Robert Geyer

Beyond the Third Way: the science of complexity and the politics of choice

Focusing on the work of Anthony Giddens, this article reviews his vision of the Third Way and argues that it reflects a new and fundamental ‘complexity’ shift within the social sciences. His ability to partially recognise and integrate this shift into his thinking gives the Third Way much of its power and coherence. However, his unwillingness to accept the shifts full implications and his determination to find the one new way for the left blinds him to its more contingent and complex implications. By coming to terms with the development of complexity theory in the natural and social sciences, this article will attempt to go beyond the Third Way and argue that there is not one, two or three ways, but hundreds.

Can European Union (EU) Social NGOs Co-operate to Promote EU Social Policy?

This article examines why, despite similar general interests, institutional positions and political constraints, EU social NGOs find it so difficult to develop co-operative strategies except on the most fundamental issues. To demonstrate these difficulties the article considers the general reasons for and against co-operation between social NGOs and then examines the difficulties and advantages of collective EU social NGO action during the 1998 NGO funding crisis, Red Card protest and civil dialogue. The article argues that there is a fundamental desire for, and are benefits from, close co-operation between the EU social NGOs. However, due to the complex ‘context structure’ within which NGOs must operate, this co-operative impetus is constantly undermined. In conclusion, the article argues that social NGOs will remain weak and insignificant actors until the Commission/Parliament and/or the social NGOs can organise the complex context structure and allow co-operative strategies to emerge.

Using ‘complexity’ for improving educational research in health care

Systematic reviews of health care education have consistently reported a lack of long-term effects, failure to use theory, and inadequate methodological rigour. Such findings have highlighted the lack of a clear causality and predictability in health care education research and therefore the inadequacy of a traditional scientific framework with its focus on analysis, prediction and control. This article argues that in order to develop an effective and standardised framework we must go beyond such a restrictive agenda and toward one that appreciates education as a complex adaptive system. It uses the example of interprofessional education in the UK to showcase its discussion.

Complexity: an appropriate framework for development?

Kuhn (1970: 6–17) argued that a scientific discipline progresses through ‘paradigm shifts’ separated by periods of relative calm during which a particular set of rules and assumptions (the paradigm) defines the boundaries for ‘legitimate’ practices in that field. Capra (1983), amongst others, demonstrated that the natural sciences adhered until recently to the dictates of a linear paradigm that originated from ideas advanced by scholars such as Hobbes, Descartes, Locke and Newton. Linearity, as typified by the laws of motion, is correlated with order, predictability, linked causes and effects, and knowable universal laws that allow desirable results to be obtained by application of the requisite inputs to a system. The constituent parts of a system give useful indications of the mode of behaviour of the whole. Fundamentally, linear processes are deterministic, mechanistic and finite, as opposed to being evolutionary and open-ended. Consequently, they respond well to hierarchical management structures and to reductionist, rather than integrative, methods of analysis. In time, linear thinking spread beyond the original scientific discoveries to embrace practically all facets of life. The success of the industrial revolution, in particular, engendered a belief that most problems could be resolved by the positivist application of reason to empirical observations. Following that logic, Smith and Ricardo claimed to have captured the laws of economics, and Marx enunciated his ‘immutable’ and deterministic laws of capitalist development. More recently, using a similar logic, Bell (1965) predicted an end to ideology while Fukuyama

Globalization, Europeanization and the end of Scandinavian social democracy?

List of tables and figures Acknowledgements Notes on the contributors Introduction PART I: ECONOMIC POLICY Europeanization and the Crisis of Scandinavian Social Democracy Bad Timing Recommodification, Credit Reform and Crises of Coordination in Norway and Sweden in the 1980s and 1990s Floating Fortunes: Scandinavian Full Employment in the Tumultous 1970s-1980s PART II: WELFARE STATE AND SOCIAL POLICY Social Democratic Welfare States in a Global Economy: Scandinavia in Comparative Perspective Equality and Swedish Social Democracy: The Impact of Globalization and Europeanization Europeanization and the Scandinavian Model: Securing Borders and Defending Monopolies PART III: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE EUROPEAN UNION Just Say No! Norwegian Social Democrats and the European Union The Impact of Globalization and European Integration on the Danish Social Democratic Party Making Peace with the Union? The Swedish Social Democratic Party and European Integration Reference Index

Globalization, Europeanization, Complexity, and the Future of Scandinavian Exceptionalism

Throughout much of the twentieth century, the Scandinavian countries have been a problem for leftist and rightist visions of global order because, with various adaptations, they have continued to successfully develop on their exceptional path of market openness and social inclusiveness. How can this be explained? From a traditional social-science perspective, it cannot. However, from a complexity perspective, where there are no rigid hegemonic fundamental human orders such as globalization and Europeanization, nation-states evolve through complex adaptation with their global surroundings. From this perspective, diversity and exceptionalism—not order—are the norm.

The Strengths and Limits of New Forms of EU Governance: The Cases of Mainstreaming and Impact Assessment in EU Public Health and Sustainable Development Policy

Abstract Since the mid‐1990s, the EU has been experimenting with a variety of new forms of EU governance, including mainstreaming and impact assessment. Though originating in gender policy at the EU level, mainstreaming and impact assessments strategies subsequently spread to other social policies and more recently public health and sustainable development policy. However, the spread of these strategies has not been uncontested or unproblematic, generating problems of bureaucratic overload and costs and competition between policy areas. Using primary and secondary sources and recent interviews with European non‐governmental organisations and Commission elites, this article will examine and compare recent developments in the mainstreaming of EU health and sustainable development policy and compare the histories of and debates surrounding these developments. Through this comparison this article will expose new insights into current developments in both policy fields and contribute to the debate on mainstreaming and impact assessment strategies as new forms of EU governance.

Globalisation and the (non) defence of the welfare state.

This article explores the relationship between globalisation and the development of the British and Norwegian welfare states. Focusing on the welfare state policies of the British and Norwegian labour parties and their relationships to the European Union (an important indicator of the impact of globalisation on West European nation-states), it argues that despite the growing importance of global dynamics and pressures, national-level forces were the predominate factors in the development of the British and Norwegian welfare states and relations to the EU in the 1980s and 1990s. Consequently, globalisation does not lead to welfare state convergence, but to divergence, interwoven with national-level dynamics.

Introduction: complexity and the international arena

The influence of complexity theory on the study of international politics has been steadily growing ever since the first seminal accounts of the relevance of non-linear science in the works of James Rosenau (1990; 2003), Lars-Erik Cederman (1997), Robert Jervis (1997), Robert Axelrod (1997) and John Urry (2003). Originating in some of the most significant developments in the natural sciences of the last few decades, the insights, concepts and methods generated by complexity are proving increasingly attractive to scholars and policy-makers grappling with the political transformations and social dynamics of an inter-connected and stubbornly unpredictable world. Thus in 2007 Emilian Kavalski could write in the pages of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs about the emergence of a ‘fifth debate’ in international relations (IR) surrounding the advent of a nascent ‘complex international relations theory’. Our hope in putting together this special issue on ‘Complexity and the International Arena’ is to advance this debate by both engaging scholars already employing complexity in their work and drawing in readers unfamiliar with it or still uncertain of its value. As such, it is important to pre-empt two potential misconceptions that may arise among the latter audience when presented with the claim that a theory drawn from the natural sciences promises to transform the study of global politics. First of all, it is essential to dispel any notion that complexity represents a lapse intonaı̈ve scientismandan illusorydrive for certaintyandmastery.On the contrary, complexity embodies an inherently humble approach that is conscious of the limitations to predictability and control which are built into the very fabric of the world and our positions as observers and actors within it. Hence complexityinformed research seeks to work within such limitations rather than deny them. As Peter Allen argued, ‘Recognising these new “limits to knowledge”, therefore, should not depress us . . . this iswhatmakes life interesting’ (Allen 2001, 42). Nor is complexity an attempt to place the study of human societies under the tutelage of thenatural sciences, but rather it is oneof the conduits throughwhich thepernicious separationbetween these twodomainsofknowledge canbegin tobeovercomeviaa process of mutual exchange that can lay the ground for a ‘new alliance’ between them (Gulbenkian Commission 1996; Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Secondly, one should note that complexity does not constitute a single body of thought or unified theory, either in the natural or social sciences. Complexity is best thought of as the array of concepts, methods and intuitions that emerged piecemeal from an engagement with specific non-linear, adaptive, emergent and/or self-organizing phenomena/problems that revealed the limitations Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 24, Number 1, March 2011

Applying the tools of complexity to the international realm: from fitness landscapes to complexity cascades

Increasingly, complexity-based thinking is challenging the dominant rationalist, realist and reductionist international relations (IR) framework. However, to move this challenge beyond the academic realm and into the day-to-day world of policy, complexity thinkers must begin to develop useful tools for policy practitioners. This paper attempts to address this issue by demonstrating the weaknesses and limits of one traditional IR tool (X–Y graphic visualizations) and the strengths of complexity tools (the fitness landscape and range of complexity outcomes). To demonstrate these arguments we examine how fitness landscapes can be used to reinterpret traditional perspectives on development and conflict and make difficult problems more approachable through three-dimensional visualizations.