Judgements concerning proper or appropriate educational endeavour, methods of investigation and philosophising about education necessarily implicate perspectives, values, assumptions and beliefs. In recent years ideas from the complexity sciences have been utilised in many domains including psychology, economics, architecture, social science and education. This paper addresses questions concerning the appropriateness of utilising complexity science in educational research as well as issues relating to the ways in which complexity might be engaged. I suggest that, just like all human endeavour, approaches to (...) research emerge out of discursive communities and can be understood as self‐organising, dynamic and emergent over time. In this formulation, complexity represents one such newly emergent approach. I argue that it is important that researchers partake in critical and reflective discourse about the nature of education and conceptual frameworks, as well as about impacts and legacies of utilising complexity, so as to participate in and influence the ongoing emergence of educational endeavour. I conclude by suggesting a series of caveats for researchers considering using complexity in educational research. (shrink)

Complexity is introduced as a fitting paradigmatic orientation to social inquiry. A complexity approach is compared and contrasted with other holistic social inquiry orientations and constructivist styles of thinking that have informed and guided the evolution of qualitative social inquiry.

A complexity cosmography is introduced as construing a world that is self-organizing, dynamic, and emergent, and that comprises organic entities that too are self-organizing, dynamic, and emergent. Following critical reflection into the nature of utilising complexity in social inquiry, specific images, vocabularies and complexity-based methods and techniques as developed by the authors are introduced.

Managing Complexity in Healthcare introduces the ComEntEth (Complex Entropic Ethical) model as an integrated bio-medical and philosophical approach to understanding how people get things done in healthcare. Drawing on the complexity sciences, studies of entropy in living organisms, and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, healthcare is theorised as energetic relational exchanges between people as entropic and ethical entities that unfold around a central attractor: Reduction in elevated entropy or suffering in patients. Living entities are engaged in a continuous struggle against (...) the tendency to produce entropy. From the cellular to the collective of human endeavours, the tendency of complex systems is to disorder and decay. Yet in the micro-activity of healthcare enterprise, people resist this tendency by expending energy to create order and sustain life. Making sense of how this miraculous work is made possible is the foundation of this book. Through practical examples - from analysis of practitioner burnout, rural and remote healthcare, the functioning of emergency departments, to government, social and institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic -this new integral philosophy provides practitioners, managers, policy designers, and scholars an effective way to understand the dynamics of daily processes and practices that link the micro of everyday interactions with the macro-trends of healthcare. (shrink)

Paradoxical images and understandings inherent in sustainable tourism discourses are identified as relating to two undergirding incongruities where humans and the environment are seen as discrete entities and inherently interrelated, and where humans and the environment are viewed as evolving over time, and as static and unchanging. To resolve these tensions, it is suggested that rather than taking an essentialist perspective, it is more useful to treat sustainable tourism as an aspiring evolving discourse. Recognition of human complicity in discourse construction (...) is proposed as necessary for fostering greater circumspection: thoughtful attention to the circumstances that reciprocally give rise to our own evolving consciousness and existential circumstances. (shrink)

Complexity, in conceptualizing life as self-organizing, dynamic, and emergent, offers evocative metaphors for making sense that are not bound to linearity or certainty. We utilize complexity as a conceptual framework in teaching related to various aspects of the humanities and social sciences (business, organization, and management studies, ethics, social and political change, health, spirituality). In this article, we reflect on our use of complexity in addressing the teaching challenge inherent in encouraging complex epistemic cognition: thinking about thinking through a complexity (...) framework. (shrink)

This article explores an understanding of organizational management developed from the metaphorical application of complexity science to the field of organizational development. It focuses on the insights that fractality triggers in relation to an alternative way of examining and appreciating organizational hierarchy, and the subsequent implications to liberating creativity, ingenuity and potentiality of individuals working within the organization. Sites where such a fractal-hierarchy mindset appears to be evident are discussed, and the effects on productivity noted.