Global Complexity / Edition 1

Global Complexity / Edition 1

by John Urry
ISBN-10:
0745628176
ISBN-13:
9780745628172
Pub. Date:
12/30/2002
Publisher:
Polity Press
ISBN-10:
0745628176
ISBN-13:
9780745628172
Pub. Date:
12/30/2002
Publisher:
Polity Press
Global Complexity / Edition 1

Global Complexity / Edition 1

by John Urry

Hardcover

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Overview

Global Complexity is a path-breaking book, which examines how the ideas of chaos and complexity can help us to analyse global processes. Urry argues that there are major advantages in thinking about global processes in this way. The idea of complexity emphasizes that systems are balanced between order and chaos, that a system does not necessarily move towards equilibrium and that events are both unpredictable and irreversible in their effects. Hence specific events can have unexpected effects, often distant in time and space from where they occurred.

This book combines new theory with many illustrations of how global processes operate. Urry distinguishes between ‘global networks’ and ‘global fluids’, and shows how forms of global emergence develop from the complex relationships between these networks and fluids. He draws out the implications of global complexity for our understanding of social order and argues that complexity requires us to reformulate the main categories of sociology and to reject any globalization thesis that is over-unified, dominant and unambiguous in its effects. Global systems are always ‘on the edge of chaos’.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics, geography and economics and to and to all those concerned with rethinking the nature of globalization.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780745628172
Publisher: Polity Press
Publication date: 12/30/2002
Pages: 184
Product dimensions: 7.87(w) x 9.84(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

John Urry (1946-2016) was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University

Table of Contents

Preface.

Chapter 1: Societies and the Global.

Chapter 2: The Complexity Turn.

Chapter 3: Limits of ‘Global' Analyses.

Chapter 4: Networks and Fluids.

Chapter 5: Global Emergence.

Chapter 6: Social Ordering and Power.

Chapter 7: Complexity beyond Society.

Bibliography.

Index

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