depends more on B if there are few alternatives available to
A).

So from this perspective, if we were to ask why did the Catholic Church
have such power over people during the Middle Ages in Europe? We could
derive two answers based on this theory. Firstly we might answer because
people wanted to go to heaven and they were dependent upon the church
in obtaining that goal. When people stopped believing in and wanting this
apparent goal the dependency on the church declined, reducing their
power. Equally we might answer that it was because Protestantism and
Calvinism came along providing a new doctrine that allowed people to
bypass the church in attaining this desired goal.

Thus in negative interdependence, the two agent’s agendas become

combined, through conflict the agents define boundaries and who has
greater or less representation within that combined agency. The agent with
less than equal representation stays within it because of some dependency
on the other, this difference in dependency defines a gradient of power
between them and a state of inequality.
 Positive Interdependence

Positive interdependencies are typically built up around some shared

function that requires more than one person to perform. An example might
be two people carrying a table that is too heavy for either in isolation. In
order to achieve the combined outcome, each role has to be fulfilled, thus
for any agent to obtain the joint outcome they must be as equally interested
in their own function as that of others. This dynamic of cooperation creates
a positive sum game. In isolation, neither person could move the table, thus
when we simply added both of our individual actions in isolation we would
get nothing. When we combined our activities though we got something
that was more than the sum of its individual parts. The table was moved, by
cooperating we added value to the whole system thus creating a positive-
sum game.

Synergies

The word synergy means a construct or collection of different elements

working together to produce results not obtainable by any of the elements
alone. The value added by the system as a whole, beyond that contributed
independently by the parts, is created primarily by the relationship among
the parts, that is, how they are interconnected, thus things have to be
interrelated in a particular fashion.

Synergistic relations are ubiquitous in our world, physical, biological and

social, they involve both differentiation and integration. When components
are different and working together they complement each other and the
combined effect is greater than the sum of its parts. A song is a good
example of a cultural synergy, taking more than one musical part and
putting them together to create a song that has a much more dramatic
effect than each of the parts when played individually. The song as a whole
exists out of the interaction between the different instruments, but we only
get this emergent phenomenon of the whole song by each individual
musician coordinating their activity with that of others, if they are not
coordinated we will just get a bad noise.

Whereas conflict defined boundaries and unequal access to some rival

resource, cooperation or collaboration is essentially the inverse.
Collaboration is working with others to do a task and to achieve shared
goals. As such, it requires the reduction in boundaries to enable a common
process. In agents having to adapt their activities to that of others, in order
to enable the group to succeed, they come to shed their own identity and
adopt that of the group, in so doing they become more equal, with the net
result being a less stratified social system.

 Institutions

Social institutions are a central object of study within the social sciences.
They represent enduring patterns of organization or structures built up
around some social function. Religions, governments, and families are all
institutions that have stood the test of time because they provide essential
structure and serve basic functions within social systems.

The concept of a social institution is really very abstract and it is one of the
most complex concepts within all of the social sciences, but it is also a very
powerful one in that it gives us some kind of unifying concept to all forms of
organization within a social system. As such, an institution is really what we
would call in systems theory a subsystem. They are meso-level structures
between the individual and the whole macro system of a society. Thus,
institutions are subsystems, that perform differentiated functions and
provide critical structure.

Structure & Function

As you may have noticed from this, there are really two different
interpretations of this concept of an institution. It may be understood with
reference to structure or function. For example in this definition from the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy they defined institutions as,
“structures or mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the
behavior of a set of individuals within a given community“. We can see in
this definition the idea that institutions primarily exist to maintain order and
structure. But here is another widely used definition for social institutions as
”a persistent constellation of status, roles, values and norms that respond
to important societal needs.” This interpretation places emphases on the
idea of social needs and intuitions as mechanisms for performing functions
to solve those needs.

To give an example of this we might think about the institution of education

from these two different perspectives. We could interpret it as either serving
the important function of educating students with the knowledge they need
to become working citizens or equally we could understand the education
system as a mechanism of social order which governs the behavior of a set
of individuals within a given community. Both of these different
interpretations to institutions are equally valid and prevalent within the
literature.

Functions

Social institutions emerge from and are determinant of the actions and
relations between agents. Institutions are at the end of the day a type of
social system, thus composed of agents and relations through which they
are interdependent. All systems perform some function, they take in
resources of some kind and process those according to some set of
instructions in order to generate an output. In order to perform this function
the system needs some form of order or structure to enable the
coordination of the elements in performing that process. Systems perform
their function only ever to some degree of efficiency, that is to say with any
system we can define a simple parameter that maps from a low level of
efficiency to a high-level efficiency, this is largely a theoretical construct as
in real world complex systems, like institutions efficiency is rarely well
defined, but this theoretical construct does help in structuring our
reasoning.

Efficiency

This degree of efficiency is a very fundamental parameter to a system that

really defines its manifest state. When we say that the system is at a low
level of efficiency, we mean that more of the resources that are being
inputted to the system are being consumed by the components within the
system as opposed to being processed into functional outputs. At this low
level of efficiency, the system is being defined by the consumption of
resources. We have already discussed this dynamic when talking about
negative interdependencies that resulted in competition or conflict between
the components for access to these rival resources. Out of this dynamic
emerges relations of dominance within a stratified hierarchical system. At
this low level of efficiency, we are in a component based regime as
described by the area of sociology called conflict theory, that we will talk
about in a minute.

Inversely, above a certain degree of efficiency, when there is more

throughput than consumption, the system comes to be defined by the
function that it performs. Within a functional regime, components have to
adapt and organize themselves in relation to each other to best facilitate
the overall function. This is self-organization and, through it, we get the
emergence of a new level of organization in order to support the collective
process. This functional regime to a social system is described within
sociology by the theory of functionalism. We will briefly outline both of these
different theories to social intuitions starting with functionalism.

Functionalism

Functionalism is a theoretical understanding of society that posits social

systems are collective means to fulfill social needs. In order for social life to
survive and develop in society, there are a number of activities that need to
be carried out to ensure that certain needs are fulfilled. In the structural
functionalist model, individuals produce necessary goods and services in
various institutions and roles that correlate with the norms of the society.
These institutions, roles, norms and values are interdependent in
maintaining a functional equilibrium within the entire system.

Within this paradigm, order is seen to derive from the interdependencies

between the social system’s constituent parts within what is called organic
solidarity. Organic solidarity is social cohesion based upon the dependence
individuals have on each other in advanced societies. Although individuals
perform different tasks and often have different values and interests, the
order and solidarity of society depend on their reliance on each other to
perform their specified and collective tasks. The term organic here is
referring to the interdependence of the component parts.

Conflict theory

In contrast to functionalism, conflict theory is a social theory that posits that

the distribution of resources between elements within a social system is the
primary factor and determinant of the structure to that system. As such, it is
focused on the unequal distribution of resources, arguing that individuals
and groups within society have access to differing amounts of material and
nonmaterial resources. Thus, the social structure that emerges out of this is
seen to be essentially a mechanism for more powerful groups to use their
resources in order to exploit groups with less power. According to the
conflict perspective, society is made up of individuals competing for limited
resources and this competition over scarce resources is at the heart of all
social relationships.
Conflict theory emphasizes the role of coercion and power in producing
social order. This perspective is derived from the works of Karl Marx, who
saw society as fragmented into groups that compete for social and
economic resources. Social order is maintained by domination, with power
in the hands of those with the greatest political, economic, and social
resources. Conflict theory sees society as a dynamic entity constantly
undergoing change as a result of competition over scarce resources.
Whereas functionalism understands society as a complex system striving
for balance and stability, the conflict perspective views social life as
competition that leads to change.

Of course, in reality, almost all social institutions are a combination of these

two. They are both structure and function, both cooperation and conflict,
static and dynamic, but by looking at these two extremes we can better
understand the key drivers that make up the complexity of a social
institution.
This model to institutions is equally applicable across all types and scale,
from families to governments. For example, if we take the two dominant
theories within international politics, structural realism, and liberal theory,
we will see this recurring pattern. Structural realism posits that states live in
an anarchic international system, a system where there is no higher
authority, where you are vulnerable to attack from any other component in
the system and due to this, states will strive for the greatest power, with all
components being governed, but the structure of the distribution of power
within the overall system. The liberal theory of international relations posits
that, the fundamental ordering force within the international community is
what is called complex interdependency that is the connections and
interdependencies between the interests of all forms of groups within
different societies.

We can see these two perspectives on international relations combine in

people analysis of the current rise of China as a global power and its
relation to the USA. Will the set of complex interdependencies between
them prevail to make this a peaceful transition or do we still live in a
component based international system where major change in its structure
requires conflict, as conflict theory would tell us?
 Summary

In summary, then, we have been taking a very high-level view of social

intuitions through the lens of systems theory. We have tried to use this
model of a system and efficiency to present an integrated picture that
combines the two fundamentally different perspectives on their nature. We
talked about what happens when we turn the system’s efficiency down,
giving us a component based regime as described by conflict theory. The
system becomes defined by the component's access to resources with
ensuing relations of dominance that define a stratified structure where
order is maintained by a top down control system. By then turning the
efficiency up, we got the emergence of global functionality and a new
regime as outlined by functionalism. It describes social intuitions as being
primarily defined by the collective function they perform, with different
elements in the system adapting their states towards this common outcome
that binds them into a state of interdependency, creating social cohesion
and order.

 Functions

In a previous chapter, we talked about social institutions as subsystems

within the overall society. We talked about how they provide both structure
and function within the overall system. In this chapter, we will be focusing
on the function that these social institutions perform. If we remember back
to our definition for a system we defined it as a set of parts that are
interrelated in performing some collective function, thus all systems perform
some function. They take in resources of some kind and process those
according to some set of instructions or rules in order to generate an
output.

And this is, of course, the same for social systems. Within any given social
system, a number of collective functions need to be performed for the
system to be maintained and develop over time. These functions might
include, basic biological reproduction of the population for which we have
the institution of the family; or economic functions such as manufacturing
products for which we have businesses; or political functions such as
collective social decision making for which we have the institution of
government.

All of these are social systems that have to aggregate individuals, assign
functional roles to them. With all of these roles being integrated within
some overarching process that takes in resources of some kind and
performs an operation on them to produce some required output.

Roles

The division of functional tasks in a social system takes the form of the
interaction among heterogeneous specialized positions, what we call roles.
A social role defines a set of behaviors and activities of someone who holds
a particular social status. Roles such as mother, manager or teacher
constitute a set of responsibilities, expectations, norms, and behaviors that
a person has to fulfill in order for the institution to function effectively. Roles
define differentiated states that an individual must occupy in order for the
organization to fulfill some collective function, as such they typically exist in
relation to each other, what is called reciprocation roles, such as the role of
doctor and patient, student and teacher, father and daughter etc.

Relations

In order to coordinate activity around some common function we need not

only roles but some set of relations between these roles that define how
they interrelate. Doctors and patients, students and teachers know how
they should interrelate in order to enable the joint outcome. In larger social
systems we have organization charts that define how the different positions
relate to each other and within very formal situations they may define
specific protocols for interaction, such as a soldier having to solute before
interacting with a member of a higher rank or having to call the queen her
majesty. But the primary objective here is to automate the interaction
between the agents so that it does not have to be renegotiated each time.
When everyone knows their role, place and how to relate to others within
the system, this will enable frictionless processes to take place.

Process & Instructions

Next, in order for the system to perform some collective function we need
to define what exactly that function is. If we think about writing a business
model, we are really trying to define the functioning of that enterprise by
answering the questions of what problem will this business solve, who will it
solve it for, and what resources will it use to do that.

So systems take in inputs and through some process, they perform a set of
operations on these inputs to generate some output. We could think about
the military as an example, it will take in people, technology, finance and
other resources in order to generate the desired functional output of
securing a nation.
In order to do this there needs to be some set of rules that define how the
whole process should be performed, thus formal social institutions are
typically endowed with a set of instructions as to how their function should
be conducted. For example, governments have a well-defined set of rules
encoded in the constitution and law as to how they should conduct the
process of governing a country, how decisions should get made, and what
they can and can’t do during this process. The same would be true for an
institute of education or even religion. These rules might be formal, as in
these examples. Or they might be more informal, as we might have best
practices within a business, or even within our culture, we have constructs
of how an ideal family, friend, community etc. should be. This is essentially
an informal set of rules as to how to perform that functional role what we
might call a norm, the specific cultural expectations for how to behave in a
given situation.

Functional & Dysfunctional

But of course, social institutions may also be dysfunctional. Political

regimes may be corrupted, parents abusive or businesses inefficient.
Robert King Merton, a twentieth-century sociologist, introduced the concept
of dysfunctionality within social systems. Talking about religion, for
instance, he pointed out the dysfunctional features of religion in a multi-
religious society. In such a society religion, instead of bringing about
solidarity, it could become the cause of disorganization and disunity, as it
divides the community up, as such dysfunctionality is also seen to be
disruptive to the stability of a social system.

As a concrete example of dysfunctionality, let's quote one commentator on

Uganda’s government bureaucracy: “You have to marvel at the chutzpah of
some government officials around here. Each day they commute to work
only to spend most of their day seemingly reading the newspaper or out to
lunch. Not such a bad gig if you can get it, even if the pay isn’t great! You
can always top it up by demanding ‘express service fees’ to stamp the
forms you’re supposed to stamp anyway“. We won’t take this comment too
seriously, but it is a nice concrete illustration of endemic dysfunctionality.
This dysfunctionality within systems theory is called entropy, which is a
measure of the state of disorder within a system that can be correlated to
its incapacity to do work or function.

According to Wikipedia, social entropy is “a macro sociological systems

theory. It is a measure of the natural decay within a social system. It can
refer to the decomposition of social structure … Much of the energy
consumed by a social organization is spent to maintain its structure,
counteracting social entropy, e.g., through legal institutions, education and
even the promotion of television viewing. Anomie is the maximum state of
social entropy. Social entropy implies the tendency of social networks and
society, in general, to break down over time, moving from cooperation and
advancement towards conflict and chaos.”
 Efficiency

As we have previously discussed, because institutions serve some

function, we can theoretically reason about the effectiveness with which
they achieve this. The social system’s efficiency is how effectively it
processes the input of resources to the output of some social function. The
lower we turn down the efficiency, the more the system is being defined by
its consumption of resources as opposed to its function - this consumption
of resources within the system generates entropy. This is a bit like eating a
banana. Once you have consumed it, you are left with a banana skin that
you considered waste and that waste, which is entropy, has to be exported
from the system. You through it in the bin and the bin is then taken outside
to be disposed of. The more bananas you eat, the more banana skins are
going to have to be thrown away somewhere. If those banana skins aren’t
disposed of, they will pollute your local environment. That is to say, if you
don’t export the entropy, it will degrade the functionality of the system.

Dissipative systems

We can describe this more formally with reference to what are called
dissipative systems. The idea of a dissipative system was introduced to the
scientific literature by the chemist and physicist Ilya Prigogine to describe
thermodynamic systems, but it has come to be seen as applicable to all
complex adaptive systems. We will be talking about complex adaptive
systems in future chapters, but what is of relevance here is that closed
systems obey the second law of thermodynamics, meaning there is an
increase in entropy over time. A natural accumulation of increasing levels of
random disorder. Dissipative systems and complex adaptive systems, like
societies and institutions, avoid this natural decay process because they
are open systems. They import energy and resources and they export
entropy. If they are successful in doing this, they will be able to accumulate
resources in order to either consume more or develop their internal
structure to become more functional. Like a biological organism, ingesting
food to grow larger, equally if they can not export this entropy then their
internal structure will be degraded and thus their capacity to function
equally degraded. How the social system manages to export entropy is
then critical to understanding how it works and why it is the way it is.

But this idea of social entropy is of course very abstract in that it represents
any form of disorder within a social system. The exporting of entropy then
may be an individual's use of violence against another, or corruption that
degrades the functionality of the overall organization.

And as we now understand entropy in terms of information, thanks to

information theory, it can also be defined as lack of information or not
knowing, thus lying to someone. The production of propaganda,
manipulating information, these are all examples of exporting entropy. A
person's misunderstanding of their environment can also be considered
social entropy. We are clearly dealing with a very abstract concept here, but
it does have a coherent theoretical and mathematical underpinning.

Formal & Informal

Social dysfunctionality is closely related to the subject of informal

institutions. Institutions can be formal or informal. Informal institutions are
largely organic, meaning they emerge naturally out of some preexisting
substrate whenever there is a function to be performed, whereas formal
intuitions are typically more artificial being designed by some set of explicit
principles.

Formal institutions are made explicit and are socially excepted functions.
For example, the family unit is a socially accepted functional unit, which is
made formal and explicit by the process of marriage. But we also have
functions within society that are not socially accepted and are thus not
made formal, but at the same time they do not go away, they simply persist
in an informal fashion. Prostitution might be an example here, the rules and
roles to the workings of that institution are not made explicit and formalized,
they remain latent.

Informal institutions can be used as a course of action which might not be

publicly popular, or even legal, and can be seen as an effective way of
making up for lack of efficiency in a formal institution. For example, in
countries where formal institutions are particularly inefficient, an informal
institution may be the most cost effective way of actually carrying out a
given task. This ensures that there is little pressure on the formal institution
to become more efficient. Our previous example of the government official
improvising in offering ‘express service fees’ to stamp the forms may be an
illustration of this.
The relationship between formal and informal institutions is often closely
aligned and informal institutions step in to prop up inefficient institutions.
Thus, when analyzing a given social system we should be aware of both
the formal and informal institutions. Whereas they will typically present
themselves as two contrasting systems, the reality is more often that
informal institutions are created out of the failures of formal institutions and
society's incapacity to accept and find solutions for integrating them into the
overall social system. There is a symbiosis between the two. For example,
in many countries, the law enforcement agencies do not try to remove
possession or the consumption of cannabis but instead may actively work
to maintain them in a particular state.

Social institutions have both manifest and latent functions. Manifest being
those that are made explicit as the function of that institution, latent being
those that are performed but not made explicit. For example, universities
have the manifest function of teaching students the knowledge and skills
necessary form some occupation, but universities also serve the latent
function of socialization.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been talking about institutions as performing social

functions. We talked about a number of components to this process
including the need for functional roles, some defined set of relations
between these roles, and their integration into some overall process that
transforms an input to an output through a set of instructions - either formal
or informal. We talked about how institutions may be dysfunctional, leading
to the generation of social entropy, a state of disintegration and decay that
needs to be exported in some fashion from the social system in order to
maintain its structure and functionality. Finally, we talked about formal and
informal institutions and the different social functions they perform. From
basic demographics to economics to political and cultural. In the following
chapter, we will be continuing with our discussion of social institutions when
we look at them as forms of social structure for maintaining order and
stability.

 Social Structure

As a famous Swiss man once said: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is
in chains.” This short quote goes to the heart of one of the central
phenomena of study within the social sciences. That is the idea of social
order or structure and its relationship to agency, freedom and the capacity
to change this social structure.

Social structures provide the paths and roads in our lives; they are the
default positions that have already been created, the established
institutions of culture, politics and the economy that enable us to go further,
fast, easier, to do more. They enable us but they also constrain us, and
they are the frameworks through which power is exercised. When we take
these pathways we give over our agency and choices to travel along roads
that have been created by someone else. Someone else is defining our
choices along this path, and in so doing they have power over us.

Social Structure

In the social sciences, social structure is the patterns of social

arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of
the actions and relations between agents. As enduring patterns of behavior
and interaction, they define some form of order to the overall system.
Social structures are typically complex and recurring patterns of
organization. In contrast to social structure, social agency is the capacity of
individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
Because social structure is largely about order, it is often treated together
with the concept of social change, which deals with the forces that change
the social structure and the organization of society.

Order

Structures are really designed to facilitate order. Social change requires

some form of individual initiative, so we have to ask how do we as
individuals change the social structure around us? Here we see the
interdependency between the two; we need structures that often constrain
the individual but also we need individuals in order to test and change the
structure for it to develop. We need order, rules, obedience and the
structure that they bring but we also need individuals who will sometimes
break and test those rules in order to make them manifest and help
develop them.

Types of Social Structure

Social structure or organization is a product of agents coordinating their

activities in some fashion. This coordination can only happen by the
individuals giving over their agency, their choices, and actions to that
organization. In people giving over their agency, they allow the organization
to make decisions on their behalf; they submit to follow orders and become
obedient to the organization's agenda.

Without this submission and coordination, we have no form of structure. It

is only by police officers following orders that we can incarcerate people; it
is only by people choosing to go to work every day that we get business
organizations; it is only in our collective belief in money that it has value. So
the question is then why do people give over their agency to organizations?
Sociologies have really found three answers to this question. We do it
either out of coercion, meaning we give up our choices because of the
force others exert on us. Or we do it in exchange, meaning we bind
ourselves into organizations because we perceive the benefits to us to be
greater than the cost. Or we do it for normative reasons, meaning we form
organizations and maintain them because we see it as a process through
which to achieve a collective outcome that we value. Each of these
different bases for giving over our agency creates very different social
structures with different process of change. So we will go over each of
them separately.

Coercion

Relations of conflict drive coercive organizations. Military dictatorships are

classic examples of coercive organizations. Power is based on force; you
give over your agency because ultimately of some fear that you have. As
humans, we actually use physical violence very rarely in our interactions.
Exercising violence is often a very last resort. What we do use though is
intimidation, displays of power, manipulation, propaganda, neglect, acts of
omission, etc. that are ultimately all trying to force one into adopting certain
actions and out of this, we get some form of order and organization that is
based on coercion.

Hierarchy

Inherent to the conflict theory of social order is that conflict is the normal
state within a society, not the exception. This is most famously captured by
Thomas Hobbes's book the Leviathan, where he posits that man, in a state
of nature, is in a continuous war of all against all. Order is then seen to only
be maintainable through some powerful centralized force.

This force is exercised through some hierarchical structure. As we have

already discussed, relations of conflict give rise to a microstructure of one
agent assuming a dominant position over another micro-dynamic of power
and authority. One agent assumes greater control over the agency of the
combined organization, while another assumes a subordinate position with
a lower level of representation within the combined overall agency. As
such, the social structure that emerges out of agonistic relations engenders
varying degrees of inequality, within a stratified, hierarchical system where
power is exercised in a downward direction in order to maintain the state or
order of the system.

Chain of Command

Coercive social structures have strong rules and follow a strict chain of
command through a hierarchal structure that represents a systematic way
to integrate the activities of members with divergent agendas by having a
clear line of command and thus automatic method for resolving conflicts. In
order to control an organization in a hierarchical fashion, it has to be
linearized. Nonlinearity is inherently uncontrollable through a hierarchical
model. By linearizing I mean that you have to define a closed system,
creating a boundary around it in order to regulate and constrain inputs and
outputs to a relatively low level. Equally, you have to reduce the number of
nonlinear interactions within the system, meaning you need information to
be primarily flowing up and down the hierarchy not horizontally, because
this would empower the agents on the lower levels of the organization and
have a corrosive effect on the top-down exercise of control.
 Agency & Structure

There is, of course, a strong dichotomy here between agent and structure.
Within coercive organizations, individual agency is not some natural right
that all members have. Members are typically stripped of individuality and
forced to conform the culture is of strict obedience. Goals would be an
example of this. Membership is not voluntary. The individual is stripped of
their personal belonging and forced to wear identical clothes, they are
identified by a number instead of by name, all of this is to reduce the
diversity and individuality of the agents and facilitate their manipulation
through the social structure. Agency is really derived from your place in the
social structure. For example, within the feudal system, the individual had
no inalienable rights, you got rights from your place in the social hierarchy,
and there was very little social mobility.

Change

Conflict theory sees social change as only achievable through conflict.

These coercive social systems are designed to serve the interests of those
in the higher strata of the system. Below some level, in this hierarchy, the
value of being part of the organization is less than it returns. People remain
in these low positions because of coercion and dependency. This creates
one subsystem that desires change, but above this theoretical line in the
hierarchy, agents are receiving more than they are putting in through
exploitation. This creates another subsystem that desires the maintenance
of the social structure. The system then remains in it current confutation as
long as the upper strata have sufficient power and the lower strata are
sufficiently dependent. However, conflict theory goes on to add that this
does not last forever. At some point, change happens though abrupt
revolution.

Utilitarian Organizations

When agents give over their agency based upon their own perceived
interests within an exchange system, we get what is called utilitarian
organizations. People engage in this type of organization because they
have something to gain. Thus the culture is one of productivity and
efficiency. Legitimacy is based on the organization's or person's capacity to
deliver in the exchange. Utilitarian organizations dominate modern
societies. With the Enlightenment came the idea of reason and people as
rational self-interested agents driven to maximize their utility. On this new
understanding of the individual, we built a whole new set of social
institutions that are utilitarian in nature. They are designed to provide
people with as much return on their investment of time, energy, money or
freedom as possible.

This is one way of understanding how economics and the idea of the
market have become so domain within modern societies as an exchange
mechanism for creating social order. A good example of a utilitarian
organization would be a business. People consent to join and give over
their agency to part of that organization in exchange for some
remuneration. That is to say, they work in exchange for pay. When they feel
this exchange is no longer of value to them, they can discontinue it. The
idea of the social contract would be another example of this. The modern
theory of the social contract propounds that individuals have consented,
either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedom and submit to
the government, in exchange for protection of their remaining rights. We
are exchanging the constraint of our actions for the agency that
governments gives back to us in the form of rights that it will protect.

Order & Change

Order is maintained by a network of relations between the mutual self-

interest of individuals and often regulated by some impartial third party that
oversees the exchange. Like in a football match, we have the two
competing parties, but we also have the referee to mediate this exchange
and ensure rules that facilitate the exchange are upheld.

Utilitarian organizations are bureaucratic in nature. That is to say, an

organizational model that is rationally designed to perform complex tasks
efficiently. In a bureaucratic business or government agency, officials
deliberately enact and revise policies to make the organization as efficient
as possible. Legitimacy and status are based largely on one's capabilities
and efficiency. Bureaucratic organizations are designed to be impersonal.
There is a degree of abstraction between the role and the individual person
that fulfills that role. There are formal methods to facilitate the change
process, whether this is through election or some employment process.

This form of organization often involves decisions made through what is

called an adversarial decision-making process. The use of a voting system
to choose candidates to hold political office is an example of an adversarial
decision-making process. This process requires each candidate to
convince voters that they are more trustworthy and will be more effective in
the role than their opponent. Everyone gets a vote in this process, but it
does not require consensus. Whoever gets the most votes wins, this
process will sound very normal to us because it is used in many modern
organizations.

Normative Organizations

Lastly, we will talk about normative organizations. People join normative

organizations not out of coercion or self-interest but to pursue some goal
they believe has value in itself. These include community service groups,
political movements, many charities and we might include the new forms of
collaborative network organizations we see emerging in post-industrial
economies, such as open source software or Wikipedia. These
organizations involve high levels of positive interdependence, making
cooperation an attractor. These relations of positive interdependence
create peer interactions of cooperation, with low levels of stratification in a
more horizontal networked structure.

Order & Agency

Collaborative organizations emerge from self-governance because the

individual is not joining out of coercion or self-benefit. They are in no way
dependent upon it, they engage in the organization voluntarily, and thus the
organization has no real power over them. Through self-governance, they
have chosen to constrain themselves in order to coordinate with the group
and achieve some collective outcome. Without this need to regulate and
control the members, the organization can do away with much of the
hierarchy within the first two forms of organization that was required to
simply ensure people's compliance, meaning they can likely be much
agiler.

Order is maintained through shared common commitment to some

collective function. The organization is an emergent phenomenon of the
individuals pursuing a goal or some interest that is of value to the overall
system.
Within this form of organization, there is the possibility for consensus
decision-making, which is a group decision-making process in which group
members develop, and agree to support a decision in the best interests of
the whole. It is used to describe the process of reaching a decision that is
fully inclusive. Through self-governance, the individual's agenda is aligned
with that of the whole, and in this way, we get integration between agency
and structure. But it is only because the individual has created some
internal structure of morals, values, ethics, etc. Thu,s they are called
normative organizations because they are really governed by these
personal normative values that people have developed to govern
themselves personally. In this way, the governance structure is not
something out there in some constitution or set of rules that need to be
enforced; it is in the individual’s culture.

Complexity

We should remember that almost all real-world social systems will involve
some combination of these three forms of basis to their structure and order.
For example, many people go to work both out of a profit motive and
because they believe in the value of what their organization is doing. Or if
we take the military as another example, we might see all three forms.
People may join the military out of a belief in the value of securing their
nation but also for personal financial benefit. And once they are there, rules
are enforced in a coercive fashion.

Summary

In summary, we have been talking about social structure and agents of

change. We noted how these two phenomena of agency and structure are
deeply interdependent with social structure emerging out of individuals
giving over and combining their agency within organizations that both
enable the individuals and constrain them.

We talked about the different types of social structure and how they can be
modeled in terms of the condition under which the agents gave over their
choices and actions. Starting on the most basic level of coercion that
places an emphasis on structure over agency in a rigidly hierarchical
organization resistant to change. Next, we talked about utilitarian
organizations where agents partake in exchange relations based on mutual
self-interest with the result being bureaucratic organizations focused on
efficiency that have come to dominate modern industrial societies. Finally,
we talked about the normative organizations we get when people
voluntarily coordinate towards some collective outcome that is of normative
value through an inclusive decision-making process.

 Nonlinear Social Science

After chaos theory becoming accepted within mainstream science during

the latter half of the previous century, nonlinear science is now set to play a
major role in the 21st century. Interpreting nonlinear phenomena of all kind
represents the forefront of contemporary research. And these ideas and
models from nonlinear science are just starting to make their way into the
social sciences. In this chapter of the book, we will be talking about
nonlinear social science as we look at self-organization, feedback loops,
chaos theory and social dynamics.

We will be firstly talking about self-organization as a process through which

social patterns of organization are formed; we will discuss feedback loops
and attractors as key features to this process. As we will see, self-
organization is essentially a process of integration, where we are going
from a set of agents with random state correlations to synchronizing their
states, giving us a distinct pattern of organization. Through this
synchronization process driven by positive feedback loops, we get the
emergence of patterns of order, as new cultures form, new social
movements take hold, or new fashions are adopted.

We will then go on to talk about chaos theory as we look at symmetry

breaking, bifurcations and the onset of chaos, which is in many ways the
inverse process to self-organization, as we start with a homogeneous
pattern but through these bifurcations and symmetry breaking we get the
development of differentiated subsystems. As homogeneous cultures,
social institutions and economies become increasingly specialized and
differentiated during their development. Finally, in this chapter, we will talk
about social dynamics and self-organized criticality as one model for
understanding nonlinear social change.

Nonlinear systems as the name implies are defined by what they are not,
and thus to get a basic understanding of the concept we need to define
firstly what we mean by a linear system. Linear systems are defined by
their adherence to what is called the superposition principles of
homogeneity and additivity. Additivity simply means that the parts of a
linear system can be added up to give us a description of the whole
system. The whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts, thus linear
systems theory is very much focused on giving an account of the individual
elements in a system and their properties, being able to form an account of
the whole by simply adding all the parts up. A thing to note here is that,
because things are simply additive, and the whole is simply a summation of
its parts, this means that the relations between the parts are of little
significance, as they appear to add nothing of great value.

Homogeneity means that the inputs and outputs to a system are always
proportional to each other. So for example, if we had twice as many
teachers per student in a school, then if this was a linear system, we would
have twice the level of student productivity. Linear systems are
synonymous with simple systems. A simple linear social system would be
one where the individuals have no special relation between them. As an
example, we might think of a group of four people in an elevator. They are
all strangers with no specific relation between them and thus the group is
nothing more than the summation of its individual members. We can give
an account of the whole group by simply listing the properties of the
individuals.

By defying the superposition principles, nonlinear systems are then non-

additive. The whole is more than the sum of its parts due to the interactions
between the parts. As we saw in the previous chapter, this derives from the
synergies and interferences between the parts. They also defy the
homogeneity principle, meaning the input and output to the system can
change over time. The classical example being compound interest where
the value that is being inputted each time is growing due to this
compounding effect, leading to super-linear growth. We will be covering this
in the next chapter as we talk about feedback loops and punctuated
equilibrium.
 Self-Organization

In this part of the book, we will be starting the major theme of nonlinearity
and self-organization within social systems. We will use this chapter to give
an outline to the overarching process of self-organization. Then, in future
chapters, dig further into the different topics covered here.

Self-organization

Self-organization is a type of pattern formation, a means through which

some form of order or coordination is developed. There are essentially just
two basic methods through which social coordination and order can occur.
Within linear systems, it may be imposed in a top-down fashion from some
centralized global authority. Or within nonlinear systems, it may emerge
from the interaction of the agents on the local level in a bottom-up fashion,
and this is self-organization. As such, self-organization is a nonlinear
process of pattern formation, meaning it is a product of distributed
interactions.

Top Down Order

Within a linear system where there is a low level of connectivity and

relatively few components interacting in a well-defined linear fashion, it is
possible to control and coordinate that system through some centralized
regulatory mechanism. We can use this centralized governance
mechanism to impose or maintain order within the system. That is to say,
by influencing or controlling the agent's choices towards a coordinated
outcome we can get some state of order within the system.

We can only have this form of centralized, top-down coordination when a

relatively large percentage of the interactions are being routed through
some centralized coordination mechanism. But this top-down form of
regulation and control is only possible within linear systems. As we turn up
the distributed connectivity, the number of components and their capacity
for autonomous decision making, the system will become more and harder
to coordinate from a centralized location, and it will become easier and
easier for patterns to form on the local level through this high level of
distributed interaction. Above some theoretical point where we have more
nonlinear distributed interactions than centrally controlled connections, we
are starting to get a significantly large enough space that is unregulated,
and it is in this unregulated space that has sufficient density of nonlinear
interactions that self-organization can take hold as a significant mechanism
for coordination.

Bottom-Up

Self-organization, in contrast to this linear top-down model, is a product of

these local nonlinear interactions. When I bump into my neighbor on my
way out in the morning and say “Hi“; this is an example of a local
interaction. These local interactions are often spontaneous. As in this
example, I didn't plan to meet my neighbor. It just happened. And they are
nonlinear in the sense that they typically happen in a distributed fashion. I
have chosen to say hi. I didn’t have to go and ask anyone for permission.
This is a distributed peer-to-peer interaction, and these distributed local
peer-to-peer interactions are very difficult to manage through a centralized
model.

A centralized model will always have to use abstraction in order to manage

the system because a centralized model means that very few people are
trying to regulate very many. We can only do that by using abstraction. The
president of a country with 1.3 billion people cannot go around telling each
one what to do; there has to be many layers of bureaucracy between them.
And information has to flow in a linear fashion out from the center to the
periphery. The further we go out, the more people we have and the more
possible cross links we can have between agents. Each one of these peer-
to-peer links is a possibility for a local pattern to form. So self-organization
often happens out at the fringes where the chain of command is weak, and
there are many local interactions. As a side note, today we see self-
organization becoming more of a mainstream form of social coordination
because we are increasing these distributed nonlinear interactions through
Information technology, thus making it more difficult to manage these social
systems through centralized methods. Either way, we can call this state an
unregulated environment, and it is the condition or ground on which self-
organization takes hold.
 Synchronization

Self-organization is then a form of distributed nonlinear pattern formation.

All patterns, forms of order, or organizations are going to involve some
correlation between the states of the system’s constituent elements - this is
essentially what an organization is. When there is no correlation, we have
randomness, the absence of order.

So we have randomness and order which are some form of correlation

between states, like two people dancing together. A change in the state of
one's motion will be correlated with that of a change in another. The
dancers, on a fundamental level, can really only do two different things.
They can move together in the same direction, which is a positive
correlation or they can move in the opposite direction, which is a negative
correlation. A positive correlation means the two elements states are
synchronized. They move together in the same direction. A negative
correlation means they are desynchronized. They move in the opposite
direction.

This dance then has what we would call a symmetry. This idea of symmetry
is at the heart of modern mathematics. During the mid-eighteen hundreds,
we came to understand algebra on a deeper level, concerning symmetric
transformations and invariance. We have since gone on to use this within
fundamental physics to understand the basic workings of our universe in
terms of these transformations - because these symmetries and
transformations apply to all forms of organizations.

As such, mathematics came to be understood by some as the study of

patterns and that is what we are talking about with self-organization.
Patterns of correlation between states that can be understood as
symmetries. In applying this to social systems then, we are talking about
agents, and thus we are talking about correlations between the choices of
agents. Do they choose to do the same thing, opposing things or is there
no correlation between their choices? This is the very basics of what we
are dealing with when talking about self-organization within social systems.
 Feedback Loops

Self-organization is then a process that is going to change the correlation

between agent's states within the system. It is going to coordinate them,
and this is done through what are called feedback loops. Positive feedback
loops have been identified as playing a central role within the process of
self-organization. We will be talking more about feedback loops in a future
chapter, but a positive feedback loop is one that is self-reinforcing. The
more products a business sells, the more it can invest in its business,
meaning it can produce better, cheaper products, meaning it will sell more,
meaning it can reinvest more and so on. This is an example of a positive
feedback loop, it is a nonlinear process of change, through it the business
can grow in an exponential fashion.

Feedback loops are the mechanisms through which some small local
event, which is often random in nature, can get amplified into a new macro
level pattern of organization and this is the heart of the whole process of
self-organization.

To give an illustration of this, let's think about a beach of people sunbathing

on their holidays. Now let's add some initial random event. We have
someone with headphones on listening to their favorite music, and they get
so excited that they jump up and start dancing around. What happens now
depends on the state of the other agents around them. Typically these
random events will get dampened down and die out. Everyone will look at
this guy like "he is weird." But by this person occupying this differentiated
state, we have already created a feedback loop. It is now much easier for
anyone else with a propensity for dancing to jump up and join him, and
when they do, we now have some distinct pattern. Two people occupying
the same state and although they are still a significant minority the positive
feedback has got stronger. It is now even easier for the next person to join.
And with every new person that joins, it becomes more attractive for
anyone else to do likewise.

Attractors

As this positive feedback process of change continues, we will get to some

point where there are more people dancing than not dancing. At this point,
dancing has become what we would call an attractor. You will be
considered more normal if you are dancing rather than not dancing. If we
add a new agent to this system who just wants to be normal and follow the
course of least resistance, then he or she will end up dancing.

And thus through this process of change driven by positive feedback, we

now have an attractor. A default set of states within the system. This
attractor is the pattern of organization, all these agents dancing have
correlated their states in some way. As another example of an attractor, we
might think about the languages and cultures within different regions.
Within any different region, there will be a strong attractor towards speaking
the same language and adopting the same culture. Behind the creation of
these cultural attractors was a positive feedback loop, the same as with our
people on the beach.
But as we know, there are many different languages and cultures in our
world representing many different attractors. Because if the system is large
enough, this process of self-organization through positive feedback may
take hold around many different components within the system at different
locations and grow out from there until it reaches another pattern at which
point we get a boundary condition. Like the national boards in Europe
marking the limits to the different cultural attractors that have formed over a
prolonged period of time. At this point, where all the elements in the system
are aligned within local level attractors, positive feedback will die out and
negative feedback will take hold as the different attractors balance each
other out to create a semi-stable configuration.

Externalities

These different attractors then have to compete or cooperate in order to

enable some form of global coordination. This type of interaction will largely
be a product of how the attractors were created in the first place. That is to
say, were these different local attractors created out of exclusive or
inclusive conditions. We can create social organization by having
individuals overcoming their differences in finding common ground,
common purpose and identity. Or we can create this organization by
defining our difference and degrading others, what is called "out-group
derogation", which is a form of negative externality. In this case, we are
creating the pattern of organization by simply exporting the entropy outside
of the system’s boundary to some other system. For example, the Nazis
created their sense of identity around the Aryan race through a systematic
derogation of other out-groups, including the Jews among others. This
exporting of social entropy creates division and conflict.
By the individual attractors exporting entropy, this will create a state of
disorder within the overall system. Any group that is dependent upon the
exporting of entropy in order to define and maintain its internal state of
order, will not be able to integrate within the overall state space and conflict
will be the primary type of interaction between the different patterns of
organization.

Emergence

But of course, this is not always the case. We can also get positive
externalities. The net result being emergence as the different local
attractions overcome their differences and we get the emergence of some
global pattern of organization. Emergence is a process whereby larger
entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller
or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. As such,
it is very much analogous to self-organization but subtly different.

Emergence is a distinctly nonlinear phenomenon in that it can not be

derived from any one component within the system. It is the product of
many distributed interactions across the system. An example of this might
be a wave at a football match. This is an emergent self-organizing
phenomenon, no one is coordinating it. Some small initial event takes hold
and gets amplified into a large macro phenomenon; it emerges out of the
synchronized states of the members. People crossing a street is another
example of pattern emergence through self-organization. We have dense
interactions as people going in either direction try to pass each other, those
who meet first have to coordinate their activity, but once they do this will
create an attractor for others to follow as we get the emergence of some
pattern to the crowd, streams of people going in different directions.

Cause & Effect

In these nonlinear systems, there is a breakdown of linear cause and

effect. If I hit a ball with a bat and you ask me why the ball moved off in the
direction it did, I can say "because I hit it with the bat." This is linear
causality, and I can predict the next time I hit the ball with the bat, it will
again move in the opposite direction. But this is not the case with nonlinear
dynamics. The effect of self-organization, that is to say, the output of the
system, is not a product of the input. It is an emergent phenomenon of the
overall state of the system and the feedback loops over time.

Almost all real world complex systems are going to have randomness,
fluctuations, and noise in them. Nothing is perfectly ordered. But these
small events typically do not affect the overall pattern of organization. If we
take any large enough society, there will always be some people who are
discontent with the current state of the socio-political system and trying to
change it. But they will typically not gain traction, thousands or even
millions of small events will take place without any effect, because of the
overall state of the system.

But when all the components come to be aligned within a similar

configuration; all the agents come to adopt a similar perspective; then
some small event can gain traction and propagate through the whole
system. For example, we might think about some oppressive political
regime. For every act of oppression from the ruler, this may not have a
direct consequence, but it creates resentment among the people. This
resentment builds up until we have some critical state. All the people are
synchronized in their discontent. At this point, some small random
phenomena, which had happened many times before, can now propagate
through the system rapidly. The system has self-organized into a critical
state, and this critical state is systemic - it is distributed out across all the
elements in the system. Thus no one cause created the effect. It emerged
out of the overall state of the system and the feedback loops that drove it
over time.

Predictability

This type of nonlinear pattern formation is then unpredictable. There are

many small fluctuations, and it can not be determined in advance which
one will gain hold. Thus, we cannot know where they will come from
because the actual event emerges out of the state of the system and
through the feedback loops. But those feedback loops play out over time
after the event has happened. That is to say, the outcome does not exist at
inception, it is not determined by the initial cause but instead, it is created
along the way.

The academic Journal of Democracy, describes this phenomenon as such:

“Regime transitions belong to that paradoxical class of events which are
inevitable but not predictable. Other examples are bank runs, currency
inflations, strikes, migrations, riots, and revolutions. In retrospect, such
events are explainable, even overdetermined. In prospect, however, their
timing and character are impossible to anticipate. Such events seem to
come closer and closer but do not occur, even when all the conditions are
ripe—until suddenly they do.“

Summary

In summary, we have been talking about self-organization as a nonlinear

process of pattern formation. That requires dense distributed peer-to-peer
interactions within an unregulated environment in order to take hold. We
discussed social organization as a form of correlation between agent's
choices, how randomness can be equated to the lack of correlation
whereas order may be understood in terms of symmetries. We talked about
how positive feedback loops are the key engines behind self-organization
as they can work to amplify some small event into a large systemic
phenomenon, creating local attractors that then have to cooperate or
compete to get global coordination.

Finally, we saw how linear cause and effect breaks down within these
nonlinear systems, phenomena emerge out of the distributed state of the
system and the feedback loops over time, making events fundamentally
unpredictable in nature.

 Synchronization

The mathematician Steven Strogatz talks about synchronization as such –

“sync is maybe one of… the most pervasive drives in all of nature. It
extends from the subatomic scale to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.
It’s a deep tendency towards order in nature that opposes what we’ve all
been taught about entropy…(it is) the tendency towards spontaneous
order.”

In continuing with our main theme of self-organization within social

systems, in this chapter, we will be digging further into the very basic
elements of this process as we discuss synchronization and causal links.
Any form of organization within a social system is going to derive ultimately
from agents assuming, either by choice or necessity, some coordination
between their activities and agendas. We get riots, financial transactions,
families, governments, tennis clubs and all forms of social systems
because untimely agents have come to assume some correlation between
their states and activities.

As we previously touched upon, there are just three different types of

correlation. Firstly, we can have a random correlation, meaning there is no
relation between the variables, they are independent. Secondly, we can
have a positive correlation, meaning the values associated with the
different elements move in the same direction. Lastly, we can have a
negative correlation, where the two variables move in different directions.
So we will go over each of these to understand how they relate to
nonlinearity.

Random Correlation

When agents act completely independently, we will get a random

correlation between their states. For example, me choosing to go to the
swimming pool on Friday has absolutely no correlation to whether my
neighbor will go shopping the following Monday. These two events are
randomly correlated. Randomness is the lack of pattern or predictability in
events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps has no order and
does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual random
events are by definition unpredictable, but in many cases, the frequency of
different outcomes over a large number of events is predictable.

For example, if we took a large enough group of people and randomly

assigned connections between them, and then went and plotted a graph of
how many connections each person had, we would get a normal or
Gaussian distribution, where some would have few connections, some
many, but most would tend towards the average. And the more connections
we added, the closer we could predict what this average would be. This is
called the Law of Large Numbers. If this is truly a random system, any
individual event is perfectly random, totally unpredictable, but as we go to
the limit of infinity we get an outcome that is perfectly predictable. Thus, the
further we go towards infinity, the more it will tend towards this predictable
outcome. But this is only because there is no correlation, but the fact is that
most things that we are interested in are not random.

Negative Correlations

If the values are negatively correlated, we have what is called a negative

causal link within system dynamics. A negative link is a relationship
between two variables where they change in the opposite direction, such
that, as the value of one variable increases, the other decreases and vice
versa. An example of this might be the financial relationship between the
owner of a business and the employees. If all other things are equal, the
more the owner pays the employees, the less profit for the owner. Thus
elements within this type of relationship are going in the opposite direction
creating a counterbalancing dynamic.

Mean Field Theory

These first two types of relations we have outlined are linear. Meaning that
the gains to one agent are balanced by the losses to another. It is linear
because when everything is added and subtracted it sums up to zero. If we
take the distribution and make one side positive and the other side
negative, when we add all the samples up they will sum to zero. Because
of this nice even normal distribution, we can collapse it all down to the
average value, this method is most explicit and well formulated within what
is called Mean Field Theory.
Mean Field Theory comes from physics and in particular statistical
mechanics where researchers are dealing with many interacting variables,
such as gas molecules in a chamber. The main idea of mean field theory is
to replace all interactions to any one body with an average interaction. This
reduces any multi-body problem into an effective one-body problem. The
ease of solving MFT problems means that some insight into the behavior of
a complicated system can be obtained at a relatively low cost.

This model has been adopted within game theory giving us mean field
game theory, which is the study of strategic decision making in very large
populations of small interacting individuals. This approach will work in many
social scenarios whenever we have these two first forms of correlation -
differences nicely cancel one another out and we can use some form of the
mean field theory. For example, consider tracking the behavior of a swarm
of bees. If you observe any one bee in the swarm, its behavior is pretty
erratic. Making an exact prediction of that bee’s next location is nearly
impossible; however, keep your eye on the center of the swarm—the
average—and you can detect a fairly predictable pattern. In such worlds,
assuming behavior embodied by a single representative bee who averages
out the flight paths of all of the bees within the swarm both simplifies and
improves our ability to predict the future. And this is the nature of simple
linear systems, where reductionism will often work well as an
approximation. We can reduce things down to a single homogenous state
variable, but this does not work in nonlinear systems.

Positive Links

Positive causal links between values associated with different elements

mean they both move in the same direction. Thus, if one variable
increases, the other one also increases or if one decreases the other also
decreases. Positive links represent relations of deep interdependency,
everyone wins or losses together. We get this positive link by two things
interacting in either a constructive fashion meaning they both increase or a
destructive fashion meaning they both decrease.

By constructive, we mean the two variables are moving in the positive

direction. By two countries signing a trade agreement, their two economies
may grow and this is essentially a synergistic interaction. By both
increasing together, they are adding value to the overall system. Inversely,
with a destructive interaction, the two variables move in the downward
direction together. An arms race between tow nations might be an example
of this. Through this interaction, the value of the whole system is
decreasing. This may be called a negative synergy or interference in the
way that two sound waves can cancel each other out making the combined
output to the system less than a simple summation of its inputs.

This illustrates how these positive links are nonlinear. When we add and
subtract the gains and losses to all agents in the interaction, they do not
sum to zero thus defying the additivity principle. This nonlinear nature to
positive links makes these phenomena less well studied and understood.
Wherever we have synergies or interference within a social system, we will
get nonlinearity. This might be the synergy between two partners in a
relationship, between tow businesses engaged in a merger or different
countries collaborating on cross-border security. Tt might be the negative
synergy between tow sides in a civil war, two companies competing on
advertising, two cultures that contradict each other. These nonlinear
phenomena are ubiquitous in our world.

 Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are central to the dynamics of nonlinear systems of all

kind, from financial crisis to population growth, to ecosystem collapse to the
outbreak of conflict. They are the engines of self-organization, they are
what drives the process as it develops over time. In this chapter, we will be
digging deeper into their workings as we talk about tipping points,
thresholds path dependency and punctuated equilibrium.

Nonlinear Dynamics

Feedback loops describe a relationship of interdependence over time,

meaning what happens now is going to affect what happens in the future
and out of this feedback and interdependence of states over time we will
get a certain pattern of development. So these feedback loops are not
taking place between agents or groups at the same time but now represent
relations over a period of time as the system changes and thus we are
dealing with system dynamics. In the model of a linear system, their is an
input to the system that generates some output, but this output does not
affect its future input. Because of this, the homogeneity principle holds.
That is, that the input and output to the system remain constant over time,
so that things grow or decay in a linear fashion 2,4,6,8 etc. This type of
linear development is really the product of independence between states
over time. This model is like a business that never gets any better it simply
stays doing the same thing year after year.

But as we know, in the real world, many social phenomena of change are
not like this, they involve feedback loops over a period of time. What
happens in the past, feeds into effect what happens now and what happens
now will feed into effect the future. Through this, we can get a compounding
effect as things build on top of themselves. Our business can actually get
better at what it does every year so that the input-output ratio to the system
will not stay constant.
 Types of Feedback

Feedback systems define how an event may feedback on itself over time,
and what we are interested in is whether what feeds back will make the
system do more of what it did in the past or less. This will be definitive in its
overall pattern of development, as we will discuss. When what happened in
the past feeds into making the system do more of what it did previously,
then this is a positive feedback loop. Everything is moving together in the
same direction over time. With negative feedback loops, the values move in
the opposite direction. If we have more of something now, we will have less
of it in the future. Thus these negative feedback relations over a period of
time will lead to stability, and little change as what one does now is
counterbalanced with what happens in the future.

Positive feedback loops are drivers of nonlinear exponential growth or

decay within a system. The output of the system now is feedback in as the
input to the future state of the system thus the system can build upon itself
over a period of time - there is a compounding effect. The classical
example of this being compound interest, the current output value of the
account is fed into the future calculation where interest is added to it, this
larger amount is then fed into the next cycle with the same rate of interest
now acting on a larger figure thus producing a large growth rate. The thing
to note here is that it is not just that the amount of money is growing, it is
more important that the amount that is being added each iteration is itself
growing because of the compounding positive feedback relations over time.

Examples

Feedback loops are an example of the premise of complexity theory that

complex phenomena can be the product of simple rules. Almost all
phenomena that you would consider not normal are nonlinear. Positive
feedback loops are present in many processes of change within social
systems. Just to make this more concrete, we will go over a number of
examples.

Riots

A social riot would be an example of positive feedback. When a riot begins

with few people these individuals are vulnerable. But with every extra
person that chooses to partake in the riot, it makes it more likely that it will
be successful and less like that any one individual will be reprimanded.
Thus, more will beget more as this positive feedback cascades through the
individuals aligning their states.

Conflict

Conflict escalation can involve positive feedback. Given some act of

aggression, an opposing agent will be threatened, becoming less tolerant
and more likely to react, which will in turn feedback to effect the same
action on the behalf of the other. An example of this would be an arms
races between two nations, where the two sides continue to try and
outcompete the other leading to all losing and growing potential for conflict.

Irrational Exuberance

Likewise, the phenomena of irrational exuberance is another example of a

positive feedback. When the value of a trader's stock goes up, this feeds
back to boost the trader's self-confidence in their decision making and
encourages them to make more investments that may be even riskier.

Inequality

Another good example would be what is called the Matthew effect within
sociology, which describes the fact that advantage tends to beget further
advantage. Thus this phenomenon is also known as the rich get richer as
these feedback loops tend to increase initial inequalities. We might think
about the fact that bank managers are more likely to lend money to people
who already have lots of money. Likewise, those who are already well
connected within society will have greater potential for making more
influential connections. This accumulative effect is described within network
science by the concept of preferential attachment, which explains that
those nodes that initially acquire more connections than others will increase
their connectivity at a higher rate, and thus an initial difference in the
connectivity between two nodes will increase further as the network grows.

We can see how this phenomenon of accumulative advantage may lead to

greater polarization and of course a polarized social system means higher
potential for conflict. This may be an example of what is called self-
organizing criticality that we will discuss in a future part.
 Phase Transitions

So whereas negative feedback within a linear system will give us linear

incremental change, that is to say, a simple quantitative change, positive
feedback will give us a qualitative change. And this makes sense because
control systems that use negative feedback are specifically designed to
maintain a system within a certain set of parameters to enable its stable
functioning, whereas nonlinearity is going to take the system outside of
these parameters, thus discontinuing that state of functionality and
requiring it to operate in a new fashion. This type of nonlinear growth is a
very powerful force that is clearly unsustainable. It can not continue
indefinitely; it will eventually drive the system out of its current regime.

Whereas linear development may maintain the system within its current
attractor, exponential growth through positive feedback drives the system
far-from-equilibrium and is a key characteristic of a system going through
what is called a phase transition. Phase transitions represent periods of
critical and rapid change within a system's development. The parameters
with which we define the system change fundamentally. The melting of ice
into water is an example of a phase transition. We get a sudden
transformation, and a regime shift as water is a very different substance to
solid ice.

Examples of phase transitions within social systems might include the fall
of the Berlin Wall. Before this rapid critical phase transition, the global
political environment was largely defined by a bipolar regime. Before the
fall, this bipolar model was the parameter we used to define the system.
After the event, the political environment was described with reference to a
new set of parameters relating to globalization. The Arab Spring might be
another example. The Arab Spring is widely believed to have been
instigated by dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments. After many
decades of the Middle East being held within a particular configuration or
political regime, the Arab Spring was a punctuation of this equilibrium. That
previous regime was a set of negative feedback loops that balanced the
system into some equilibrium. We might say there was some balance of
power, but this balance got broken through some small fluctuation, the self-
sacrifice of a street vendor in Tunisia. This small event then got amplified
by positive feedback into a large systemic transformation. Through this
positive feedback, the balance of power was broken temporarily and the
political system across the Middle East moved into a phase transition.
 Tipping points

This process of self-organization involves what are called tipping points.

Within sociology, a tipping point is understood as a point in time when a
group of agents—or a large number of group members—rapidly and
dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare
practice. The phrase was introduced to sociology by Morton Grodzins.
Grodzins studied racial integration within american neighborhoods in the
early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families remained in the
neighborhood as long as the comparative number of black families
remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black
families arrived, the remaining white families would move out en masse in a
process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point."
Tipping points are the product of agents having thresholds that have to be
met before they will act, and there is clearly a feedback loop at work here,
every time an agent reaches a tipping point and acts, this makes it more
likely that another will also.

So for example, if we take two groups of people and each individual has a
propensity to adopt some new phenomena as seen described by: 0, 1, 2, 2,
2 & 1, 1, 1, 2, 2. Then, we will notice that the first group will adopt the new
phenomena as soon as it is introduced because the lowest threshold within
that group is zero and once that person adopts then the next person at one
will do likewise and then the rest. But the other group will not become
adopters because they require one person before they will change.

The thing to note here is that both groups have the same average
propensity for adoption, both groups as a whole are equally as receptive to
this new phenomenon. We can then see that the average or normal is not
important; it is the outliers that matter. You have to know the distribution or
variance and how they are connected. With more people in the tail, you are
more likely to get a collective action.

And thus we can say that within these nonlinear systems it is the tail that
wags the dog. Because of heightened connectivity and interdependence,
major new phenomena start at the fringes and then through positive
feedback build up and make their way into affecting the mainstream.
 Punctuated Equilibrium

A combination of negative and positive feedback loops during the

development of a system can lead to a model of development called
punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium is a model first derived from
evolutionary biology but has also been applied to social theory as a method
for understanding change in complex social systems. This model looks at
the evolution of social change, suggesting that most social systems exist in
an extended period of stasis, which are later punctuated by sudden shifts of
radical change. Social systems are characterized by long periods of
stability, where negative feedback loops work to maintain an equilibrium
holding them within a well-structured attractor state. This is then
punctuated by large—though less frequent—societal shifts, driven by a
positive feedback loop that drives the system far-from-equilibrium and out
of its current attractor into a new one. During a phase transition, that
represents a new regime and new equilibrium under a new set of negative
feedback loops.

Path Dependence

This dynamic to nonlinear systems creates path dependency, which

explains how the set of states to a system now are limited and defined by
the historical trajectory that led to this point in time. That is to say, complex
social systems bare their history on their shoulders. Time reversibility only
holds for some linear systems, but nonlinear systems are non-time
reversible. The development of the system goes in one direction with
respect to time. Because of feedback loops, the system is within a
particular attractor because of the choices made in the past.

An example of this we could cite might be the clustering of businesses.

Similar businesses tend to congregate together geographically; opening
nearby similar companies that attract workers with expertise in that
business domain. This then draws in more businesses in search of
experienced workers. This network effect is driven by positive feedback
loops and negative externalities that have taken the system down a
particular pathway into a particular basin of attraction from which it would
be difficult to exit or change.
 Summary

In this chapter, we have been talking about feedback loops as a key

component to self-organization within nonlinear systems. We briefly
outlined the workings of positive feedback loops that work to accelerate
change, and negative feedback that works to dampen down change,
constraining the system towards a stable state. We looked at a number of
example of positive feedback, talked about tipping points and thresholds
that create abrupt cascading processes of change.

We saw how these positive feedback loops can be a powerful force that, if
left unchecked, will take the system out of its current overall state and into
a phase transition as it moves into a new regime, with this model giving us
a pattern of development that is marked by prolonged periods of stability
that are punctuated by these rapid phase transitions.

 Attractor and Chaos

When we look at many different types of social systems, we see distinct

patterns of clustering - distinct substructures that have synchronized their
states. If we look, for example, at the distribution of ethnic groups across
many multicultural cities, we will see these distinct recurring clustering
patterns to the different cultures. We would also see this clustering within
the distribution of political opinions across the different regions of some
country, or again the clustering of traditional dialects. None of these forms
of organization have been planned by a central authority. They are all
examples of emergent phenomena. All of these different clustering patterns
are examples of attractors which are central to understanding the process
of pattern formation within nonlinear systems.

State space

An attractor is a set of states towards which a system will naturally gravitate

and remain cycling through unless perturbed. For any system we can
create what is called a state space, that is all the possible states that the
system might take. A state space also called a phase space is a
mathematical model in which all possible states of a system are
represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one
unique point in the phase space.

To build this state space model, we have to define one or more parameters
to the system that we are interested in, where a parameter is simply a
measurement of something about the system. So if we were interested in a
sales person’s finances, we could define a parameter, to measure their
income, but this would not be very interesting, it would simply go up and
down depending on their sales. So what we are typically interested in then
is the relationship between two or more different parameters. So we might
define another parameter to their overall savings or wealth. Now at each
day, we will take a sample of both of these parameters, putting a dot at the
corresponding value and stay doing this over a period of time.

What we will see after doing this for a few weeks is some kind of typical
behavior, during the week they are earning some amount, then it goes up
on Saturday with lots of sales but then down on Sunday when they are not
working and then starts again the next week. What we will typically see is
that these different states do not go around every single state in the whole
space, but are confined to a limited subset of all the possible states. So we
can say that this subset of the phase space of the dynamical system
corresponding to its typical behavior is the attractor.

A bowl containing a ball may be used to illustrate the concept. The ball will
move around the bowl until eventually, it comes to rest at the lowest point.
We can say that it is 'attracted' to that point, so each part of the bowl can
be regarded as leading to that stationary point, and the whole bowl is what
we call the system's basin of attraction.

Systems, like this ball, are typically held within their attractor because of the
different forces placed upon them by their environment. An animal stays on
a particular patch of fertile land and does not stray too far from it because it
needs to eat; a person gets up and goes to work every day because they
need the money to support themselves. What is happening here is that
these dynamical systems are dissipative, meaning they need some source
of energy to maintain their dynamic state. They are continuously inputting
new energy and then dissipating it, and they cycle through this process
always having to come back to the source of energy that is maintaining
their dynamic state. It is in that cycling that we get all the different states
within the attractor.

Social Attractors

Within social systems, we can think of attractors as representing the course

of least resistance for a person or social group at any given time. They
remain within their current configuration because of inertia. Due to these
counter balancing forces that are on the system within its basin of
attraction, it can be said to be in a state of equilibrium.

For example, an attractor may represent a social institution of some kind;

social institutions serve some function for individuals and society, they are
essentially patterns of behavior or belief that exist within a given society in
order to serve basic human functions. Institutions represent pre-existing
solutions to given social challenges both personal and social. As such, they
are the course of least resistance for individuals within that society. Working
for an existing company is typically easier than creating one's own.
Adopting the values of one's society is typically much easier than reading a
big pile of philosophy books to figure out one's own beliefs and values.
These attractors then keep social actors within a well-defined set of
behaviors and some equilibrium state.

Bifurcation

The word "bifurcation" means splitting or cutting in two. If a river divides

into two smaller streams, that's a bifurcation. If you split a company into two
divisions, that's a bifurcation too. Mathematicians have borrowed the term
bifurcation to describe how a system branches off into a new qualitatively
different long-term state of behavior. What we are interested in here is
really a bifurcation in these attractors, so instead of having just one
attractor in our state space, a bifurcation will now give us two attractors,
and that means two stable sets of states that the system may cycle
through.

To help us understand what this might mean, let's think about the French
Revolution as an example, in particular, what is called the tennis court oath
which was a pivotal event during the first days of the French Revolution.
When Third Estate, after being locked out from the government, made a
makeshift conference room inside a nearby tennis court, calling themselves
the National Assembly they, went on to form the new political republic of
France.

Prior to this event, we had a single attractor within the political state space
to the nation. It was an absolute monarchy. All political activity was beneath
and in relation to the monarch. This tennis court oath was then a bifurcation
in the topology as a new attractor formed.

Symmetry Breaking

Any agent within this state space after the bifurcation is going to have to
choose one of the attractors. Whereas previously before this bifurcation
everyone was under the same political regime of the monarch, that is to
say, everyone had a symmetric homogeneous state, but now that we have
two attractors people have to choose one state or another, and this is
called symmetry breaking.
Symmetry breaking is a phenomenon in which critical points decide a
system's fate by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken. Such
transitions usually bring the system from a symmetric but disorderly state
into one or more definite states. As such, symmetry breaking plays a major
role in pattern formation, as we are now getting differentiation and some
form of organization, that is to say, that there is now some relationship
between these different parts.

To continue with our previous example, this symmetry breaking would

correspond to you having to choose to side with the monarch or the new
parliament. Once you have made this choice, you are now within one of the
two basins of attraction. You have differentiated your state with respect to
others. And out of everyone going through this symmetry breaking, we will
start to get a new pattern of organization forming.

As another example, we might think about the massive cultural revolution

that took place within Western society as we moved into the modern era.
Prior to the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment, this society was
based on the homogeneous belief system of the Catholic church. With the
scientific, secular vision of the world, we had a bifurcation in this cultural
state space and, ever since, we have had many more bifurcations until
today. We now live in multicultural societies, with many different religions,
philosophies and belief systems. An individual growing up in this society is
no longer held within a single basin of attraction, they are free to choose
from a number of different attractors.

Onset of Chaos

This bifurcation and symmetry breaking process is pervasive across many

different types of systems. This process is most clearly expressed in what
is called the logistic map, which is an iterative function, meaning we take
the output at each iteration and feed it back into calculating the next value.
Such as with population growth, where we take the previous population and
feed it into the iterative function to calculate the current population, and
then that again will feed into the next iteration and so on.

We will not go into the details of this logistic map, but what it tells us is that
there is what is called a period doubling in the rate of bifurcation. After we
have this initial bifurcation, we then get more bifurcations happening faster,
doubling in rate each period and this is called the onset of chaos as we are
moving towards a state of more and more attractors, great and great
differentiation.

This is one way of understanding complex systems. On the left-hand side

of this graphic of the logistic map, we have systems with a single
equilibrium, which is characteristic of simple linear systems. We then have
a bifurcation as we get the emergence of two attractors. From here on, we
get the period doubling with more and more attractors emerging and this is
the chaotic regime of nonequilibrium complex systems that have multiple
basins of attraction and can flip between them. And this is one way of
understanding what is called chaos, where chaos means sensitivity to initial
conditions, two things that started out almost exactly the same, diverge and
ultimately end up in totally different basins of attraction. No matter how
close together two states were initially and no matter how long their
trajectories remain close together, at any time they can suddenly diverge
going in completely different directions.

Going back to our previous example about the development of Western

society, we might think about how, at the beginning of the modern era, we
were all relatively economically, socially and culturally similar. Economically,
almost all of us were manual laborers working the land, culturally we all
believed in the same belief system that guided and controlled all social
institutions.

Through the process of modernization, both our cultures, society, and

economies have become increasingly specialized and differentiated.
Culturally, we have developed a vastly more complex body of knowledge
for interpreting our world. Our social institutions have become decoupled
from the church to gain autonomy, and of course, economically we have
become highly specialized and differentiated within our skills and
occupations. This social system that started our relatively homogeneous
has gone through many bifurcations, and symmetry breaking to become a
heterogeneous complex system with many different attractors.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been talking about attractors and the fundamental
role they play within social dynamics, both with respect to self-organization
and chaos. We firstly gave an outline to the model of a state space, that
allows us to quickly identify recurring patterns within a system's long-term
behavior. We talked about how these dissipative systems typically only
occupy a small subset of the overall space as they cycle through some set
of states relating to an underlying process of energy consumption and
dissipation. And it is this subset of states that we called the attractor, that
may be interpreted as an agent's path of least resistance. We discussed
bifurcations as a topological transformation that results in the emergence of
two different attractors, requiring agents to adopt a specific state within
either attractor, resulting in the process of symmetry breaking. Lastly, we
saw how this process of continuous doubling in bifurcations is a universal
feature of systems as they move into a chaotic and complex regime
consisting of multiple attractors and multiple equilibria.

 Edge of Chaos

The idea of social order and chaos has fascinated people from many
different domains for millennia, but these very big ideas have remained
largely outside the scope of modern science. With our analytical and
reductionist methods, we never really had the conceptual means with which
to approach these very abstract concepts. As we have previously
discussed, we have some tools within mathematics and fundamental
physics (some of the ideas we have been discussing around symmetry and
symmetry breaking), but they never really generalized to outside of these
domains. With the rise of chaos theory and complexity, we have started to
get the very bare outlines of some form of a language for approaching
these very fundamental questions.

Chaos theory has given us a basic understanding of how systems turn

chaotic, and with the study of synchronization, we are getting a basic
language with which to approach this topic. We can now ask questions
about how things come into and go out of synchronization and, of course,
our growing understanding of self-organization is also central to this
enterprise. With the theory of self-organized criticality and catastrophe
theory (that we will be touching upon in a future chapter), we are again
starting to get real quantitative models as to how these macro-level
processes of change between order and chaos play out.

Edge of Chaos

The phrase edge-of-chaos was coined by mathematician Doyne Farmer to

describe the phenomenon discovered by computer scientists of a small
area conducive to producing cellular automaton capable of universal
computation. In the sciences in general, the phrase has come to refer to a
metaphor that some physical, biological, economic and social systems
operate in a region between order and either complete randomness or
chaos, where the complexity is maximal. And this is one way of interpreting
the idea of complexity. Complexity can not be understood in terms of
simple symmetries, but it is also not random, it is some combination of both
and this is why our traditional scientific methods have had such problems
dealing with it.
This generative complexity takes place in the boundary between rigidity
and randomness. Historically, science viewed “change” as moving from one
equilibrium state to another. Newtonian understandings could not cope with
the random, near-chaotic messiness of the actual transition itself.
Ecologists and economists similarly favored equilibrium conditions because
neither observation nor modeling techniques could handle transition states.
The relatively inexpensive computational power of modern computers has
changed all that. Non equilibrium and nonlinear simulations are now
possible. These developments, along with the study of complexity, have
enabled us to better understand the dynamics of this “messiness” on the
edge of chaos that is a lot more representative of what our world actually
looks like and what social systems look like.

Phase Transition Space

Too much order and change will not cross impermeable boundaries. Too
much chaos and the system loses its organization. It is thought then that
complex adaptive systems maintain themselves between this randomness
and order where they can somehow use both in order to configure and
reconfigure themselves, going through both integration and differentiation
in evolving to become more complex.

Mitchell Waldrop provides a description of the edge of chaos concept in his

book: "The balance point -- often called the edge of chaos -- is where the
components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite
dissolve into turbulence either... The edge of chaos is where life has
enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name
of life. The edge of chaos is where new idea and innovative genotypes are
forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the
most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of
chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of
Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment;
where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale
species transformation. The edge is the constantly shifting battle zone
between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system
can be spontaneous, adaptive and alive.”
Systems that evolve along the edge of chaos periodically re-integrate into
structures with temporary stability, which bear recognizable resemblance to
the string of predecessor structures. They are free enough to change, but
stable enough to stay recognizable. In describing the edge of chaos,
complexity scientists have documented and analyzed qualities that humans
have sought in our social systems for some time. A vibrant democracy is an
“edge of chaos” form of governance; a healthy market is an “edge of chaos”
form of economics; a flexible and adaptive organization is an “edge of
chaos” institution; and a mature, well-developed personality is an “edge of
chaos” psyche.

 Social Dynamics

The question of macro-scale social dynamics is of great interest to many.

Questions of why the Easter Islanders or Mayan civilization collapsed,
capture our imagination and challenge us to question whether there is
some fundamental dynamic built into social systems through which we can
interpret these events. We see clear recurring patterns of instability that
lead to financial crisis and the fall of brittle dictatorships, but we also see
social systems in places like Indonesia and Japan, that have managed to
develop over hundreds or even thousands of years in a stable fashion. And
of course this is not just an academic debate but of great relevance to our
world as the 21st-century context is challenging us to tackle this big idea of
how to develop sustainable economies and societies.

Social Dynamics

Complexity theory has a number of different models to help us in trying to

formalize the dynamics to social systems, and this area of research is
called social dynamics. Social dynamics uses various mathematical and
computational models, but probably the most important and the one we will
be focusing on here is that of system dynamics.

The system dynamics modeling paradigm is used for analyzing complex

systems in many different areas. It is part of systems theory, as such, it
takes a holistic perspective on a system's development over time trying to
capture the basic causal interactions that drive its long-term pattern of
development. System dynamics is another nonlinear modeling framework
as it is very much focused on these feedback loops that we have been
previously discussing. If we remember, there are just two types of feedback
loops: positive and negative. So we will talk about how each of these
affects social systems' development over time.

Linear

As we have previously touched upon, negative feedback involves some

balancing mechanism, meaning what happens now will get balanced out by
something that happens in the future. Thus, there is some counteracting
force that will hold the system within some limiting parameter values. For
example, if I take out a loan, I will now have lots of money, but this is being
counterbalanced by what I will have to pay back in the future. This counter
balancing creates a steady flow within the system. Whatever is being
gained is being lost again at some future stage. Thus, we do not get a build
up of large accumulations within the system. Negative feedback is an
inherent control mechanism, a system governed by this negative feedback
can be said to be under control.

Non-equilibrium

We get positive feedback when the system starts to move in one direction
without a counterbalancing force being exerted. Through this positive
feedback, we get nonlinear exponential change, and the system is now out
of control. Nonlinear change and non-equilibrium are a product of some
broken negative feedback. This means the system is not paying the full
price for its operation. There is some free source of energy being imported
to the system and/or entropy is being exported to the system's
environment. As an example, we might think about the huge change within
human society as we moved into the modern era. Human society,
demographics and economic output remained relatively stable for
thousands of years due to the fact that it was fueled by manual labor that
represents a negative feedback loop. In order to produce physical
resources you had to do physical work, thus you are taking from your own
stock of resources. In order to get more, you had to give more, thus
balancing each other and maintaining some equilibrium. With the rise of
modern technologies and the use of petroleum, we have broken this
negative feedback loop. We now no longer have to do all of this manual
labor, and this has lead, among other factors, to exponential growth driven
by this positive feedback loop. But of course, as we know, these fossil
fuels and modern systems of technology are creating negative externalities.

Negative externalities

This positive feedback happens because of some externality. The cost is

being borne by someone or something else, meaning that the
counterbalancing force is being in some way externalized from the system.
We could take the recent financial crisis due to subprime mortgages as an
example. Within any financial security, there is both a risk and a return,
which creates the negative feedback loop. The more return you want, the
more risk you are going to have to take and this is a balancing mechanism.
But with these toxic assets, the risk was being externalized, those who
were making a return by supplying the assets were not bearing the actual
risk. The risk was being externalized to some third party. They were paying
the cost of running the system by bearing that risk. This externality created
a strong incentive for those supplying the assets to overproduce, and this is
the foundations of where we get the rapid growth from.

As another example, we could cite the Matthew effect that we previously

discussed, where the rich get richer. There is clearly a positive feedback
loop here. The more you have, the more you will get - the more popular a
book, video or piece of music is, the more people will want it and
experiments have shown that this is simply due to its popularity, not
because of any inherent quality to that item. There is, of course, a negative
externality here. This excess attention that is given to these items is being
taken from others. New books, videos or music will find it more difficult to
gain traction and thus the overall level of meritocracy in the system will be
reduced as well as the overall quality.

Another example of this would be the phenomenon of groupthink. The

more people that believe in an idea or opinion, the more of an attraction
this places on others to also believe in it. Out of this, we can then get the
emperor's new clothes phenomena, where people are simply believing in
something because everyone else is also. Again, this is a form of negative
externality. Because no one is questioning the actual value of that thing,
this can distort any form of value system that correlates with the underlying
context that is supporting it. And of course the classical example of this
being bubbles. within financial markets, where people start to believe
something has value just because it has value within the financial system
irrespective of its value within the real economy. And of course, this is
distorting the real economy which the whole system is ultimately dependent
upon.

This positive feedback and negative externality mechanism is a pervasive

phenomenon within sociocultural systems. As an example, within
psychology, we might think about the phenomenon of confirmation bias,
which is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information
in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses, while giving
disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities. There is a
positive feedback loop as these hypotheses are self-fulfilling and there is a
negative externality in that they are excluding other alternatives.
 Path Dependency

In all of these examples, this positive feedback dynamic, coupled with

negative externalities, ultimately works to disintegrate the environment or
context within which the system operates. Thus reducing its sustainability.
These positive feedback loops combined with negative externalities are a
key source of path dependency, as positive feedback creates a strong
attractor towards a certain behavior, while negative externalities work to
degrade other possibilities and options, creating a lock-in effect, making it
more and more difficult to choose some other path.

Positive feedback makes it easier to do more of the same, while negative

externalities reduce the development of other options. What this means is
inertia, which is the resistance to change. That we stay doing the same
thing and become more incapable of doing other things. Think about
learning a new language. It is not so difficult for a child to learn a second
language as they are growing up, but the further you go down the path of
speaking just one language the better you get at it, and the more difficult it
becomes to learn another - this is path dependency. As the system
develops, it gets more efficient at exploiting or processing a particular
resource, but also more dependent upon this single resource, creating a
lock-in effect.

So called carbon lock-in is an example of this. Carbon lock-In refers to the

self-perpetuating inertia created by large fossil fuel-based energy systems
that inhibit public and private efforts to introduce alternative energy
technologies. The source of carbon lock-in inertia arises from the co-
evolution of large interdependent technological networks and the social
institutions and cultural practices that support and benefit from the system's
development. The growth of the system is fostered by increasing returns to
scale, which is a positive feedback. But this example will help to illustrate
an important part of this dynamic surrounding complexity. As the system
stays developing down a particular trajectory, this development means
increased complexity, more subsystems with greater interconnectivity and
interdependency between them. This complexity has to be maintained and
it costs something to do that.
 Cost of Complexity

The American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter has studied

many forms of social collapse, and he talks about this phenomenon of
increased complexity as such: "When I looked at what happened to ancient
societies over long periods of time I realized the challenge they faced was
the cost of their societies becoming more and more complex. As these
societies faced problems, whether it was problems of external enemies or
managing their own environment, they would tend to develop more
complex institutions. Very often, this meant a larger military, a larger
government or more control over their people. Thus, these societies tended
to tax their citizens more heavily to pay for their complex problem solving.
The difficulty with complexity is that it always costs. In ancient societies that
I have studied, for example the Roman Empire, a great problem that they
faced was when they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain
the status quo. Invest very high amounts that don’t yield a net positive
return but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they had already
got."

Percolation

In all of these previous examples, the positive feedback loop is insulating

and protecting the system from disturbances from its environment.
Groupthink reduces the social system's exposure to external ideas that
might disturb the consensus. Confirmation bias reduces the exposure of
our hypothesis to disconfirmation. Our store of petroleum enables us to
create artificial environments independent from the natural environment.
When we reduce the disturbance during the system's development, we
increase the tightening of the coupling within the system, connections
become stronger and as it develops they become denser. A system that is
moving towards a critical point, has a high degree of connectivity and
interdependence between its subunits. This is called high percolation,
where we can think of percolation as simply the density of the connections
within the system.

A good example of this is research done on forest fires in California, which

has shown that, if the forest receives fewer disturbances - if we reduce the
number of small frequent fires - then the density of trees within the
ecosystem builds up. It becomes more tightly coupled, as the percolation
increases. This creates more pathways for the fire to spread from tree to
tree. As this percolation becomes denser, the system reaches a point from
where any small fire can now spread through the whole forest, creating a
large systemic effect and this is what we call criticality, the system has
reached a critical point.

Criticality

When we have all these factors: positive feedback driving the system down
a particular trajectory; negative externalities degrading alternative options;
the growing cost of maintaining the system's complexity; tight coupling,
interdependencies, and high percolation. Then the system is moving into a
critical regime. The term critical in mathematics and physics relates to or
denotes a point of transition from one state to another, these critical points
before a transition are studied within the domain of nonlinear dynamics
called catastrophe theory. Catastrophe theory studies dramatic changes
within the system's topology, the most famous of which being what is called
the cusp curve where the topology dramatically folds back on itself,
creating a cliff like structure.

A system is then said to be critical if its state changes dramatically given

some small change in an input value to a control parameter. Once the
system reaches its critical point, even the smallest perturbation can have
major consequences. And this is uncontrollable. As the system becomes
more critical, its eventual collapse becomes greater and its eventual
transformation becomes more inevitable, but less predictable. We know it is
going to happen because any small event can trigger it at this stage, but
because it is in this critical state and so many small events can trigger this
transformation, we don't know which one will or when they will.

Beyond the critical point, we get some runaway effect, a tipping point has
been passed and the system moves into a phase transition as it is now
irreversibly moving into a new state. At this stage, the system becomes
extremely nonlinear, cause and effect break down almost completely.
Massive direct interventions within the system can have very negligible
effect. You as a government can put billions into the market buying up toxic
assets and only have a negligible effect on the price. Because the failure is
distributed, out any small event can trigger a large systemic effect. In this
situation, there is no real possibility for control. Previously unknown
interconnections and interdependencies become revealed and random
events can determine significant outcomes. This is what is called societal
collapse. The system is moving to a lower state of functionality as the
social structure breaks down.

This process of non-equilibrium social dynamics is equally applicable to

micro and macro social systems. From a financial trader going boom and
bust through the positive feedback loop of irrational exuberance to small
extremist groups formed out of the positive feedback and negative
externalities of some ideology built on out-group derogation. And of course,
it is applicable to whole societies as described by conflict theory where the
positive feedback of the rich getting rich effect leads to increased inequality,
which, if left without a counterbalance, will move the social system towards
extreme polarization. At some point, the oppressed simply can't bear the
oppression anymore and we get ensuing riots and revolution. And of
course, we also see this pattern of societal collapse on the macro level of
whole civilizations such as with the Roman Empire.

Self-Organizing Criticality

This whole social dynamic of positive feedback driving exponential growth

and decay is a form of what is called self-organized criticality, which is a
property of nonlinear dynamical systems that have a critical point as an
attractor. Another good example of this would be the tragedy of the
commons, where each individual is driven through a positive feedback loop
to overuse the commons with the negative externalities from this destroying
the whole resource and leading to the collapse. This is self-organizing
criticality because it is the way the dynamic is set up that attracts the
agents towards pursuing agendas that lead to a macro level critical
outcome.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been looking at social systems dynamics. We

talked about how positive and negative feedback can give us one model for
interpreting these dynamics. We briefly discussed how negative feedback
can give us a relatively stable process of development involving
counterbalancing forces that maintain the system within some equilibrium.
We then went on to talk about a non-equilibrium process of change where
this negative feedback loop gets broken and positive feedback, coupled
with negative externalities, leads to rapid unsustainable development.
Within this dynamic, path dependence, lock-in and heightened percolation
all lead to eventual criticality and a phase transition.

We have been using these very simple tools of feedback loops to describe
what are in reality very complex processes of change. Feedback loops do
offer us some deep insight into this dynamic, but if we wanted to get a more
sophisticated and complete representation, we would need to add a few
more tools to our toolbox. That includes the ideas of adaptation, diversity
and the process of evolution - all of which would help us to understand
better how social systems manage to develop more sustainably. We will be
covering evolution and adaptation in the last part of the book so we will
move on for the moment.

 Self Organized Criticality

In the previous chapter, we briefly introduce the idea of self-organized

criticality, and here we will dig a bit deeper into this topic. Self-organized
criticality (SOC) is a property of nonlinear dynamical systems that have a
critical point as an attractor. As mentioned, the tragedy of the commons is a
form of self-organized criticality. Out of local events, that is to say by
everyone acting in their own rational self-interest, using the commons as
much as possible, this will drive the whole system to a critical state where
we get the overuse of the commons and global collapse. The point being
that this collapse was the attractor to that system. Thus we can say that it is
the way that the local rules are setup that creates the destructive global
outcome.

This phenomenon of self-organized criticality has been identified in many

different systems from earthquakes to fluctuations within financial markets,
to ecological evolution to outbreaks of epidemics and the occurrence of
solar flares. Self-organized criticality is typically illustrated with reference to
what is called the sandpile model, developed by researcher Pear Bac. The
sandpile model was the first model to exhibit self-organized critical
behavior, where the system endogenously moves towards its critical (phase
transition) point.

The model is taken from the empirical observation that when we drop small
grains (of something like sand) on top of each other, they will build up into a
pile with occasional grains running off - one or two at a time, in proportion
to the rate at which we are dropping them. This is the linear equilibrium
state to the system's development. Grains of sand are held on the pile by
its low incline and the friction from other grains that have already built up
(this is the attractor).

But at some critical point, the pile of sand has built up to such an extent
that the incline on the side has reached a critical level. By dropping just one
additional grain of sand we can cause a cascading avalanche, a positive
feedback as each new grain of sand that cascades down destabilizes the
system more which will feedback to effect more grains to slide off.
The sandpile phenomena is a classical example of nonlinear change. Here
again, we can note the prolonged period for which the system was held
within a stable equilibrium and the very short period of rapid nonlinear
change. This is an illustration of punctuated equilibrium, prolonged periods
of stability and then rapid phase transitions characteristic of nonlinear
change and as we previously noted we cannot predict when these
nonlinear change events will happen.

 Social Network Science

Social network analysis is now one of the major paradigms in contemporary

sociology and is also employed in many other social sciences. It offers us a
powerful formal language with which to model and analyze the structure of
social relations and how this structure defines the overall social system.
The big idea here is that of connectivity. A central axiom of the social
network approach to understanding social interaction is that social
phenomena should be primarily investigated through the properties of
relations between and within units, instead of the properties of these units
themselves.

As such, social network analysis is an alternative way of investigating

complex social systems, one that is not focused on the actors and their
properties but instead on how they are interconnected. And this is a
paradigm shift, a very different way of seeing the world. In our traditional
paradigm, we see things, we don't really see the connections because
connections are much more abstract - we can typically touch and hold
things but not connections. Connections are also typically much more
complex. For every one thing, we can have possibly an infinite amount of
connections. Networks very quickly take us into the world of complexity.

In order to understand this way of seeing the world, we need to firstly

appreciate that connectivity creates a new kind of space. We are used to a
linear conception of space, what is called a Euclidean space. It is the world
we walk around in every day and see all these people and things that have
certain properties to them. But now imagine you pull out your mobile
phone, and it is almost as easy to call a person just next door as it is to call
someone on the other side of the planet. This is a new kind of space,
where our traditional linear conception of space is being stretched and
distorted by this connectivity.

Connectivity creates a nonlinear type of space, and that space is better

called a topology. Topology is a branch of mathematics that can be used to
abstract the inherent connectivity of objects while ignoring their detailed
form. In its most general definition, topology means the way in which
constituent parts are interrelated or arranged. Thus for any set of things or
people, we can have a different set of global rules for how they are
interrelated.

Flow

So why should we care about any of this? Because as we noted networks

are all about connectivity and connectivity is an exchange along which
something will flow. Along with every connection, there is a flow of
something. In a communications networks, information flows. In a financial
network, assets flow. In a political network, power flows. If there is no flow,
there is no network. So now we have these two abstract concepts: we have
a space, called our topology and we have connectivity which is something
flowing through that topology. So to understand any given network we are
going to have to understand how something flows through that particular
topology.

Social Actors

The topology is the environment and the flow is the connections within that
environment. As we are analyzing social systems here, this environment
may be a physical one
where we are talking about basic demographics, the movement of people,
migration, the spreading of viruses, urban transportation etc. All of these
are social connections that take place within a physical environment. But
also we can have an economic environment, giving us networks of financial
and economic connections. We can have a political environment through
which power flows, a cultural environment through which beliefs, values,
and ideologies flow. All of these are very different topologies, with different
forces acting on them. In order to understand these networks we need to
understand these forces that are acting within that environment.

Micro Macro

There are really two different ways to start analyzing a network. By either
taking a micro level bottom up perspective, where we are talking about the
agents, why and how they make connections or a more global perspective,
where we are looking at the overall network and the environmental context
to see how this shapes the system of connections. Within any social
network, we have some agent that is choosing to make that connection.
Agents typically make connections based upon some return on their
investment of time energy, interest, social capital or some other resource
that they value. We make friends with people whose company we like, we
believe in ideologies that we value, we watch television channels that we
find interesting. These are all connections that we make because we value
what we get more than what we have to give in making the connection.

Environment

But there is also the context or environment within which an agent is acting.
That environment is exerting some force resisting or enabling them to make
that connection.
As an example we might think about an oppressive political regime that
uses intimidation, coercion, and propaganda to prevent people from
forming counter political movements. This is a form of resistance - the
agents have to overcome their fear in order to make political connections
within this environment.
So we can understand this environmental context as a form of transaction
cost, a cost that is being placed on an agent for them to make a
connection. Inversely, it might be a payment where the environment is
conducive to them making that connection. We might think about an
ecosystem as an analogy, where when we turn down the temperature all
the creatures hibernate and when we turn it up they come out and interact.
But the cost of making a connection is not evenly distributed out. Some
options will be easier, some more difficult. It is like water running through
some rocks where it finds the course of least resistance.

So these are very general considerations, but they will help us in

contextualizing and understanding the nature of the whole network and the
kind of forces that it is under. Social network science is quite an analytical
approach and networks are quite abstract representations. This makes
them powerful tools, but it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that
these networks exist within some context and to understand the general
nature of that context. Or else we can get blinded by our tools.

Integration

Because networks are all about connectivity and processes taking place
through those connections, a central and overarching question will be that
of network integration.
One of the most important factors with respect to the nature of any society
is the question of social cohesion or structural cohesion, where we are
asking about the degree of integration to the overall system, as this
correlates to such things as social solidarity, shared norms, identity,
collective behavior, etc. The idea of social capital is often used as a metric
to a society's degree of cohesion. Social capital may be defined as the
network of relationships among people who live and work in a particular
society, enabling that society to function effectively.

So from this perspective, when we ask what is the difference between a

socially functional urban community and a socially dysfunctional ghetto, we
would say that there is some integration within the first that enables the
flow of economic resources and social capital, while we could say the
second represents a disintegrated network that inhibits the flow of these
resources, disconnecting it from the broader social system and rendering it
dysfunctional. Put very simply, a central interest here in how something
flows through the whole social network as it is this flow that gives it
cohesion. This is obviously a very big and fundamental question when
analyzing any social system. How integrated the whole system is, will be
determined by many different factors.

Density

A primary consideration is the density of connections within the whole

system. Clearly, the more connections, the more integrated it will be, and
going from a system with a low level of connectivity to one with a high level
represents a very different overall dynamic. At a low level of overall
connectivity, we are just dealing with a group of people. At a high level, we
actually have a networked system. This fundamentally changes the
dynamic and we will be discussing it in a future chapter.

Clustering

A second key consideration affecting the overall integration to a social

network is the degree of clustering. Clustering is one of the few universal
features found in almost all social networks, from the social networks of
ancient hunter-gather tribes of Africa to today's global networks. Clustering
is derived from the fact that people form connections to people with similar
attributes to themselves, what is called homophily. Out of this, we get
global patterns consisting of local communities that have their own distinct
structure. These clusters give social networks a distinct heterogeneity to
their topology that makes them resistant to the uniform spreading of some
phenomena.

Path Length

Another widely encountered phenomena within social networks is that of

short average path length, meaning that although a social network may be
quite large in terms of its number of members, and despite the fact that
they may contain significant clustering, we often find that any member is
connected to any other by just a few links. This is where we get the famous
six degrees of separation hypothesis from. This average path length is
again a key metric with respect to the overall integration of the social
network. We are all aware of how social solidarity can break down as we
scale the community up. The traditional mechanisms for social solidarity
that worked for thousands of years as we lived in small rural communities
break down in large urban centers, and this is still one of the great
challenges that the modern era has presented. This metric of average path
length is very important to social cohesion, as it is a primary factor in
determining how close everyone will think they are to each other and the
degree of interdependence and cohesion.

Degree distribution

Finally, the last almost universal feature of social networks is a very high
degree of inequality between how connected people are within the network.
Here, we are talking about degree distribution. A high degree distribution
means some people have lots of links while others very few. And we often
see that this inequality is quite extreme. In fact, it follows a power law,
meaning that there will be some who have a very high level of connections,
such as a celebrity. Again, there is a positive feedback loop driving.

But this degree distribution is another important determinant of the level of

social integration. A low degree distribution gives us a somewhat egalitarian
society, with the topology having a certain evenness to it through which the
same phenomena can flow to all. This is in contrast to the many socio-
cultural systems we see that are in fact highly centralized with significant
degrees of inequality in connectivity, that creates some resistance to a
uniform spreading.
 Summary

In this chapter, we have been taking a very high-level view to social

network analysis. We have talked about how connectivity creates a certain
type of space, or what we called a topology that stretches and distorts our
traditional conception of linear space. We discussed how reasoning about
the general forces that are acting on the network can help us in providing
some overall context to our analysis, where we need to consider both the
rules under which the agents are making connections and the
environmental constraints that affect those choices, either enabling or
constraining them. We then went on to talk about some of the primary
considerations to a social network's overall makeup and social cohesion,
touching upon the topics of network density as the primary factor; clustering
that creates local communities with a heterogeneous topology; we cited
average path length as another key factor to the network's overall
cohesion; and lastly mentioned degree distribution as a metric for the
degree of equality within the system.

 Network Communities

In this chapter, we will be talking about social networks on the micro level,
looking at agents and their local communities. We will quickly talk about the
basics of social graphs, before going on to discuss a number of different
metrics for trying to understand how significant an agent is within a
network. Finally, we will discuss interpersonal ties as we talk about strong
and weak connections.

Nodes & Edges

The basic constituents of a social graph are nodes and edges, nodes are
people or groups of people. Edges also called ties, represent the
relationships between these social actors, which can come in many
different kinds, such as friendship, kinship, colleague etc. These edges may
be weighted meaning that we can ascribe some quantitative value to them,
such as the amount of time one person spends talking to another. We can
also ascribe positive and negative values to this weight. To depict positive
and negative relations, such as trust or lack of trust, loans, and debts, etc.
These edges can also be directed, giving us an idea to which direction the
resource being exchanged is flowing, with this net flow being depicted by
an arrow. Here, we can have undirected relations that go only in one
direction, such as the influence that a celebrity might have over others
without this influence being reciprocated. Or it may be a bidirectional
relation like a typical friendship with each influencing each other.

Centrality & Influence

A primary question we are often interested in when looking at the individual

agents within a network is not to do with their properties in isolation, but
instead asking how influential are they within that network based upon their
connections. This measurement of how influential or powerful an agent is
within a given network is called centrality. Almost all sociologists would
agree that power and influence are fundamental properties of social
structures. Network thinking has contributed a number of important insights
about social power and influence. Perhaps most importantly, the network
approach emphasizes that power is inherently relational. An individual does
not have power in the abstract. They have power because they can
dominate others -- an ego's power is an alter's dependence and this metric
of centrality is a primary tool for helping us in modeling how the social
structure of relations give agents influence and power. Social network
analysis has made important contributions in providing precise definitions
and concrete measures to this idea of power and influence based upon an
agent's position within a social structure of relations.

Because a network can be considered a description of the paths along

which something flows, the significance of any agent to that network can be
understood in terms of how much of the network's resources flow through
that node, and how critical is it to that flow. Both of these factors will give
them the capacity to influence whatever resource is flowing and it is from
this that they get their influence within the network. Whereas influence and
power are well defined within a hierarchical social structure, networks are
not so orderly. Influence is often context dependent, and of course, we
should remember that being central within a network is not always a good
thing. It works both ways. Centrality measures are really just telling us how
embedded an agent is within that social network.

Network analysis often describes the way that an actor is embedded in a

relational network as both imposing constraints on the actor, and offering
the actor opportunities. Actors that face fewer constraints, and have more
opportunities than others are said to be in more favorable structural
position. Having a favored position means that an actor may extract better
bargains in exchanges, have greater influence and that the actor will be a
focus for deference and attention from those in less favored positions. But,
what do we mean by "having a favored position" and having "more
opportunities" or "fewer constraints?" There are no single correct and final
answers to these difficult questions. Trying to capture how influential an
agent is within a network is not trivial, it is quite complex in reality. Thus,
researchers use a number of different metrics, including, degree centrality,
closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, and prestige centrality.

Degree Centrality

Actors who have more ties to other actors may be in an advantaged

position. Because they have many ties, they may have alternative ways to
satisfy needs, and hence are less dependent on other individuals. Because
they have many ties, they may have access to, and be able to call on more
of the resources of the network as a whole. Because they have many ties,
they are often third-parties and deal makers in exchanges among others,
and are able to benefit from this brokerage.

And thus the primary measure to the significance of any social actor within
a network is his or her degree of connectivity, which is simply how many
connections they have and the weight of those connections if relevant. This
tells us the likelihood of a node contacting or being able to effect in some
way whatever is being exchanged within their immediate network. It tells us
something about their embeddedness within that network. Thus, a higher
degree of connectivity may be a positive or negative thing depending on
what is spreading within the network. A node with a high degree of
connectivity is termed a hub. But this simple degree of connectivity
measurement is a very blunt way of interpreting a node's significance that
can often be misleading. We will need a number of other metrics to support
it.

Closeness Centrality

Closeness centrality is another metric for interpreting a node's significance,

one that looks at how far it is to any other node in the network. As distance
is assumed to be a restriction on transmission, whichever agent is closest
to all others can have the greatest capacity to affect them.

Betweenness centrality

Betweenness centrality is a third metric quantifying how often a node acts

as a bridge along the shortest path between any other nodes in the
network. This gives the agent influence in that it is playing a role to reduce
the distance between any two nodes, thus significantly helping to hold the
network together by reducing transaction costs. Institutions that work as
market makers within the financial system are a good example of this. They
are working as critical bridges between agents and organizations, holding
the network together and thus they can demand significant transaction
fees.

This is also called occupying a structural whole, meaning that the agent
who is working as a link between two clusters is filling some gap within the
network that is critical in maintaining its overall integration. This actor is
bridging two communities and may play a critical role in transferring
information or some other valued resource. For example, they may be
transferring information between two scientific domains or playing a critical
role as mediator during periods of conflict between two clustered
communities.

Prestige Centrality

Lastly, prestige centrality, which is really looking at how connected the

nodes that you are connected to are. These prestige metrics such as
eigenvector centrality, assign relative scores to all nodes in the network
based on the concept that connections to high-scoring nodes contribute
more to the score of the node in question than equal connections to low-
scoring nodes. So your centrality and influence is greater if the people you
are connected to are well connected. The assumption is that each node's
centrality is the sum of the centrality values of the nodes that it is
connected to.

Interpersonal Ties

Next, we will talk about the local connections that agents make, what are
called interpersonal ties. As we previously discussed, making connections
typically costs something in terms of resources. Laying cables to transport
information costs money, making new friends or developing a diplomatic
relation with another country takes time and some effort. Added to this, we
can recognize that making connections between different components
typically requires more resources than making those same connections
between similar component, whether we are talking about connections
between computers with different operating systems, trade between
countries with different import procedures or communications between
different cultures. The fact that it requires less resource to make
connections between components with similar attributes is a key factor in
the make-up of many networks and particularly so with social networks.

It in many ways defines the difference between strong and weak ties that
describe the intensity of interpersonal ties between actors. A strong tie is
between two agents that interact frequently and typically share similar
attributes. Thus, they are connections that are typically easier for us to
enact. Inversely, a weak tie connects people to different social circles, they
can be more challenging in that they require the agent to overcome some
difference between groups, but they also expose the person to novel
phenomena and information. The "strength" of an interpersonal tie is a
product of many different factors. It may be a combination of the amount of
time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy, or some other reciprocal service
that, in that relation, the greater the exchange, the stronger the tie.

Clustering

Most of the time, most people interact through strong ties with a fairly small
subset of others, many of whom know one another and this creates a
distinct substructure within the network, what we call a cluster. This
clustering pattern is an almost universal feature of social networks. Social
clustering can be understood by simply asking how many of the people that
someone is connected to are also connected to each other. Evidence
suggests that in most real-world networks, and in particular social
networks, nodes tend to create tightly knit groups characterized by a
relatively high density of ties and clustering. These closely knit clustered
communities can maintain their diversity in the face of homogeneity within
the larger network.

The extent to which these subpopulations are open or closed may be a

telling dimension of social structure. With too many strong ties, we can get
strong clustering and a network that tends to be fragmented into local
communities. These clumpy networks will have longer distances relative to
other networks with the same density and these clusters slow the even flow
across the network.

Weak Ties

Weak ties, in contrast to strong ties, connect people to different social

circles. As such, they are bridging ties that expose people to new
information and novel phenomena. Specifically, more novel information
flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close
friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they
receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances,
by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel
information.

Small World

When we combine both strong links within clusters and these weak
bridging links we get an effective network for spreading information even
though it may have high clustering. This type of social graph that has both
high clustering and some random bridging links, giving it a low average
path length is called a small world network. These characteristics result in
networks with the unique property of regional specialization and efficient
long range information transfer. Social networks are intuitive examples of
this small world phenomenon, in which cliques or clusters of friends are
strongly interconnected, but also people often have some random
acquaintances within other far of groups. By using these weak ties, we find
that even within very large social networks consisting of many millions or
even billions of people, any person may be only five or six links away from
anyone else within the system, giving us the famous six degrees of
separation theory.

The "small world" phenomenon seems to have evolved independently in

many large networks. Thus, we can see how these micro-level interactions
of agents choosing to make strong or weak ties can give rise to overall
macro-level properties to the network such as its average path length which
we can see is important to its overall cohesion.

Multiplex Graph

Simple graphs allow for just one type of connection between nodes, but we
can also have multiplex graphs that allow us to model a number of different
relations between nodes. So, in a multiplex graph, we would draw two
different edges between people to describe how they are, say, work
colleagues as well as friends. Of course, this adds a significant amount of
complexity to our model, but it gives us a much more realistic
representation as social actors are often embedded within a multiplicity of
different networks. Social, political, cultural, economic and so on. With a
multiplex network, we can try and capture how these different connections
interact and affect each other. This is a much more realistic picture that lies
behind many social phenomena and a lot more faithful to one of the basic
premise of complexity theory. That is that many phenomena are in fact the
product of a multiplicity of nonlinear interacting forces. As a quick example,
we might think about the recent uprisings in Egypt. When we first look at
this phenomenon, we would consider it political in nature and start
analyzing the political network. But research has shown a robust correlation
between spikes in the price of basic foods and the occurrence of these
riots. Thus, these events are an emergent phenomenon of different
interacting networks. Social, political and economic all putting stress on the
social system. In this situation, it would be of use to use a multiplex network
to try and model the overall dynamic. Phenomena like this are very
complex, they are embedded within many different overlapping networks.
Simply modeling one of these networks can only ever give us a partial
insight. This is the nature of complex systems of all kind, they are multi-
dimensional.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been looking at social networks on the micro level,
talking about local communities. We started off by laying down the basics of
graph theory and talking about centrality measures that can help us in
modeling how influential or powerful an agent is within a network. Based
upon their connections, we talked about four different metrics, citing degree
of connectivity as a primary consideration, but also closeness centrality and
betweenness centrality.

We then went on to talk about interpersonal ties that are divided into strong
and weak. Strong ties being typically between people with similar attributes
that interact more frequently and intensely. While weak ties are random in
nature working to bridge between communities playing an important role in
transferring information. We talked about clustering and how a combination
of both strong clustering and some random weak ties can give us the small
world phenomena with a surprisingly low average path length - even within
very large networks. Finally, we touched upon the topic of multiplex
networks in order to get a more complete representation of complex social
systems as the interaction of a number of different relational types.

 Network Structure

In the previous chapter, we looked at social networks on the micro level,

talking about individuals and local clusters. In this chapter, we will be
adopting a more "macro" perspective that focuses on the overall network
structure within which individual actors are embedded. The "top down"
perspective we'll follow here seeks to understand and describe whole
populations by the makeup of the overall network. Primary among our
considerations here will be the network's overall density of connections, its
average path length, and degree distribution.

Network Density

Overall network density is a primary determinant in the make-up of any

network, with density we are simply asking how many connections are
there relative to the maximum possible number of connections. Network
density can be understood in terms of interaction cost. The easier it is for
agents to make connections, the more connections we are likely to have.
Network density is a very fundamental parameter in that it defines the
difference between a social system that is a network as opposed to being
simply a group of people. At a low level of connectivity, we are dealing
mainly with individuals in isolation, here it is the attributes and properties of
those individuals in isolation that matters.

When we turn up the connectivity, this is no longer so much the case. It is

now the nature of the network that you are a part of that matters. This is
captured in the famous saying "it is not what you know but who you know".

If we are dealing with a social system with a low level of overall

connectivity, then it does matter what you as an individual know. But at a
higher density of connections, it is more what your network knows that
matters. We see this with the internet. We ourselves used to have most of
the information and knowledge that we would use on a daily basis but now
much more of the information we use, we do not have ourselves but is
instead in the network.

Thus, as we turn up the degree of connectivity within the social system, it is

no longer the attributes of the agents in isolation that is so important. But
instead, their capacity to interoperate, provide something of value to the
network and ensure their connectivity to that network.

As another example, we might think about the difference between so-called

introverted and extroverted people. Introverted people with a low level of
social connectivity have to rely heavily on their own capabilities and they
are often more self-resourceful, whereas extroverts who can rely heavily on
their network may not have such personal capabilities but are instead
particularly good at accessing the skills and resources they lack through
their social network.

Thus, the overall connectivity is a primary determinant within any social

system and also one of the determinants to the nature of power within the
organization, as within a social system that has a very low density and
loose coupling, not much power can be exerted. In high-density social
systems, there are more and stronger channels through which power can
be exerted.

Path Length

Network density is also a key determinant to average path length. Here we

are talking about how close any two agents within the network are to each
other on average. This closeness is obviously a very important factor in
terms of cohesion and interdependence. As we scale up the number of
components to the social system, this creates longer path lengths between
members. This can stretch and break traditional forms of social cohesion. A
longer average path length is like an outward force disintegrating the social
system as it puts people at a longer distance from each other with a lower
sense of interdependency.

We can also note that the longer the path length the easier it is for sub
groups to form and disintegrate the overall social network. Agents act and
adapt to their local environment. If we turn up the average path length
between agents or groups, they will not identify with, or adapt to those
other members, and we may get the formation of incompatible local
clusters. In trying to achieve global coordination within such a system, we
would likely mean having to impose it in some top-down fashion.
But now, if we turn down the average path length, which could happen
through better transportation or communications technology, people now
interact more often making it easier for them to synchronize their states and
easier for them to recognize their interdependence and common identity.

Degree Distribution

Probably the second most important question we can ask about the overal
structure to a social network relates to its degree distribution. Degree
distribution is a measurement of how evenly or unevenly the degree of
connectivity is distributed out among the agents. Degree distribution is
important because it is really telling us how equal or unequal resources are
distributed out in the system. It is asking the question do some people have
a lot of connections and others have very few? Or does everyone have
roughly the same degree? This is clearly going to tell us a lot about the
nature of power within that system. High degree distribution will mean
inequality of some kind that will be detrimental to social integration, and it is
in many ways this inequality in connectivity that is the means through which
power can be exerted.

This degree distribution tells us a lot about how centralized or distributed

the network structure is. At a low degree distribution, all actors have
relatively the same amount of connections. Thus, they would be what we
consider peers and we would get many peer-to-peer interactions giving us
a distributed network. As an example of a distributed social system, we
might think of the Israeli Kibbutzim,
which are collective communities in Israel that were traditionally based on
agriculture.

Within the Kibbutzim, the principle of equality was taken very seriously up
until recently. Members did not individually own tools or even clothing. They
ate meals together in the communal dining hall, and major decisions about
the future of the community were made by consensus or by vote amongst
all. Distributed social systems like this have limited centralized institutions.
Everyone is responsible for maintaining the system and power is thus
distributed out. Although distributed social networks may exist, they are
often the product of some random process, or a small informal network, or
a network in its early formation where it has not developed any overall
formal organization. Or, as in this example, of the Kibbutz the social
network has been specifically designed to be egalitarian in nature.
 Scale-Free Networks

But more often, what we see is that, as a social network develops and
particularly when it becomes more formal, we get greater differentiation
between degrees of connectivity. Many real world social networks show a
skewed node-degree distribution in which most nodes have only few links
but, by contrast, there exist some nodes which are extremely well
connected. This heavy-tailed distribution is known as a power-law or scale-
free network. Here we are getting the emergence of major hubs and high
degrees of social inequality.

There may be two different reasons for this inequality. Firstly, some people
are simply better at doing certain things than others. We all watch certain
people play football, sing or act simply because they are better at it than
others. And what we mean by that is that they provide us with a better
return on our investment of time, energy or money and thus many of us
choose to make connections to that particular node, while others do not
receive our attention. Thus, giving us this unequal, centralized model and
this process is meritocratic in nature. This explanation is largely intuitive to
us, but it might not be sufficed to explain how we can get such extreme
differences in connectivity within these scale free social networks.
Researchers have then also come up with another explanation behind the
formation of these scale free networks, that of preferential attachment.

Preferential Attachment

As we have previously discussed, a preferential attachment process is any

of a class of processes in which some quantity, typically some form of
wealth or attention, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects
according to how much they already have, so that those who already have
lots receive more and those who already have little receive less.

The best example of how preferential attachment works is seen in recent

research done by Duncan Watts and team, where they created two
websites selling music tracks. One where people could rate the songs they
downloaded and one where they could not. Over 14,000 participants then
downloaded previously unknown songs on both sides. On the site where
users could leave feedback for each track and others could see that
feedback, it was found that there was a much greater disparity between the
most and least downloaded songs compared to the other site where there
was no feedback available. Thus, increasing the strength of social influence
increased the inequality in degree distribution. This power law distribution
also applies to cities. The distribution of wealth and income and many other
phenomena where we have social interaction creating feedback loops that
amplify the disparity to give us a much greater degree distribution than
would occur if simply generated by merit. And this creates major centralized
hubs within the network, weather we are talking about an urban network,
financial network or some other social network.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been talking about three of the major factors
shaping the overall make-up to a social network. We started by talking
about the density of connections as a primary factor, as it defines whether
we are actually dealing with a network or just a group of independent
people. This level of overall connectivity will fundamentally change the
whole system as, when we turn it up, our focus has to shift from the
properties of the parts to the flow of resources within the network. We then
talked about average path length as a second key overall metric one that
will tell us a lot about the network's overall cohesion. Lastly, we looked at
degree distribution as playing an important role in defining the degree of
equality within the system. Degree distribution tells us a lot about how
centralized or distributed the network is, which is of major significance in
understanding the dynamics of power and how something will flow through
the whole system.

 Network Diffusion

As we have previously discussed, networks are all about connectivity and

what is flowing along those connections. How something spreads across a
social network is then one of the central questions within social network
analysis. The study of network diffusion tries to capture the underlying
mechanism of how events propagate through a complex network. Whether
the subject of interest is a virus spreading through some population, the
spreading of some social movement, some new fashion or innovation or it
may be a marketing message through an online social network. Whatever
the phenomena of interest, the primary questions remain the same. That of
what are the different forces that are affecting its diffusion and how will the
structure of the network effect that process? How fast will it spread? For
example, will we get tipping points? How can we enable or constrain that
process of diffusion? And these are some of the questions we will touch
upon in this chapter.

Forces

Firstly, we need to understand the forces acting on the network. What are
the forces pushing the phenomena over the network? That is to say how
contagious is it? And inversely we need to ask what are the counteracting
forces resisting its spreading. So we are talking about the infectiousness of
the phenomena on the one hand, and the resistance of the agents to that
phenomena on the other. These are two counteracting forces.

As an example, we might think about the social network of some society

consisting of a dominant and minority culture. As a concrete example, we
might think about the current situation in Myanmar with a minority of
Muslims and majority of Buddhists within the population. Now, we will add
some actors within the majority culture that are trying to promulgate some
rhetoric of violence towards the minority group within this network and ask
how it will spread. So we have the outward force of these actors spreading
this rhetoric that has a certain degree of infectiousness, but we also have
the individual's opinions that may be more or less receptive to that
message. In analyzing this social system, we might then create a
conceptual or cognitive map representing people's opinions towards those
of an alternative ethnicity. By understanding people's opinions, we can get
an understanding of how resistant they will be to that message and thus a
better understanding of the two forces at play, and this would form the
basis of our model to how rapidly this message may diffuse through that
network.

Density

The density of the network is important for the obvious reason that with a
high level of connectivity something has more channels through which to
spread. But beyond this, we also need to ask whether the agents within the
system can actually spread the phenomenon themselves or not. As we turn
up the overall connectivity within the system, the nature of the diffusion
changes fundamentally. At a low level of connectivity, when we are dealing
with an isolated group of people, we have to try and affect the whole group.
We try and broadcast to everyone, as exemplified by traditional advertising
and political campaigns, that put up posters and billboards in public spaces
where the mass of people will get exposure to them, this is a kind of brute
force method to diffusion that is necessary at low levels of connectivity.

But when we turn up the distributed level of connectivity, this is no longer

the case. Now everyone can be a means of diffusion. We no longer need to
use brute force trying to affect everyone. We can now be much more
strategic, simply affecting those who have the greatest capacity to affect
others. And in this way, we can get much higher leverage. Influencing the
network in the right place can now have a much larger nonlinear effect. And
we see this with current trends within advertising. Because we are all now
much more connected, agencies can focus less on broadcasting
commercials to the mass of people but instead focus more on getting
influential bloggers to adopt and spread their message.

Clustering

Next, we need to consider the overall topology to the system. How

something will spread across it will be significantly affected by the
clustering within the network. Clustering creates heterogeneity. This might
be the different ethnic and linguistic clusters within the network of global
society that are resistant to the spreading of a single homogeneous
ideology or we might be talking about the clustered cultural groups within a
single city. This clustering and heterogeneity within the network will clearly
be resistant to some uniform phenomena flowing across the entire network.
This clustering may well also create competing phenomena within the
same overall network, where a new phenomenon is introduced but given
different interpretations or forms by different socio-cultural clusters, with
these different variants then competing. We might think about the
spreading of some religion that gets interpreted in different forms by
different cultural groups, or the local idiolects of some common language.
These are all sub-clusterings that give the network a heterogeneous
topology and make it resistant to a uniform spreading. This heterogeneity
due to clustering can create bottlenecks to the process of diffusion, where
we have some cluster and just a few links connecting it to other groups,
these links are then critical to the spreading process which reduces
robustness, and increases the capacity for exercising power.

Centralized/Distributed

Centralized networks can be much more effective at spreading. With

preferential attachment, we get major hubs, and those hubs are key
enablers to the diffusion process. Because a hub is attached to many small
nodes which may pass on the phenomena to them and then they will affect
all the other nodes within their local network, thus in just two hops we have
covered a whole subsystem.

But we should always remember that centralized social systems will have
strong power dynamics because of the high degree distribution, and this
can distort the diffusion process. For example, if we think about giving aid
to some African country such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, a large
percentage of that money may well get siphoned off at the central hub of
the network before diffusion really takes place. Or we might think about
broadcast media, which again is a centralized system that can be very
effective at disseminating information to a broad group of people. And we
have seen how it has been used effectively as a means for creating
national solidarity amongst millions of people within a country. But again we
know it is often used as a means for manipulation and propaganda
spreading.

And this is the nature of centralized networks in general. They have a high
concentration of power allowing them to be very coherent, effective and
capable of rapid diffusion. But they can also be more dysfunctional as in
these examples. Centralization is essentially a top-down method, meaning
that few people are trying to affect many. This centralized mechanism
always comes at an expense and has its limitations. And this ties back to
our previous discussion about the agents within the network working to
spread the phenomena. That can only happen with distributed connectivity
- the agents have to be connected to each other in a peer-to-peer fashion,
but centralized systems will typically repress and work to exclude these
distributed connections. Thus there may be a certain trade-off here.

Network Effect

Networks don't always grow linearly but may grow exponentially. Whenever
there is exponential growth there is typically some positive feedback driving
it, and in this case, it is what is called the network effect. The network effect
arises when users gain value from others using the same network. The
more people that join, the more value for everyone else, this is a positive
feedback loop. A good example of this would be a language. The value of
some language is relative to the number of other users of that language,
the more people that adopt that language, the more valuable it will be.
People learn English, Spanish and Chinese as a second language not
because those languages are in anyway better than others, but simply
because billions of people speak these languages, giving them a powerful
network effect and lots of value. The network effect may be seen behind
the formation and spreading of many phenomena within social networks,
such as the spreading of some fashion, and as always with positive
feedback, it will give us exponential growth, tipping points, and cascades as
we have previously talked about.

What is happening with the network effect is that there is really a positive
externality. When I chose to learn a particular language, I am not just
generating value for myself, but also some of the value is being
externalized to everyone else who is using that network, as they now have
more communications options available to them due to this positive
externality. The network effect gives us what is called Metcalfe’s law, which
suggests that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the
number of users of that network. Because of all of these positive
externalities, the system as a whole now has value greater than it
individuals.

With the network effect, people will not only adopt a phenomenon based
upon its value in isolation but also on the assessment of how many others
will also adopt the phenomenon. We choose to go to a party or some
gathering only if we think others will also go, and thus expectation becomes
very important. People not only have to value something but they have to
expect that others will also adopt it. And thus expectation can be a very
high leverage point with respect to diffusion on social networks. The
network effect is also notorious for creating lock-in because there is so
much value created by everyone simply using the same network. This
creates a strong force towards convergence, everyone using the one
network at the expense of all others, we can see this with the dominance of
English as a global language with the decline of many other smaller
languages.

Tipping Points

This network effect may give the diffusion process a strong tipping point,
because below a certain level of people adopting that phenomenon the
value is very low - we might say sub-linear. Adopting some radical new
fashion when no one else has, will come at great social cost. But doing it
when everyone else has will come at a much greater value. Thus, the
pioneers of some new phenomena, whether we are talking about a new
political opinion, a new social movement or a new style, these first adopters
will have to be very committed putting in a lot of resources and getting little
out. But if the phenomenon does spread then the network effect will take
hold. There will be a snowball effect due to the positive externalities. There
will be some tipping point or phase transition where it rapidly goes from a
fringe activity to a mainstream phenomenon and the course of least
resistance.

Complex Contagion

Complex contagion is the phenomenon in social networks in which multiple

sources of exposure to an innovation are required before an individual
adopts the change of behavior. This differs from simple contagion in that it
may not be possible for the innovation to spread after only one incident of
contact with an infected neighbor. The spread of complex contagion across
a network of people may depend on many social and economic factors; for
instance, how many of one's friends adopt the new idea as well as how
strongly they actually influence the individual.
In complex contagion, the probability of adopting a behavior, or an idea,
varies with the extent of exposure. As an example, a person might not
respond when they see a piece of information on one social media site, but
when they see it on another or a third, this may trigger them to have greater
belief in that piece of information and start to share it.

When we allow for this more complex form of contagion, we now have to
start to take into account different sources of contagion that may be
conflicting, as we noted when talking about clustering. The spreading of
propaganda may be an example of this. Within a very simple homogeneous
scenario where we have just one national broadcaster, we will have a
relatively simple contagion process, with just one single message being
propagated. But in a more complex setting with multiple channels, there
may be conflicting messages and we have to understand the network of
interacting messages that people are receiving and also the significance
that they ascribe to those different channels.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been talking about the diffusion process within
social networks looking at some of the primary considerations. Talking
firstly about the two counteracting forces of the infectiousness of the
phenomena on the one hand and the resistance of the agents. We
highlighted network density as a second factor, whereas we turn up the
overall degree of distributed connectivity within the system the nature of the
diffusion changes fundamentally allowing for a peer-to-peer process of
sharing. We noted how clustering can create a certain resistance to uniform
spreading and centralized networks can be very effective at enabling the
diffusion process through large hubs. We touched upon the network effect
and how it can create rapid diffusion once a tipping point is reached due to
positive externalities. Finally, we expanded our model to include complex
contagion where an agent must be exposed to a number of different
sources before adopting it.

 Fitness Landscape

In this part of the book, we will be using models derived from complex
adaptive systems theory to try and interpret social phenomena. Complex
adaptive systems can be understood as a special class of complex system
that has the capacity of adaptation. When we use this paradigm, we are
essentially looking at social systems as an environment within which we
have many different agents who are acting and reacting to each other's
behavior as they adapt and evolve over time. A good example of this would
be the world of organized crime, where we have a social system consisting
of law enforcement agencies and criminal networks who each have
counteracting agendas, and they are acting, reacting and adapting to each
other's behavior, creating a very dynamic system.

Adaptation

This idea of adaptation is then central to this whole paradigm. We can

define adaptation as the capacity for a system to change its state in
response to some change within its environment. The system does this in
order to optimize its state within that environment according to some
metric. So the agent has some value system, meaning it can define a set of
states and ascribe some value to them, with some of those states being
better and some being worse. We might be talking about a trader in a
financial system trying to make more money; a government negotiating a
trade agreement; a politician trying to get elected, or criminals trying not to
get arrested. All of these are examples of agents that have some value
system. They are operating within some environment and they are
searching for an optimal solution according to that set of criterial.

These agents are operating within some environment, and that

environment is changing periodically. The agents have to adapt by finding
new responses to these changes. As such, we can understand the process
of adaption as a search over many different possible solutions in order to
generate the most effective one, given the environmental condition.
 Adaptive Landscape

The most coherent and robust formal model we have for understanding this
process of adaptation as a search, is what is called a fitness or adaptive
landscape. It is a very solid formal mathematical model we can use to
describe complex adaptive systems.

In a recent paper summarizing the literature on the fitness landscape model

in the social sciences, they describe the model as such: "At first sight,
fitness landscapes provide a visual representation of how an agent, of any
kind, relates to its environment, how its position is conditional because of
the mutual interaction with other agents, and which possible routes towards
improved fitness there are. The allure of fitness landscapes is first and
foremost that it represents a complex story about adaptation and fitness in
one coherent image that helps to summarize the many aspects of those
processes in an accessible way."

Fitness Function

So there are a number of parameters that our adaptive landscape model

needs to capture. Firstly, we need to define a parameter for how good, or fit
any solution is. Every fitness landscape has to have a well-defined metric
telling us which way is up and which way is down. The higher up this
parameter, the more efficient the solution is and thus the better the payoff
for the agent. Next, we need two more parameters in order to create a 2-
dimensional space within which to put our different solution types, Those
that are similar will be placed in proximity to each other within this space.
So, as an example, we might be using this model to represent a military
campaign. If we had two solutions based around predominantly using
airstrikes we would put them in proximity, while other different strategies
using ground forces would be clustered in a different location.

So when we put these three parameters together we have a three-

dimensional space where the horizontal axis tells us the type of solution we
are using and the vertical axis is telling us how effective that solution or
state is. Now, for any application of this model, the different locations on the
horizontal axes will have a different payoff ascribed to them, some will be
better than others. Thus, each one will have a certain elevation based upon
its efficiency. When we map out all of these elevations, we will get a
landscape inside of our model, representing the solution space to that
particular environment.

Now, we can put our agents into this landscape, so these agents might be
countries within the international political environment. Their elevation
representing their capacity to influence the global political system and
those with similar political regimes and ideologies would be in proximity to
each other. Or as another more concrete example, we might be modeling
the different drug cartels within Mexico, where their control over territory
and resources would be their elevation within the landscape.

Explore and Exploit

Agents are then trying to reach higher elevations within this landscape, but
they typically do not have a global vision of the entire landscape. They do
not know if they are on a global optimal solution or just on a local one. We
do not know if we break up with our partner whether we will find a more
suitable one in the future. We don't know if we overthrow the current
political regime whether the next one will be any better, etc. Thus at any
given time agents are faced with two different option of either exploiting
their current position or investing resources in exploring for better options.

Types of Landscapes

So this adaptive landscape represents the different types of environments

that agents are operating within, and these different environments can span
from the very simple to the very complex. On the simple end of the
spectrum, we are dealing with a context that is static in nature and with
limited interdependencies. On the complex end of the spectrum, we are
dealing with environments that are dynamic in nature, consisting of many
interdependent interacting parts. I will now describe in more detail what this
means by going over four of the qualitatively different types of adaptive
landscapes starting with the simple and going to the complex.

Linear Environments

The most simple environments are static in nature and consist of the least
amount of interacting variables. As an example, we might think about an
absolute monarch or absolute dictatorship where all social, economic and
cultural institutions are controlled and held constant through the political
hierarchy. Within such an environment everything is in relation to one
political institution, simply succeeding within that single organization can
achieve global success. Or as another example, we might think about
some homogeneous cultural system that defines clearly what is considered
right and wrong and from this the one correct way to live one's life. These
are examples of linear socio-cultural environments that would give the
landscape a single dominant peak, one optimal solution that is well defined,
and because of this, the agent needs only to follow some linear
optimization algorithm.

Interconnected Environments

If we now increase the complexity by turning up the number of equally

viable solutions, we will get a landscape that has many different peaks, and
agents now have to invest a certain amount of time searching for the
optimal position. As an example of this, we might think about a young
person having completed high school choosing which university to go to.
They will be trying to optimize for a number of different variables: cost of
tuition, location, facilities, collage ranking etc. and thus there will be a
number of different viable solutions, giving the landscape a number of
different peaks, a roughed landscape. But in this situation the variables are
not changing over time thus the student could invest quite a bit of time and
resources in researching all of the factors involved to find whatever they
consider the optimal. Although this environment may represent complicated
problems in that there are a number of interacting variables that require a
significant amount of computation, it is still a relatively simple environment.

Adaptive Environment

If we now allow for the different interacting variables to adapt and change
over time we now have a complex environment. We now have a landscape
where actors are acting and reacting to each other's behavior, constantly
adapting. And it is out of this interdependence and adaptation that we get a
landscape where the peaks and valleys are moving up and down over time.
An example of this might be the current international political environment,
as we move into an increasingly multipolar world. With the rise of China
and the other emerging economies, we are now no longer in an
international environment dominated by the homogeneous Western
ideology of the Bretton Woods institutions. But increasingly have many
more actors, both public and private, each with their own strategies and
interest that are constantly acting and reacting to each other. And this
means the end target is constantly changing any solution that may be
effective now, may cease to be effective when others adapt to it, which
once again alters the payoffs on the landscape as it moves up and down
over time

Open Environments

Lastly, this whole complex adaptive social system of agents acting and
reacting is receiving some set of input values from external sources.
Whether this is the natural environment or the technology infrastructure to
that society. A major change in these input values can cause the whole
landscape to transform. In such circumstances, we are no longer talking
about the agents acting and reacting to each other, but instead, we are
talking about the whole topology to the landscape transforming. This is like
a paradigm shift within science or culture where the whole landscape gets
changed. We can think about the paradigm shift in our culture as we moved
into the modern era, everything got recontextualized, through a scientific
and materialistic context. With this cultural paradigm shift, virtually every
single social and cultural institution within the entire landscape had to
reinvent itself within this new context. Education, governance, work, etc.,
everything got redefined and those that weren't have slowly lost relevance.
This is a long term systemic change where we are no longer talking about
adaptation but instead evolution.

To take a more contemporary example, we could think about the rise of

machine learning and mass automation. Machine learning in many different
areas is making the basic processing of information a commodity. We as
human beings no longer have a monopoly on basic knowledge and
information processing activities, which is a paradigm shift. We have for
millennia had an uncontested monopoly on these activities and through it
control over our environment and all other creatures. But this is rapidly
changing. Within this context of a systemic transformation, we are no
longer competing with each other to maintain relevance, but now the actual
whole context is changing and the whole system of our society has to
evolve in order to maintain relevance within this new environment.
 Adaptive Strategies

From this, we should see that different environments require different types
of adaption. Within the first simpler environment agents only need a
relatively simple linear form of adaptation which is an optimization
algorithm. The second environment is again algorithmic in nature, but it
requires a greater investment of computation as it is no longer a simple
trade-off between two variables but now a number of different variables
interacting.

In neither of these first two environments does the system really have to
adapt. It simply has to make an initial investment of resources exploring the
environment before converging to some optimal position and can then
remain there. Because the landscape is not changing, the process of
exploration and adaptation is transient in nature; we only have to do it for a
period of time before the system can settle into some basin of attraction.

The aim of the game here is to find the best solution and then just stay
using it. You don't really have to adapt, this is like becoming the biggest fish
in the pond so that no one can affect you. Or the single superpower in a
monopolar political environment, so that you have significant enough
resources that you don't really have to adapt to what others are doing.

When the landscape is changing in response to everyone's actions, this

actually requires adaptation. You have to stay continuously responding to
what other actors are doing. This is like being in a multipolar international
political environment. No one is big enough just to ignore what others are
doing, there are enough major players that any one of them changing their
state will affect the entire landscape to a greater or lesser degree.

When the landscape is subject to systemic change, then agents must be

capable of changing their entire functionality in order to be able to intercept
and transform whatever new resource may be available. This requires them
to be able to go through the process of evolution, which is simply a more
long-term and fundamental form of adaptation. In order for agents to
change their entire functionality and evolve, this requires the maintenance
of a stock of redundant diversity within the system in order to be able to
foster, grow and develop the new long-term solution in response to major
long-term changes.
 Changing Strategies

Strategies that work well in one environment may well fail in another and
this if often a limitation to long-term sustained development. Where an
agent adopts a strategy that works well in a simple environment and
enables them to develop into a more complex environment, wherein they
stay applying their previous strategy which works to prevent them from
developing a more appropriate one for the new context. Here we can
identify that success often creates a positive feedback loop, such as we
have previously discussed with the phenomena of irrational exuberance,
where success makes the agent overconfident in their strategy and drives
them forward into a more complex environment where their strategy may
be inappropriate. But the positive feedback loop of irrational exuberance
limits their capacity to recognize that and change accordingly, giving us
unsustainable development and this might be cited as a form of self-
organized criticality.

As Albert Einstein would say; "We can't solve problems by using the same
kind of thinking we used when we created them." As an example, we might
think about how our industrial technologies and solutions that were
developed when we had a much lower ecological impact, have taken us
into a more complex environment where we are for the first time
significantly altering earth's core regulatory systems, such as the climate
and polar icecaps. Solving problems within this more complex environment
requires a form of collaboration that our industrial systems of organization
such as the nation state, that previously may have worked well, are not well
designed for. The point to take away here is that strategy is context
dependent. Complexity is a fundamental parameter to a system when we
turn it up or down we can expect strategy to change fundamentally,
requiring greater or less capacity for adaptation.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been looking through the lense of adaptive system
theory to see what insight it can offer us on macro-social phenomena.
Firstly, we talked about adaptation as a process through which an agent
tries to change its state in response to some change within its environment,
doing this in order to optimize its position and payoff within that
environment. We gave an outline to the adaptive landscape, that can be
used as a formal model for representing whole complex social systems
consisting of many interacting agents both on the micro level of individuals
and on the macro level of interacting organizations.

We talked about the degree of complexity to an adaptive landscape as a

key parameter where as we turn it up we go from a linear environment with
a single solution, to multiple solutions, to a dancing landscape, to an
evolving topology representing an open system. Finally, we looked at how
the agent's strategies need to change fundamentally in response to these
changes in context, as they go from simple algorithms to adaptation and
evolution.

 Adaptive Capacity and Resilience

In this chapter, we will be talking about adaptive capacity, the capacity of a

social system of any kind from whole societies to individuals to deal with
change within their environment.
This question of social adaptation becomes increasingly significant when
social change affects important aspects of life over comparatively short
periods of time. Such changes include migration, changes in age, rapid
industrial development, or major shifts of the population from rural to urban
living, which has been characteristic of the modern era.

In such times of rapid and fundamental change, it is the adaptive capacity

of the social system that ensures the preservation of its structure and
functionality over time, and this question of what enables or constrains the
system's adaptive capacity becomes of central interest.

Strategies

As we have discussed in the previous chapter, agents operate within some

environment. They are periodically subject to change within that
environment, they have to deal with this change in some way in order to
ensure the preservation of their structure and function, and their capacity to
do that we would call their robustness or resilience. The question we are
interested in then is how do they respond to that change, what strategy
does the system use. And there are fundamentally really just tow different
approaches to dealing with change. Agents can resist it, or they can adapt
to it. And of course, most eventualities will involve some combination of
both, but we need to understand these two different paradigms of
resistance and adaptation. We will be using models from the area of
cybernetics to help us in this.

Resistance

Adaptive systems typically have a specialized sub-system for regulating

their behavior called a regulatory or control system. Examples of this
include the human brain, the board or directors within a company, a
national government or a military commander among many others.
Regulatory systems are designed to manage the overall maintenance of
the system's structure and functionality to ensure preservation and
homeostasis.

All complex adaptive systems are in some way dependent upon their
environment. They are what we would call thermodynamically open
systems. They require the input of energy and resources in order to
maintain their dynamical state - without it, they will slowly or rapidly decay.
And thus the regulatory system has to ensure that the system as a whole is
and will be receiving the required input values from its environment. The
regulatory system then has to know what the parameters to those input
values are and direct the system towards a state that will optimize them. If
we are cold and there is a fire nearby, we will move towards it. If we are
very poor, we will be driven to make money. If our economy requires a high
input of oil, we will try and secure that resource. These are all examples of
homeostasis, where the regulatory system monitors, controls and adjusts
the system as a whole so as to maintain it within the optimal set of input
values required to preserve and develop its level of structure and
functionality. And this is the same for all complex adaptive systems.

Regulatory systems always define a desired state for the system and
parameters or boundaries around that which are requisites for it to achieve
that desired state. Here we are defining what the system is. That is to say,
there is some structure or function through which it defines itself. This might
be the identity of being Indian, of being a good person, of being an athlete
of being a tough guy. But in order to be any of these things you have to
stay within a certain set of parameters - you can't be a good person and
take lots of drugs and steal lots of things, you can't be a tough guy and go
around wearing pink flowery t-shirts all the time.

All of these identities are dependent upon a set of boundary conditions that
must be maintained in order to maintain that state of functionality. In order
to occupy that state, you are dependent upon those input values. When we
as groups or individuals form an identity that is defining what we are, this
identity also typically depends upon some resource, such as the territory
that a nation occupies, the job status that an individual occupies, or a
position within some social hierarchy. In defining what we are, we are also
defining what we are not. We are creating some kind of boundary condition,
limits to our existence. These dependencies and boundary conditions
create a structure that holds the system within a certain configuration
creating inertia and the resistance to change.
 Path Dependence

The formation of identity and boundaries is often path dependent with

negative externalities that create the lock-in effect. The emergence of the
structure may have been initially contingent with other directions being
easily feasible in the early stages. But once the structure is in place, it can
be self-perpetuating, creating its own conditions for persistence. Think
about the carving up of the Middle East by the colonial powers after the
second world war, by drawing often arbitrary lines in the sand. But those
lines in the sand would now be considered semi-sacred. Trying to now
move them just a few kilometers could possibly result in a Third World War.

Once contingent historical events take place, path-dependent sequences

are marked by relatively deterministic causal patterns or what can be
thought of as "inertia" and this is driven by the same process we discussed
before - positive feedback making it easier to continue with the same pre-
existing solution and negative externalities reducing alternative options.
And out of this the boundary condition gets self-perpetuated and reinforced
over time.

Resistance Strategy

Once the adaptive system has defined a boundary condition and becomes
locked into that condition, we will get Inertia - the resistance to change.
Resistance as a strategy means the control system trying to limit the
number of possible eventualities and maintain only a limited number of
responses. In order to try and reduce the number of possible eventualities
to some small subset that is conducive to the system, we have to try and
control the environment. The farther we go down this path of resistance,
the more we are trying to control the environment, and the more we are
trying to reduce the possible input values to the system. In order to properly
control a system, we have to linearize it. Nonlinearity is uncontrollable we
have to externalize it from the system, in so doing reducing diversity,
reducing redundant components and by linearizing it we can increase the
coupling. All of these will give increases in short-term efficiency. But also, of
course, this leads to long term self-organizing criticality as the system
becomes more dependent upon a narrower band of input values and any
small change in those critical values can create systemic shock. The
classical example of this being our current dependency on petroleum,
where small changes in the input value can ramify across the whole system
and here again this critical state was created by path dependency, a
process driven by positive feedback and negative externalities as we
previously saw when we talked about carbon lock-in. But this state of
inertia reduces the system's adaptive capacity and requires the heavy
maintenance of a control system in order to insure that these critical values
are not altered.

Adaptation

We have already defined adaptation as the capacity to generate some

appropriate response given some environmental change. Adaptation is
essentially the opposite from resistance and control. Both resistance and
adaptation are methods for maintaining the system's structure and function.
But control does so by reducing the number of input values to the system to
the required type, by creating boundaries and exerting some external force
to alter the environment. Whereas adaptation tries to ensure that the
system has the appropriate response for any given input value. Adaptation
means being open to a number of different eventualities. That is to say, the
condition of uncertainty, and having the capacity to reconfigure the system
in response to that change, without compromising critical functions.

Whereas regulatory systems will have to spend a large amount of their

resources on maintaining their whole mechanism for regulation. That is to
say, the means through which they amass information, define and protect
boundaries, exercise control etc. Adaptation as a strategy, in contrary, is not
trying to reduce the range of input values. Thus, it does not need to
maintain all of this apparatus, meaning it can be a much more agile
strategy.

This strategy of adaptation is then focused on ensuring the system has a

sufficient number of states to generate the appropriate one when required
and ensuring the competency of these components. Whereas resistance
will try to remove all disturbances, adaptation comes with a recognition of
the importance of disturbance in testing the system, in order to maintain the
competency of the system's components. Because without control over its
environment, the diversity and effectiveness of it constituent components is
the only thing that is going to ensure its preservation.

As an example, we might think about the different philosophies surrounding

child rearing. On the one hand, we have those parents who will believe it
best to try and protect their children from every eventuality, giving them all
the vaccines, not letting them play in the garden and get dirty, talk to the
bad children or stay out late. And on the other hand, we have parents who
believe it is necessary to expose the child to these environmental
perturbations during its upbringing, in order for it to develop its adaptive
capacity through overcoming these perturbations. This is of course how our
bodies develop their adaptive capacity. The immune system develops by
encountering interventions from antigens, having to develop the
appropriate responses and then retaining a copy of those for future
application. In so doing it uses these environmental perturbations to build
up resilience over time.

Edge of Chaos

And this whole discussion ties back to the previous chapter where we
touched upon the theory of the edge of chaos. The hypothesis that
successful complex adaptive systems somehow maintain themselves
between chaos or randomness and order, where they are exposed to
perturbations that broaden the possible set of input values and remove
those components that do not add to its overall adaptive capacity. The
system uses the two regimes in order to configure and reconfigure itself,
enabling it to evolve over time in a sustainable fashion.

Slow & Fast Variables

Because of emergence, complex systems like whole societies are multi-

dimensional or multi-scalar. Through emergence, patterns develop on
different levels and those patterns have their own internal processes taking
place. This means that change is occurring on many different levels. From
the micro to the macro and these processes of change are taking place in
parallel, with smaller processes nested within larger ones. For example,
within Western society during the past five hundred years, we have been
going through the macro process of change that is modernity, representing
a very fundamental socio-cultural transformation. But nested within that we
have also been going through the process of industrialization for the past
two hundred years approximately, and within both of these, we have the
process of economic liberalization that has been taking place for the past
thirty years or so.
Thus, in these complex social systems, there are many processes of
change taking place in parallel. These macro processes of change typically
take place very slowly. Within ecology, these are called slow variables.
Micro-level processes of change happen much faster and they have fast
variables associated with them. Fast variables are factors that change
rapidly and that are most easily measured and manipulated by managers.
Regulatory systems can try to directly influence and manage the system
through fast variables, such as a central bank reducing interest rates or
putting liquidity into the market in order to effect the state of the system
immediately.

But we typically can not use centralized regulatory systems to manage

macro processes of change. There is no government to the process of
modernity. There is no board of directors to the process of globalization.
These things are managed through the mechanism of evolution - they take
place in a distributed fashion over prolonged periods of time. There is no
centralized regulatory system that can really affect these slow variables. If
the macro system has self-organized into a critical state, there is nothing
you can do about that now. You can not now affect this macro situation and
the slow variables associated with it by altering fast variables, the
possibility of solving that problem was in the past.

Here again, we see path dependency, and again most of this can be
understood in terms of positive feedback and negative externalities. These
stresses on the macro level accumulate because some regulatory system
on the micro level has learned to displace a lot of its problems to its
external environment – quite simply, it pushes them beyond its boundaries.
But it is really just pushing them onto the macro level, distorting the process
of evolution and leading to macro level self organized-criticality, that it can
not effect through its fast control variables on the micro level. The system
might become increasingly competent at managing everything within its
boundaries, through linearization and externalizing things it can’t manage
well. And the big idea here is that of sustainability, which we haven't had
the chance to touch upon, but we might say is the ultimate aim of adaptive
capacity.

Summary

In this chapter, we have been discussing adaptive capacity and resilience

within social systems. We talked about two different strategies for trying to
manage change. Resistance and adaptation. Where resistance involves
developing some static identity based upon a boundary condition and
creating a regulatory system for monitoring and controlling the system's
environment to ensure a limited subset of eventualities that are conducive
to the system's self-preservation and continued functioning - what is called
homeostasis. And it does this by amassing as much resources as possible
in order to be able to exert as much control as necessary to resist any
perturbation that might take it outside of those operating parameters.
Inversely, we talked about adaptation as a second alternative strategy, one
that is focused on the system's capacity to generate a wide set of
responses, ensuring its capacity to reconfigure itself given as wide a
spectrum of input values as possible, in so doing ensuring its resilience and
continued functionality. We talked about how the adaptive approach is not
focused on amassing resources in order to prevent change, but instead on
generating the appropriate response and fast recovery from inevitable
failures, thus responding to change in a constructive way as an important
means through which it develops.

Finally, we discussed the multidimensional nature to complex social

systems being engaged in processes of change on various levels from the
micro to the macro, giving us slow and fast variables. With these fast
variables being the means of centralized regulation and slow variables
being the outcome to the process of long-term evolution.

 Evolution

In this chapter, we will be discussing the process of evolution as it acts on

macro-scale social systems of all kind. We will be talking about the different
stages within this process, and how through this process of evolution social
systems can develop to exhibit greater complexity over time.

Complexity

The question of what exactly complexity is, is one of the big open questions
within complexity theory, as there are a number of different approaches to
trying to answer it. We can, for example, talk about it in terms of
computation or interconnectivity, among various other approaches. But
evolution offers us one answer to this question. This perspective starts with
a recognition that systems do not start out complex. All systems start out
simple and evolve to become complex. Through this process of evolution,
the subcomponents within the system become more specialized and
differentiated, but it also involves a process of reintegration, increased
interconnectivity and interdependence between those differentiated
subsystems. As an example, we can think about the human body. Of
course, we started out as very simple unicellular organisms like every other
creature. But through a long process of evolution, different cells have come
to work together while also becoming increasingly specialized. And it is
through this combination of integration and differentiation during the
process of evolution that our bodies have become the complex systems
they are today. From this evolutionary perspective, a complex system is a
system that is both differentiated and integrated, and out of that, we get
synergies and the emergence of complex phenomena.

Evolution

The first thing to note is that evolution is not something that only happens
to dinosaurs and monkeys. It is a pervasive phenomenon in our world. The
mechanism of evolution in the abstract is a process of development for any
type of adaptive system. Ecosystems, economies, societies, cultures,
football teams, ideas, religions, political parties and the list goes on.
Evolution is the same process as adaptation, but now operating on the
macro scale. Adaptation is how an individual responds to change within
their environment. Evolution is the process through which a whole
population of agents responds to change within its environment. Both
adaptation and evolution are characterized as processes of change without
centralized coordination. Both adaptation and evolution do not require a
centralized regulatory system. They both happen in a distributed fashion.
With evolution, there is no one single divine entity that gets to make
choices about which creatures will live or die. That choice is distributed out
across the entire ecosystem. Just as no one in a free market economy gets
to say which products will be produced or not produced, that choice is
made by many different producers and consumers across the entire market
as part of an evolutionary process. The point to take away is that evolution
is a macro scale process of development within any adaptive system that is
characterized by a distributed mechanism for selection.

Within this world of evolution, there is no right or wrong, good or bad. There
is only really survival and adaptation. Survival means being able to
effectively intercept and transform resources within some environment.
Adaptation means being able to alter your state so as to be able to
continue performing this function when the input values from the
environment change. It is through being able to do both of these that you
can ensure your survival. And this environment may be ecological where
we are talking about some biological creature, or it may be some business
within an economy, some political movement within a society, some
ideology within a culture, etc. For all of these entities to survive, for them to
be continued within their particular environment, they have to be
intercepting and transforming resources effectively and be capable of
adapting as the environment changes. If you can't do that then over time
you will become irrelevant within that environment and ultimately
discontinued. The whole mechanism through which this operates is called
the process of evolution.

Process of Evolution

This process of evolution then operates through a number of key stages

that need to be performed successfully for the process to be effective.
Firstly, we need the production of variety in order to create new sets of
possible solutions to the changing context. Secondly, those variants need
to be exposed to their operating environment in order to see how effective
they are within that context. And finally, we need some objective
mechanism for selecting and replicating those that have been successful
while discontinuing those that have not.

Variety

For evolution to act on any population, there needs to be variety amongst

its members. In terms of socio-cultural evolution, this would mean a variety
of subcultures, information and knowledge sources, political ideologies and
social institutions plus the capacity to create new ones through cross
mixing. Low barriers to entry would be important, enabling marginal beliefs
and institutions to get a foothold and gain some exposure. The Internet is a
good example of this. Allowing otherwise marginalized ideas and
subcultures to get exposure through low-cost mass communication, making
it easier for people to access and remix content into new cultural variants,
and easily create new organizations around them. This is like the
prototyping stage in design. This stage in the process will be most effective
when there are lots of different building blocks, the capacity to easily remix
them, putting them together and taking them apart, and having low barriers
to entry so that we can rapidly deploy and test them, fail early and quick at
low cost and learn fast. Internet organizations are again a good example of
this. Through social networking technologies, we can very rapidly create
dynamic organizations around any theme or location and collaborate at low
cost, allowing for a much greater possible number and diversity of new
organizations. With such low barriers to entry, we can have rapid iteration
to see which might scale.

Operation

These different types of socio-cultural institutions need to be given the time

and autonomy to develop in order to see how well they are suited to that
particular context. What is needed here is a level playing field so that all
variants can compete in a somewhat equal fashion. That is that all are
exposed to the same environment in which they have to compete. If there
is one dominant ideology, culture or political regime that is given
precedence over all others, this will work to hinder the emergence of new
variants that may be better suited than the existing incumbents and create
a barrier to change and evolution. Here we can see the cost of unequal
socio-economic opportunities, a cost that may not be borne immediately
but will have a long-term detrimental effect on the system as a whole. That
will again lead us into self-organized criticality on the macro scale, reducing
sustainability.

Democratic political processes are an example of this. Theoretically they

allow for a number of different political parties and ideologies to compete
on an even playing field, but of course, this is not what always happens in
practice. When we increase the amount of money for campaigning, we will
distort this process, reducing the number of viable possibilities to those that
are amenable to the interests of the economic incumbents. Again this will
sooner or later reduce the solution set that the system has to respond to
the challenges it is presented.

Selection

Although diversity and variety may be necessary for evolution and change,
they also carry a cost. Once these different belief systems, cultures, social
movements or other intuitions have explored the full state space of
possibilities within that social context, and we have some metric for
understanding which ones perform best, there then needs to be some
mechanism for selecting those most successful variants and replicating
them so that they will become more prevalent within the future life-cycle of
the whole system, while those that have proven less effective are not
replicated and left to expire. Within democracies, political parties are
subject to selection at the ballot box, companies are subject to selection by
their consumers, when people stop believing and spreading an ideology it
becomes discontinue. But in that discontinuing, we get the release of
resources that were previously occupied and the system makes space for
those resources to be reconfigured through those patterns of organization
that have proven most successful within this cycle of the evolutionary
process.

Sustainability

Evolutions is not a process of luxury, it is a process of necessity of long-

term survival. If it is not performed, then the system's chances of survival in
the long run will be degraded. And distortion to any stage, whether it
involves excluding new varieties from emerging, giving them an unequal
field on which to compete or distorting the selection process, will result in a
degradation of the macro system leading to some form of self-organized
criticality. Evolution may not give us short term optimal solutions, but what it
does produce is long-term sustainability. It is a framework for how to
manage the development of distributed complex systems sustainably.

Complexity

Through this process of evolution, the system becomes both more

differentiated and integrated. As a system goes through this process of
evolution, it has to develop new differentiated subsystems in order to
operate in new environments. With this process of differentiation, the
system comes to have more parts with those parts being more specialized
and autonomous.
For example, traditional hunter-gatherer societies have only a few dozen
distinct functional roles within the community, while a modern census would
recognize 10,000 to 20,000 distinct occupations. But in order for the whole
system to be effective and sustainable, it also has to integrate those
subsystems and through the process of integration those parts become
more interconnected and interdependent. Today most of the humanity is
deeply interdependent through our dependence upon the global economy,
within which there are many differentiated specialized functions that are
highly interconnected and interdependent.

Through this process of evolution, a social system can transition from a

small society with few subsystems to those that are large with many
different interconnected subsystems. And this complexity enables the
system to operate sustainably in a broader environment, as we have gone
from local patterns of organization within simpler communities to the
emerging global society of today.

Summary

In summary, we have been taking a brief overview to this process of

evolution as it acts on macro scale socio-cultural systems. We described
evolution as a distributed process through which a complex adaptive
system response to change within its environment - without centralized
coordination. And how through this process the system can develop over
time to exhibit greater complexity, which enables it, in turn, to function
within broader more complex environments. We talked about how evolution
operates through a number of key stages, that need to be performed
successfully for the process to be effective. Including firstly the production
of variety in order to create new sets of possible solutions to the changing
context; with those variants then needing to be exposed to their operating
environment in order to see how effective they are within that context. And
finally, we talked about the need for some objective mechanism for
selecting and replicating those that have been successful while
discontinuing those that have not.
A Complexity Labs Publication
Curated by Joss Colchester
info@complexitylabs.io