Complexity-based Approach Research Articles

Corporate strategy and the environment: fit through teleological approaches

Complexity-based approaches to corporate strategy are particularly important in times of extensive environmental uncertainty where previous corporate predictions and forecasts regarding environmental changes frequently turn out to be invalid. The purpose of the article is to develop a framework that integrates corporate strategy and complexity-based teleological approaches. The framework is accompanied by propositions that contribute to literature by showing what teleological approaches are consistent within different corporate strategies and environmental settings. The propositions represent ways of achieving a fit between the number of freedom degrees in corporate strategy formulation and the level of environmental uncertainty. The application of teleological approaches in the context of corporate strategy generates additional and valuable insights to both theory and practice.

Aproximación a la complejidad de las zoonosis en Colombia

The present reflection was aimed at making a contribution towards improving control policy and programs integrality and efficacy in an attempt to answer the following question, "How can understanding zoonoses in Colombia be approached from a complexity-based approach?" The first part of this article examines zoonoses as a complex problem and the reiterated tendency of control policy and programs to deal with them as a simple problem, involving unidisciplinary and reductionist responses. The current status of complexity is synthesized as a paradigm, as are the advantages of using it in analysis and formulating policy and interventions. Possible fields of work are proposed for development when approaching zoonoses in Colombia from a complexity science viewpoint.

Creating Clinical and Economic “Wins” Through Integrated Case Management

The 5% of patients using 50% of health resources commonly have interacting and persistent multimorbid illnesses; concurrent mental health problems; impaired social networks; and/or difficulties in accessing care through the health system. To improve outcomes in these patients, it is necessary to overcome clinical and nonclinical barriers that lead to poor health, treatment resistance, high health care cost, and disability. This article describes an innovative complexity-based and outcome-oriented approach using integrated case management. It helps treating physicians and health administrators understand how to incorporate value-based case managers to optimize care for complex patients while better utilizing resources.

The use of complexity-based models in international relations: a technical overview and discussion of prospects and challenges

Complexity has become an übernotion for a contemporary perception of many social phenomena. This is mirrored by the existence and advent of an array of methods and theories that describe complex social phenomena, including in International Relations (IR). However, many scholars fall short of explaining what it is they call ‘complexity’, how the notion of complexity can help to better understand IR and which kinds of methodologies support such analyses. This article provides an overview and critical discussion of the latter. The notion of complexity and its underlying concepts are briefly clarified and methodological aspects and challenges are discussed. It is explained which social phenomena within the realm of IR are most promisingly studied under a complexity paradigm. Three modelling examples are given for illustration that allow for the identification of methodological and epistemological limits and the anticipation of potential prospects of a complexity-based modelling approach to IR.

Social policy in Europe: paradigms of change

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

A complexity-based method for predicting protein subcellular location

A complexity-based approach is proposed to predict subcellular location of proteins. Instead of extracting features from protein sequences as done previously, our approach is based on a complexity decomposition of symbol sequences. In the first step, distance between each pair of protein sequences is evaluated by the conditional complexity of one sequence given the other. Subcellular location of a protein is then determined using the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. Using three widely used data sets created by Reinhardt and Hubbard, Park and Kanehisa, and Gardy et al., our approach shows an improvement in prediction accuracy over those based on the amino acid composition and Markov model of protein sequences.

Complexity of European Union Languages: A comparative approach*

In this article, we are studying the differences between the European Union languages using statistical and unsupervised methods. The analysis is conducted in the different levels of language: the lexical, morphological and syntactic. Our premise is that the difficulty of the translation could be perceived as differences or similarities in different levels of language. The results are compared to linguistic groupings. Two approaches are selected for the analysis. A Kolmogorov complexity-based approach is used to compare the language structure in syntactic and morphological levels. A morpheme-level comparison is conducted based on an automated segmentation of the languages into morpheme-like units. The way the languages convey information in these levels is taken as a measure of similarity or dissimilarity between languages and the results are compared to classical linguistic classifications. The results have a significant impact on the design of (statistical) machine translation systems. If the source language conveys information in the morphological level and the target language in the syntactic level, it is clear that the machine translation system must be able to transfer the information from one level to another.

A Cognition-based View of Decision Processes in Complex Social–Ecological Systems

This synthesis paper is intended to provide an overview of individual and collective decision- making processes that might serve as a theoretical foundation for a complexity-based approach to environmental policy design and natural resource management planning. Human activities are the primary drivers of change in the Earth's biosphere today, so efforts to shift the trajectory of social-ecological systems must focus on changes in individual and collective human behavior. Recent advances in understanding the biological basis of thought and memory offer insights of use in designing management and planning processes. The human brain has evolved ways of dealing with complexity and uncertainty, and is particularly attuned to social information. Changes in an individual's schemas, reflecting changes in the patterns of neural connections that are activated by particular stimuli, occur primarily through nonconsious processes in response to experiential learning during repeated exposure to novel situations, ideas, and relationships. Discourse is an important mechanism for schema modification, and thus for behavior change. Through discourse, groups of people construct a shared story—a collective model—that is useful for predicting likely outcomes of actions and events. In effect, good stories are models that filter and organize distributed knowledge about complex situations and relationships in ways that are readily absorbed by human cognitive processes. The importance of discourse supports the view that collaborative approaches are needed to effectively deal with environmental problems and natural resource management challenges. Methods derived from the field of mediation and dispute resolution can help us take advantage of the distinctly human ability to deal with complexity and uncertainty. This cognitive view of decision making supports fundamental elements of resilience management and adaptive co-management, including fostering social learning through the involvement of a broad range of stakeholders, and building trust and increasing links among governance organizations.

The Potential of Reflective Journals in Studying Complexity 'In Action'

As educators embrace theories of complexity to inform their teaching and research practice, theoretically relevant methods will be required to appropriately conduct and study complexity-based approaches to education. Action research has been identified as offering significant potential for studying complexity, acting as a form of ‘real life modeling’ for learning and teaching. In this paper it is argued that reflection, a key aspect of action research, can be a productive method for both studying and working with complexity in educational contexts. Reflective journals, more specifically, provide scope not only for gathering research data but also for promoting learning and change. As a teaching approach, reflective journals can reduce the impact of external control while providing opportunities to promote and document instability and disequilibrium. Reflective journals allow for documentation of emergence and bifurcation and embrace participants’ involvement in interpretation of data in inherently non-linear ways. Reflective journals assist to build up an holistic picture of the interplay between individuals’ histories and their current and emergent ‘state’, thus providing insight into ‘sensitivity to initial conditions’. This paper illustrates these theoretical ideas through a case study derived from a course in information and communication technology (ICT) for practicing teachers.

The Complexity of Improvisation and the Improvisation of Complexity: Social Science, Art and Creativity

The concept of improvisation has become increasingly popular in the discourse of organizational theory. This paper explores several aspects of improvisation, in the context of musical, organizational, and everyday activities, in order to address some of the philosophical and practical issues relevant to this emerging interest. Connections are made between the modernist concept of organization and scholarly inquiry, and postmodern or complexity-based approaches that stress creativity as an emergent property of the relationship between order and disorder. It concludes by suggesting that the study of improvisation demands a profound immersion in (inster-)subjectivity, emotions, time, aesthetics, performance, and social creativity, none of which have traditionally been the focus of organization and management studies, or the social sciences in general. It also suggests that the practice of social sciences itself should reflect upon, and attempt to incorporate these elements.

La trajectoire tchèque de transformation économique post-socialiste : une approche par la complexité

The Czech course of post-socialist economic transformation : a complexity-based approach. The purpose of this article is to offer a stylized description of the course of post- socialist changes in the Czech Republic, using a complexity-based approach. This should make it possible to assemble a coherent body of ideas relating to the study of economic change in Central and Eastern Europe, ideas which in most writings on the subject tend to emerge in isolation, thus : complex system, self-organization, emergence, trajectory, path dependence, lock-in, non-linear dynamics, irreversibility. Self-reorganization of the four economic sub-systems identified, and of their interrelations, i.e. the system of production, the financial system, the socio-economic compromise and the State, leads to the appearance of hybrid institutional and organizational forms in the post-socialist transitional phase, in particular : a complex form of quasi-private ownership (involving banks, enterprises and the State), original post- socialist organisational bodies, a multiple financial market, an implicit manager/employee social pact, a form of State market paternalism. In the short term, this general configuration appears to underpin a Czech growth model whose dynamic in the middle term is uncertain.