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Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

We discuss the impact of complexity science on the design and management of health care organizations over the past decade. We provide an overview of complexity science issues and their impact on thinking about health care systems, particularly with the rising importance of information systems. We also present a complexity science perspective on current issues in today’s health care organizations and suggest ways that this perspective might help in approaching these issues.

We review selected research, focusing on work in which we participated, to identify specific examples of applications of complexity science. We then take a look at information systems in health care organizations from a complexity viewpoint.

Complexity science is a fundamentally different way of understanding nature and has influenced the thinking of scholars and practitioners as they have attempted to understand health care organizations. Many scholars study health care organizations as complex adaptive systems and through this perspective develop new management strategies. Most important, perhaps, is the understanding that attention to relationships and interdependencies is critical for developing effective management strategies.

Increased understanding of complexity science can enhance the ability of researchers and practitioners to develop new ways of understanding and improving health care organizations.

This analysis opens new vistas for scholars and practitioners attempting to understand health care organizations as complex adaptive systems. The analysis holds value for those already familiar with this approach as well as those who may not be as familiar.

The purpose of this paper is to: give a brief history of the development of complexity science for people unfamiliar with the details of complexity science; describe the different types of complexity; discuss examples of the types of complexity, and introduce some ideas about how complexity could be introduced into education.

This paper summarizes other work in the field of complexity science, and organizes the results in a new way with the intent of making a difficult subject easier for the reader to understand.

Two different types of complexity are described – organized and unorganized. The focus of the paper is on organized complexity of which three categories are described – complicated, chaotic and critical. Examples, descriptions and characteristics of each category are given.

Suggestions are given as to how this transformational science could be integrated into education.

The paper summarizes other work in the field of complexity science, and organizes the results in a new way with the intent of making a difficult subject easier for the reader to understand.

This chapter discusses the emerging network science approach to the study of complex adaptive systems and applies tools derived from statistical physics to the analysis of tourism destinations. The authors provide a brief history of network science and the characteristics of a network as well as different models such as small world and scale free networks, and dynamic properties such as resilience and information diffusion. The Italian resort island of Elba is used as a case study allowing comparison of the communication network of tourist organizations and the virtual network formed by the websites of these organizations. The study compares the parameters of these networks to networks from the literature and to randomly created networks. The analyses include computer simulations to assess the dynamic properties of these networks. The results indicate that the Elba tourism network has a low degree of collaboration between members. These findings provide a quantitative measure of network performance. In general, the application of network science to the study of social systems offers opportunities for better management of tourism destinations and complex social systems.

This paper aims to expose the inadequacy of social marketing to tackle complex social problems, while proposing an expansion in the discipline’ conceptual repertoire. The goal is to incorporate complexity tools, in particular from the system dynamics field, and the promotion of mindware within a true transdisciplinary paradigm.

This paper uses literature review to support the proposed theoretical development. It also presents a short case study.

Most problems that plague our modern societies have a distinctive complex nature that is not amenable to traditional social marketing interventions. Social marketing has simplified the problem of bringing about societal change by thinking that upstream social actors can be influenced in the same way as downstream individuals. This paper shows that this is not the case while proposing a framework to close this gap.

The proposed framework is a theoretical one. It depends on further refinements and actual application to wicked problems.

Complex social problems – or wicked problems – remain widespread in modern societies. Moreover, they are getting worse over time. The paper presents a proposal to redefine the limits of the social marketing discipline so it can be more useful to tackle such problems. Practical approaches such as measuring the success of mindware in the marketplace of ideas are implied in the proposed framework.

The increase in complexity of social problems has not been accompanied by an evolution in the discipline of social marketing. The lack of proper conceptual tools has prevented the discipline from contributing to tackling these problems effectively. Some interventions may actually worsen the underlying problems, as illustrated in the paper.

This paper identifies two major gaps associated with the social marketing discipline, in particular the lack of complexity and systems thinking and the forsaking of ideas (mindware) as a legitimate goal of the discipline. This realization corroborates the claim that boundaries among disciplines are often artificial, hindering the proper understanding of complex social problems. In turn, only the use of adequate conceptual lenses makes it possible to devise interventions and programs that tackle actual causes (instead of symptoms) of complex social problems.

Approaches to solving sustainability problems require a specific problem-solving mode, encompassing the complexity, fuzziness and interdisciplinary nature of the problem. This paper aims to promote a complex systems’ view of addressing sustainability problems, in particular through the tool of network science, and provides an outline of an interdisciplinary training workshop.

The topic of the workshop is the analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a political action plan. The authors are interested in the synergies and trade-offs between the goals, which are investigated through the structure of the underlying network. The authors use a teaching approach aligned with sustainable education and transformative learning.

Methodologies from network science are experienced as valuable tools to familiarise students with complexity and to handle the proposed case study.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work which uses network terminology and approaches to teach sustainability problems. This work highlights the potential of network science in sustainability education and contributes to accessible material.

Three problematic issues followed by paradigm changes over the recent history of human intellectual endeavour are identified as 1. mysticism/superstition to – conventional science (of physics), 2. predominant use of qualitative/quantitative properties for analysis and design to – structural or systemic properties, and 3. current speculative/fragmented, multiple approaches to the “systemic view” to – a firmer knowledge-based approach reflecting the empirical and universal nature of this view. This paper aims to consider the problematic issues, to conclude that conventional science is inadequate to cope with the 2nd paradigm change and to introduce a “new science of systems” which can integrate conventional science and alleviate the 3rd problematic issue by suggesting three principles implemented by linguistic modelling as operational model.

The highly successful methodology of conventional science is followed with systemic content by suggesting three general principles of systems, namely, principle of existence (pervasiveness of structural description), principle of complexity (aggregates for emergence of outcomes) and principle of change (change by purpose or chance), and linguistic modelling of static and dynamic scenarios based on natural language as operational model. This language is processed to “elementary constituents”, of which complex structures can be constructed. These constituents are converted into reasoning schemes consisting of “ordered pairs” and “predicate logic statements” in static and dynamic states.

Stories of problematic scenarios are converted into the universal scheme of “management/producers” – “products” – “users/consumers” by constructing linguistic networks of products and semantic diagrams of organizations/user/consumers for investigating the emergence of outcomes in analysis and for designing prototypes. Problematic issues of individual objects in a scenario are resolved by methods of conventional science, which is thus integrated with systems science to form the “scientific enterprise”.

Once the new approach is debated, further developments in the mathematics of ordered pairs, predicate logic and uncertainties are needed. The linguistic basis is to be further investigated. Connection with AI and “logical atomism of Bertrand Russell” is to be explored.

Further applications to large-scale scenarios by practitioners using the “universal scheme” and development of software are needed.

The approach is rooted in accepted branches of knowledge, is highly teachable and should lead to be used by professionals and others once debated and accepted.

Smart manufacturing is the prime gripper for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. Smart manufacturing systems (SMSs) largely determine how smart manufacturing evolves in technical and organizational dimensions and how it realizes values in products, production or services. SMSs are growing rapidly and receiving tons of attention from academic research and industrial practice. However, the development of SMSs is still in its fancy, and many issues wait to be identified and solved, such as single point failures, low transparency and ineffective resource sharing. Blockchain, an emerging technology deriving from Bitcoin, is competent to aid SMSs to conquer troubles due to its decentralization, traceability, trackability, disintermediation, auditability and etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the blockchain applications in SMSs, seek out the challenges faced by blockchain-enabled SMSs (BSMSs) and provide referable research directions and ideas.

A comprehensive literature review as a survey is conducted in this paper. The survey starts by introducing blockchain concepts, followed by the descriptions of a literature review method and the blockchain applications throughout the product life cycle in SMSs. Then, the key issues and challenges confronting BSMSs are discussed and some possible research directions are also proposed. It finally presents qualitative and quantitative descriptions of BSMSs, along with some conclusions and implications.

The findings of this paper present a deep understanding about the current status and challenges of blockchain adoption in SMSs. Furthermore, this paper provides a brand new thinking for future research.

This paper minutely analyzes the impacts that blockchain exerts on SMSs in view of the product life cycle, and proposes using the complexity science thinking to deal with BSMSs qualitatively and quantitatively, including tackling the current major problems BSMSs face. This research can serve as a foundation for future theoretical studies and enterprise practice.

As a discipline, health organisation and management is focused on health-specific, collective behaviours and activities, whose empirical and theoretical scholarship remains under-utilised in the field of implementation science. This under-engagement between fields potentially constrains the understanding of mechanisms influencing the implementation of evidence-based innovations in health care. The aim of this viewpoint article is to examine how a selection of theories, models and frameworks (theoretical approaches) have been applied to better understand phenomena at the micro, meso and macro systems levels for the implementation of health care innovations. The purpose of which is to illustrate the potential applicability and complementarity of embedding health organisation and management scholarship within the study of implementation science.

The authors begin by introducing the two fields, before exploring how exemplary theories, models and frameworks have been applied to study the implementation of innovations in the health organisation and management literature. In this viewpoint article, the authors briefly reviewed a targeted collection of articles published in the Journal of Health Organization and Management (as a proxy for the broader literature) and identified the theories, models and frameworks they applied in implementation studies. The authors then present a more detailed exploration of three interdisciplinary theories and how they were applied across three different levels of health systems: normalization process theory (NPT) at the micro individual and interpersonal level; institutional logics at the meso organisational level; and complexity theory at the macro policy level. These examples are used to illustrate practical considerations when implementing change in health care organisations that can and have been used across various levels of the health system beyond these presented examples.

Within the Journal of Health Organization and Management, the authors identified 31 implementation articles, utilising 34 theories, models or frameworks published in the last five years. As an example of how theories, models and frameworks can be applied at the micro individual and interpersonal levels, behavioural theories originating from psychology and sociology (e.g. NPT) were used to guide the selection of appropriate implementation strategies or explain implementation outcomes based on identified barriers and enablers to implementing innovations of interest. Projects aiming to implement change at the meso organisational level can learn from the application of theories such as institutional logics, which help elucidate how relationships at the macro and micro-level have a powerful influence on successful or unsuccessful organisational action. At the macro policy level, complexity theory represented a promising direction for implementation science by considering health care organisations as complex adaptive systems.

This paper illustrates the utility of a range of theories, models and frameworks for implementation science, from a health organisation and management standpoint. The authors’ viewpoint article suggests that increased crossovers could contribute to strengthening both disciplines and our understanding of how to support the implementation of evidence-based innovations in health care.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to refine the conceptual framework of complexity. For such a purpose, a number of epistemologically oriented remarks are provided, arguing about the relevance of second-order considerations for complexity and the importance of pluralism in scientific research.

At first, the paper focuses on one of the topical areas of complexity research, i.e. network theory, but uses this for drawing the attention to more general issues. The underlying assumption is that scientific and philosophical research might complement each other, and that this is especially crucial for the advancement of complexity.

The paper suggests three ways for refining the scheme of complexity: analyzing it at the right level, i.e. not focusing on single principles or theories (e.g. network theory), but rather on the overall frame; including both ontological and epistemological considerations; and recognizing how the epistemological implications of complexity foster the adoption of a pluralist stance in scientific research (and beyond).

The way in which science (complexity) is portrayed, i.e. as “perspectival” and inclined to pluralism, could impact on how it is thought, designed and socially perceived.

Complexity is one of most promising fields of contemporary science, but still lacks of a coherent frame of analysis. This requires an investigation from different point of views, as an object of interdisciplinary cooperation. The main paper’s value consists of providing second-order considerations which puts scientific findings in perspective and can contribute to a better understanding of their meaning from a philosophical standpoint too.