Emergence has a long and controversial history. In this paper we briefly review the primary strands of the debate, paying attention to its use in the fields of philosophy of science and mind, social science and systems theory including the theory of complex systems. We argue that it is important to recognize why emergence in social systems is fundamentally different from other natural systems. ...

Dashun Wang1; 2, Yu-Ru Lin3; 4, and James P. Bagrow5; 6 1Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA 2Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA 3College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA 4Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA 5Engineeri...

Ecological systems theory is explicated as a current form of successive systems models used in social work. Behavior principles assumptive in this model are identified: of exchange balance, inner consistency, and dialectial change. Several misconceptions of ecological systems theory and a cultist aspect of its current popularity are addressed. Advantages, including the emergence of practice pri...

Received: 11 August 2005 Revised: 27 September 2005 Accepted: 29 September 2005 ‘Antonio! I’ve discovered a new Vietnamese restaurant, you have to try it, it’s excellent!’ this kind of conversation has been very common over the years I spent side by side with Claudio at the LSE. We moved to London at almost the same time and we both had to find out how to settle in the city. Our daily conversat...

Along with the explosive growth of the phenomenon Online Social Networks (OSN), identifying influential users in OSN has received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, the development of practical approaches for the identification of influential users is still in its infancy and researchers face numerous challenges. By means of a structured literature review, we analyze and synthe...

Although there has been a significant increase in networked communication and a growing interest in virtual organizing, to date researchers have yet to establish consistent terminology and have paid little attention to how specific characteristics of the electronic network influence social dynamics such as knowledge contribution. To address this gap, we develop a theoretical model and a set of ...

There are two dominant approaches to describe and understand the anatomy of complete health and well-being systems internationally. Yet, neither approach has been able to either predict or explain occasional but dramatic crises in health and well-being systems around the world and in developed emerging market or developing country contexts. As the impacts of such events can be measured not simp...

Technical systems are intuitively understood as rather different from organizations. Yet, this holds merely for their implementation. It appears to be very convenient to consider technical systems as ’automated’ social systems. The first results of a research project, investigating the benefits of this ’social stance’ towards technical systems, are reported upon in this paper. Two example techn...

Building construction challenge, in recent years, is the reduction of social, economical and environmentalimpacts along with economical nature and increasing life quality, as here sustainable construction is important. Pre-fabrication and industrialization are referred as a solution of sustainable construction due to some of its main characteristics consisting of many sustainability aspects. Du...

In sociology and social sciences there has been for long a debate on whether actions and agents play the role of the explanans in sociological or social scientific explanations or structures and rules. In this contribution it will be argued that introducing the concept of self-organisation that relates agency and systems enables the divide between both strains of thought to be rendered obsolesc...