Thanks Justin and Heather,

I have to say I am a bit wary of the notion of ‘simple rules’ - there is often a slippage from recognising a regularity that emerges from ongoing interaction - that you might describe as a rule in the sense of being something that recurs in practice - and the use of a rule as a 'law' in a complex system. There are parallels here with Bourdiue’s notion of the 'objectivist illusion', and substituting the map for the territory (Bourdieu 2007).

Dave Byrne and Gill Callaghan (2014) discuss this as ‘restricted complexity’ which is interestingly a widespread reading and uptake of complexity - particularly in the US and particularly in the form of agent based models and a lot of mathematical models that generate ‘emergence’ from simple rule-governed interactions (the boids simulation of flocking birds being a classic example).

Instead he argues that social systems are examples of 'generalised complexity’ - because agency and meaning come into play, adding more layers of interaction and feedback. I am very much in agreement with Byrne and Callaghan that it is this generalised complexity that is to the fore in social systems. This doesn’t mean mathematical models are not useful, but they need to be calibrated against reality and empirical data. Many of the economic models are really about mythical rules and often not brought into contact with empirical reality (think of game theory and its abstraction from any plausibly real context of relational and communication rich human interactions).

That said, I do hold out the promise of complexity informed approaches pointing to a retroactive understanding of the things that seem to matter, and the kinds of patterns that RE also attempts to generalise from the ongoing flow of real social settings with their interactions between contexts and mechanisms at various nested levels of reality. We do want to find some things that are generaliseable in understanding social practice, so that we can build on the best possibilities rather than the worst in what people do, I agree. Here, in the complexity frame, the notion of ‘control parameters’ (see Byrne and Callaghan 2014 for this too) - important sets of system properties that can have a key influence and bearing on whether the system tips from one state (‘attractor' in the language of complexity) or another. But again these are not to be understood in any simple deterministic way - rather they are the constellation of factors that seem to co-occur when seeing certain patterns of outcomes, and usually a relational constellation of things (very much drawn from a critical realist ontology in common with Realist evaluation). This is quite different from the common understanding of rule as a deterministic law, and that is why it I worry about the use of that term.

I had a coffee chat with Gill Westhorpe at the CARES conference where we touched on the pre-conference meeting on complex causality (which I very much regret missing) - and I think she hinted that the interpretation of rule was an issue in that discussion (forgive me Gill if I am re-writing history!) though I couldn’t say exactly how that played out of course.

This debate has also played out in evaluation circles and Chris Mowles and Ralph Stacey have pointed to the similar danger of reifying complexity in the notion of rules, and I have written about this in a development related paper on the insights of complexity as applied to evaluation: http://wiki.ikmemergent.net/files/1203-IKM_Emergent_Working_Paper_14-Complexity_Theory-March_2012.pdf

Warm regards

Robin