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A New Agenda for the Social Sciences

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New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities

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Abstract

To recap, this book is about new thinking in complexity for the social sciences, to promote the building of a new science. For sure, it may be hard to imagine how a new science can be built. Actually, it may seem that one has to invent the science anew. So, the problem is how to start this very process of invention and, maybe even more importantly: how to go on in this rather complicated process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bruce Nauman, American artist, shown at an exhibition of a project in the Tate Gallery in London, 2005.

  2. 2.

    This notion links very well with the complex responsive responses by Stacey (2001) and his description of the involvement of partners in communicative interaction as “complex responsive processes of relating” (p. 6), or as “ongoing participation in patterns of relating” (p. 210; emphasis added).

  3. 3.

    See also Chia (1998) for a similar view.

  4. 4.

    Although she is not the only one (see the work of Vygotsky for a different complexity view, also operating in this era), she is definitely the most complete in this respect.

  5. 5.

    See Mary Parker Follett (1924), pp. 62–63; or in Drucker et al. (1995), p. 42 (emphasis added).

  6. 6.

    See the book of the critical realist thinker Roy Bhaskar, 1987, with the title “Reclaiming Reality”.

  7. 7.

    2005, p. 17, in a translation by Derek Bryce and Léon Wieger. New York: Gramercy Books.

  8. 8.

    We will not go into the differences with Epstein’s approach to the Generative Social Sciences. However, we may state that we like to think as generativists do but even more so as thinkers in complexity about reality-constituting processes (cf. Chia 1998, p. 367). The differences may show up in the language for use in describing and explaining the performance of the common subject of study.

  9. 9.

    Title of the book by this English philosopher and critical realist Roy Bhaskar.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Education and Learning (former IVLOS), University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Ton Jörg

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Jörg, T. (2011). A New Agenda for the Social Sciences. In: New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1303-1_5

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