ABSTRACT:
There is growing recognition that complexity is an
ontological feature of the world, and as such a crucial
issue for understanding the limits and possibilities of
concerted human action. However, for complexity theory
to be useful for policy analysis, we have to overcome
two main obstacles: First, instead of operating with a
rather undifferentiated concept of "systems" (assuming
that all systems shared the same characteristics which
could exhaustively explain their relevant properties),
we need to understand the characteristics of complex
human-material systems and how these affect the dynamics
of complexity. Second, policy analysts tend to see
complexity primarily as an obstacle in the path of
concerted human action. While it is certainly true that
complexity makes things more 'difficult', we should also
think of complexity in terms of intervention. Complexity
is an inescapable feature of the world that humans have
dealt with for centuries, if not millennia. Actors
harness complexity by acting on the situation at hand;
by intervening in it and observing if what happens
accords with the expectations they have held. We will
use the case of the rise of Personal Genomics to
illustrate and develop our argument. |
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