Times, Noise and Institutional Complexity. A Comment on Graham Room’s Essay on the “Contingent Historical Model” of Social Dynamics

Authors

  • Flaminio Squazzoni Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6503-6077

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10820

Keywords:

institutional change, complexity, social evolution, time, noise

Abstract

This comment on the essay “The Empirical Investigation of Non-Linear Dynamics in the Social World. Ontology, Methodology and Data”, by Graham Room, focuses on the challenge of understanding institutional change in complex social systems. It discusses the evolutionary foundations of Room’s “Contingent Historical Model” by questioning the bio-social divide on selection mechanisms. It concentrates on Room’s concept of temporalities of institutional change and discusses the role of noise.

References

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Braudel, F. (1992). Civilization and Capitalism. 15th-18th Century. In Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Original work published 1979).

Elias, N. (1986). Time: An Essay. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Elster, J. (2015). Explaining Social Behavior. More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Jain, S., & Krishna, S. (2003). Graph Theory and the Evolution of Autocatalytic Networks. In S. Bornholdt & H.G. Schuster (Eds.), Handbook of Graphs and Networks (pp. 355–395). Weinheim: Wiley-VCH.

Macy, M., & Tsvetkova, M. (2015). The Signal Importance of Noise. Sociological Methods & Research, 44(2), 306–328. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124113508093

Room, G. (2011). Complexity, Institutions and Public Policy: Agile Decision-Making in a Turbulent World. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Room, G. (2016). Agile Actors on Complex Terrains: Transformative Realism and Public Policy. London & New York: Routledge.

Room, G. (2020). The Empirical Investigation of Non-Linear Dynamics in the Social World. Ontology, Methodology and Data. Sociologica, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10819

Sapolski R.M. (2017). Behave. The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. London: Bodley Head.

Squazzoni, F. (2014). A Social Science-Inspired Complexity Policy: Beyond the Mantra of Incentivization. Complexity, 19(6), 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21520

Squazzoni, F. (2017). Towards a Complexity-Friendly Policy: Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Equilibrium Thinking in Economics and Public Policy. In J. Johnson, A. Nowak, P. Ormerod, B. Rosewell & Y.-C. Zhang (Eds.), Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy (pp. 135–148). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Wrangham, R. (2019). The Goodness Paradox. How Evolution Made Us More and Less Violent. London: Profile Books.

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Published

2020-05-20

How to Cite

Squazzoni, F. (2020). Times, Noise and Institutional Complexity. A Comment on Graham Room’s Essay on the “Contingent Historical Model” of Social Dynamics. Sociologica, 14(1), 195–199. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10820

Issue

Section

Comments on Essays