The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 1: advancing transdisciplinarity and a social complexity imagination

The Atlas of Social Complexity

As a quick summary, the Atlas of Social Complexity charts the future of the field, focusing on the avenues of research with the greatest promise for advancing social complexity as a truly disruptive, transdisciplinary science. Together, these advances, organised around six transdisciplinary themes and twenty-four topics, constitute the social science turn in complexity. The first theme sets the agenda for the tour, exploring the thirteen challenges presently facing the field – from overvaluing computational modelling to ignoring social science – and the social complexity imagination necessary to address them. The tour then takes off, surveying twenty-four research areas – from immune system cognition to network theories of psychopathology to resilience and configurational social science to complex realism – thematically organised around: cognition, emotion and consciousness; the dynamics of human psychology; living in social systems; advancing a new methods agenda; and the creative value of unfinished spaces. The tour ends encouraging readers to use the Atlas maps to chart their own travels into new territory.

 

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PURPOSE OF CHAPTER 1

This chapter marks the start of our tour by clarifying what we mean by transdisciplinarity; outlining the contours of a social complexity imagination; summarising the six themes of the tour; and detailing how to read the book in a nonlinear and even team-based way. The Atlas of Social Complexity maps the future of the field, focusing on the avenues of research with the greatest promise for advancing the study of social complexity as a truly disruptive, transdisciplinary science. For those looking to do research in the field, it provides an extensive array of topics to explore or combine, including methods

Social Complexity Imagination: In the spirit of C. Wright Mills, the best way for the study of social complexity to overcome its current limitations and to become truly transdisciplinary is to reembrace a social complexity imagination. This time, however, the inspiration comes from a different direction: it comes from a direct engagement with the social sciences, practice, policy and the arts, in particular those areas that don’t associate themselves with the complexity sciences.  

We see such a renewed social complexity imagination expanding outward in four directions. 

• The first is to imagine a study of social complexity that moves beyond the wider and often contradictory social organisational and historical patterns that bracket the social sciences and the relationship between those sciences and practices of everyday life. This implies attending to the thirteen situations that are currently threatening the study of social complexity. 
•  The second is to imagine the study of social complexity as belonging and contributing to a long lineage of intellectual development that comes in fits and bounds, and that features waves of creation and destruction. In fact, C. Wright Mills wrote the sociological imagination in 1959, in part, to challenge the hubris, blind spots, trappings and failures of Talcott Parsons’ grand social systems theory, which was built on a combination of cybernetics, systems theory and classic sociology and which sought to promote a transdisciplinary social science. It seems to us that these attempts and subsequent criticism are part of a cycle of creation and destruction that drives the social sciences. 
•  The third is to imagine the study of social complexity as embracing the complexity of the globalised world in which we live. This includes the development of a more sophisticated (social) psychological response to complexity by thinking, feeling, behaving and changing in complex ways. There is often a disconnect between the analysis of social complexity on the one hand, and the full acceptance of it in daily life on the other hand. 
•  The fourth direction imagines the study of social complexity as one that critically examines the role of politics, power and inequality – not just as one of the many measures in complex system analysis but above all in qualitative terms.