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Books : reviews

David S. Byrne.
Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: an introduction.
Routledge. 1998

‘Chaos’ and ‘complexity’ are the new buzz words in both science and contemporary society. The ideas they represent have enormous implications for the way we understand and engage with the world.

Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences introduces students to the central ideas which surround chaos/complexity theories. It discusses key concepts before using them as a way of investigating the nature of social research. By applying them to such familiar topics as urban studies, education and health, David Byrne enables readers new to the subject to appreciate the contribution which complexity theory can make to social research and to illuminating the crucial social issues of our day.

David S. Byrne.
Interpreting Quantitative Data.
Sage. 2002

How do quantitative methods help us to acquire knowledge of the real world? This book guides the reader through the complex causal processes and interactions between the social and natural worlds.

Classification through measurement is perhaps the most important and reliable way in which we can understand a complex non-linear world, and this refreshing and articulate book provides students with a novel and useful resource for doing quantitative research. It provides students with a guide to:

• Interpret the complex reality of the social world
• Achieve effective measurement
• Understand the use of official statistics
• Use social surveys
• Understand probability and quantitative reasoning
• Interpret measurements
• Apply linear modelling in an appropriate way
• Understand simulation and neural nets
• Integrate quantitative and qualitative modelling in the research process

Expressly written with the needs of students in mind, this book will be required reading for students interested in using quantitative research methods.

David S. Byrne.
Applying Social Science: the role of social research in politics, policy and practice.
Policy Press. 2011

In contemporary societies, social science has become increasingly linked with governance processes. At the same time there is an increasing recognition that attempts to understand the complex social world using similar approaches to ‘hard sciences’ are mostly useless. This wide-ranging book explores the relationship between social research as a process and the ways in which it is used in contemporary society and how it might be applied in the future. A central argument is that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ science of the social and that a recognition of the inevitability of application imposes obligations on social scientists wherever they work which challenge the passivity of most in the face of inequality and injustice. It will therefore be of interest to academics and students across a range of social science disciplines as well as to policy makers and practitioners.

David S. Byrne, Gill Callaghan.
Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: the state of the art.
Routledge. 2014

For the past two decades, ‘complexity’ has informed a range of work across the social sciences. There are diverse schools of complexity thinking, and authors have used these ideas in a multiplicity of ways, from health inequalities to the organization of large-scale firms. Some understand complexity as emergence from the rule-based interactions of simple agents and explore it through agent-based modelling. Others argue against such ‘restricted complexity’ and for the development of case-based narratives deploying a much wider set of approaches and techniques. Major social theorists have been reinterpreted through a complexity lens and the whole methodological programme of the social sciences has been recast in complexity terms.

In four parts, this book seeks to establish ‘the state of the art’ of complexity-informed social science as it stands now, examining: • the key issues in complexity theory • the implications of complexity theory for social theory • the methodology and methods of complexity theory • complexity within disciplines and fields.

It also points ways forward towards a complexity-informed social science for the twenty-first century, investigating the argument for a post-disciplinary, ‘open’ social science. Byrne and Callaghan consider how this might be developed as a programme of teaching and research within social science.