Abstract
During the past couple of decades the study of complexity has grown as one of the most fashionable themes of research. A cursory review shows that thousands of books have been published on the topic during this period and several journals are continuously addressing different aspects related to it. The work by the Santa Fe Research Institute is perhaps one of the most famous recent efforts to approach the topic in an interdisciplinary way. Yet, despite the different particular applications of these works or perhaps because of this, there is no single generally agreed definition of complexity, let alone one practical measurement of complexity. However, in this chapter inspired by Ross Ashby’s concept of variety we attempt a precise definition of the concept of complexity. This definition is necessary to approach the kind of issues that interest us throughout this book, such as self-regulation, self-organization and variety engineering.
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Notes
- 1.
This large number of publications can be confirmed through a search on Amazon.
- 2.
For more information you may visit the Santa Fe Research Institute at: http://www.santafe.edu/
- 3.
See the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Oxford University Press.
- 4.
Though efforts have been made by authors like Gell-Mann (1995) to offer a more ‘objective’ definition.
- 5.
The system here is the criminal justice system in a concrete location, where juries face, say, 50 issues with three possible values each; this is their input. On the other hand, the output is a single decision with two possible values: guilty or not-guilty. The variety of the system is, then, the variety of the output (i.e., two) to the power of the variety of the input (which is 350).
- 6.
Ashby formulated this law originally as ‘only variety absorbs variety’ (Ashby 1964). Here we are using complexity instead of variety.
- 7.
- 8.
Notice that some authors have recently challenged that Eskimos actually have different names for snow. However, this fact does not affect the point we want to illustrate here. We could use many other examples of cases in which we recognize new distinctions in language but we are not able to make these same distinctions in our practices. We kept the Eskimos case because of its popularity.
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Espejo, R., Reyes, A. (2011). On Complexity: How to Measure It?. In: Organizational Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19109-1_3
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