Qualitative Complexity

Chris Jenks is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice Chancellor at Brunel University. He has written numerous books on culture, sociology and childhood. He is interested in sociological theory, post-structuralism and heterology, childhood, cultural theory, visual and urban culture and extremes of behaviour.

• Part 1: The Interdisciplinary Field 1. Complexity Theory: A Positioning Paper 2. From Descartes’ Conjecture to Kant’s Subject and the Computo 3. Autopoiesis in Cognitive Biology 4. Emergentism, Evolutionary Psychology and Culture 5. Prigogine’s Thermodynamics, Ontology and Sociology Part 2: Critical Developments 6. Modernism and Determinism: Linear Expectations and Qualitative Complexity Analyses 7. Complexity Theory as a Critique of Postmodernism 8. Cognition and the Renewal of Systems Theory: Redundant Idioms and Disputed Positions 9. The Evolution of Intelligence, Consciousness and Language: Implications for Social Theory 10. Complexity, Language and Culture: Social Systems in Qualitative, i.e. not Formal Terms Part 3: The Fields of Complex Analysis: Contemporary Complexity Theory 11. The Ethics of Pragmatism: Politics and Post-Structuralism in Transition after the Complexity Turn 12. The Topology of Complexity 13. Re-Interpreting Global Complexity as an Ontology: Human Ecology