Complexity Theory

This entry explores complexity theory, its meaning, its origins, its foundational ideas and its relationship to action research. As a cross-disciplinary theory, complexity is concerned with evolving and changing nonlinear systems and the inability to totally understand the whole system through an understanding of the parts. The entry argues that complexity can provide an epistemological, theoretical and methodological basis for action research, and a number of examples of such application are provided.

Complexity theory has emerged relatively recently as a valuable underpinning for action research theory and practice. As a collection of ideas, and thus perhaps more accurately referred to as ‘complexity theories’ (or sometimes ‘complexity science’), this body of literature has influenced a broad range of disciplines from biology, climatology, immunology, architecture and economics to education, business and psychology. Such cross-disciplinary relevance foreshadows the potential of complexity (the term used henceforth) as an epistemological, theoretical and methodological basis for action research.

Complexity is concerned with non-linear, evolving and changing systems—those that are unpredictable in that even if one were familiar with all the components of the system, one would still not be able to determine what exactly would happen next. Most social contexts [Page 167]can be considered as such systems, but these ideas resonate particularly in contexts such as teaching and learning, management and organizational change, contexts where action research has traditionally been practiced.

Complexity acknowledges the inability to totally understand the whole through an understanding of the parts. Rather, it aims to understand the whole by understanding the interaction of its parts. At its briefest, complexity is concerned with the ‘big consequences of little things’, helping to understand how coherent and purposive patterns and wholes emerge from the interactions of simple, non-purposive components.

Complexity’s foundational ideas (outlined below) can help action researchers to ‘make sense’ of their research context, particularly the nature of change and learning. It is also argued that action research provides an appropriate meta-methodology for those who recognize and embrace complexity in the social sciences.

That said, the application of complexity to action research has not been without critique. Such arguments are often based on particular modes of practice of action research itself and are ultimately influenced by the ontology, epistemologies, philosophies, beliefs and assumptions of those engaging in it. For example, action research which is focused on hypothesis testing or generalization of findings may not sit comfortably with complexity thinking. Additionally, some working with complexity in the hard sciences have challenged the application of these theories to the social sciences more generally.

Origins

The literature explicating complexity owes much of its development to a group of eminent cross-disciplinary researchers, several of them Nobel laureates, working at the Santa Fe Institute in the USA. The historical background to complexity is well outlined by Mitchell Waldrop (1992) in his popularized book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. This text references the seminal contributions of writers such as Fritjof Capra, Stuart Kauffman, Heinz Pagels, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers.

While a number of writers drew loose connections between complexity and action research in the late 1980s and 1990s, the most explicit theoretical work in this area was made in the late 1990s by the Canadians Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara, who have gone on to publish key papers on the topic.

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