Hardback
Handbook on Institutions and Complexity
This innovative Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the significance of complexity theory for understanding institutions. Eminent scholars cover the key tools and concepts of the field, including emergence, networks, ergodicity, and modularity, exploring their contributions to institutional formulation and evolution.
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Critical Acclaim
More Information
This innovative Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the significance of complexity theory for understanding institutions. Eminent scholars analyse the key tools and concepts of the field, including emergence, networks, ergodicity, and modularity, exploring their contributions to institutional formulation and evolution.
Bridging the gap between complexity theory and mainstream economics, this pioneering Handbook reveals novel approaches to understanding institutional processes from the micro to the macro level. Chapters balance theoretical discussions with practical analysis, showcasing the relevance of complexity to specific areas such as cities, forests, religion, and historical development. Ultimately, the Handbook argues that viewing economies and societies as co-evolving, non-linear, path-dependent, and non-equilibrium systems can provide invaluable insights into the study of institutional emergence and impact.
Academics and students in economics, politics, public policy and other social sciences will benefit from the in-depth analyses in this prescient Handbook. It is also a valuable resource for policy-makers interested in the study of complex systems and their ever-growing applications.
Bridging the gap between complexity theory and mainstream economics, this pioneering Handbook reveals novel approaches to understanding institutional processes from the micro to the macro level. Chapters balance theoretical discussions with practical analysis, showcasing the relevance of complexity to specific areas such as cities, forests, religion, and historical development. Ultimately, the Handbook argues that viewing economies and societies as co-evolving, non-linear, path-dependent, and non-equilibrium systems can provide invaluable insights into the study of institutional emergence and impact.
Academics and students in economics, politics, public policy and other social sciences will benefit from the in-depth analyses in this prescient Handbook. It is also a valuable resource for policy-makers interested in the study of complex systems and their ever-growing applications.
Critical Acclaim
‘All social science involves the study of interactions, and interactions lead to complexity. In this pathbreaking, heterodox, and fascinating collection, the editors have brought together twenty highly original thinkers who show the astonishing multiple ways in which institutions and complex systems connect and how the study of complexity can enrich our understanding of societies and their institutions past and present.’
– Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University, USA
‘The Handbook on Institutions and Complexity is a vital resource for any practitioner of modern political economy and social theory. Young scholars will have a hard time envisioning a time when the social sciences strove to develop an “institutionally antiseptic” theory of society. In response to this sterile vision of the social sciences, New Institutional Economics was developed and the powerful framework of analysis provided had wide acceptance in economics, politics and history. But translating the insights into the scientific strategy of modern social science often had the result for tractability of reasons of flattening the notion of institutions matter to its most simplistic rendering. The Handbook challenges that rendering and insists on the essential complexity of both the world we are trying to study and the theoretical framework we use to study that complex reality. The chapters inside this book represent foundational contributions to that effort.’
– Peter Boettke, George Mason University, USA
– Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University, USA
‘The Handbook on Institutions and Complexity is a vital resource for any practitioner of modern political economy and social theory. Young scholars will have a hard time envisioning a time when the social sciences strove to develop an “institutionally antiseptic” theory of society. In response to this sterile vision of the social sciences, New Institutional Economics was developed and the powerful framework of analysis provided had wide acceptance in economics, politics and history. But translating the insights into the scientific strategy of modern social science often had the result for tractability of reasons of flattening the notion of institutions matter to its most simplistic rendering. The Handbook challenges that rendering and insists on the essential complexity of both the world we are trying to study and the theoretical framework we use to study that complex reality. The chapters inside this book represent foundational contributions to that effort.’
– Peter Boettke, George Mason University, USA
