The Complexity Turn

A flock of birds sweeps across the sky. Like a well-choreographed dance troupe, the birds veer to the left in unison.... The flock is organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. Bird flocks are not the only things that work that way. Ant colonies, highway traffic, market economies, immune systems – in all of these systems, patterns are determined... by local interactions among decentralised components. (Resnick, 1997: 3) THE SOCIAL and cultural sciences have experienced a whole array ofincursions over the past few decades. These have included Marxismin the 1970s, the linguistic turn and postmodernism in the 1980s, the body, performative and global culture turns in the 1990s. Many of these turns are reflected in and partly promoted within TCS journals and book series. This new Special Issue seeks to reflect upon, to develop and in part to evaluate yet another turn, the complexity turn. This turn derives from developments over the past two decades or so within physics, biology, math-ematics, ecology, chemistry and economics, from the revival of neo-vitalism in social thought (Fraser et al., 2005), and from the emergence of a more general ‘complex structure of feeling ’ that challenges some everyday notions of social order (Maasen and Weingart, 2000; Thrift, 1999). Within these scientific disciplines, an array of transformations took place, loosely known as chaos, complexity, non-linearity and dynamical systems analysis. There is a shift from reductionist analyses to those that involve the study of complex adaptive (‘vital’) matter that shows ordering but which remains on ‘the edge of chaos’. Self-assembly at the nanoscale is a current example of new kinds of matter seen as involving emergent complex adaptive systems. At the nanoscale the laws of physics operate in different ways, especially in the way that molecules stick together and through self-assembly can form complex nanoscale structures that could be the basis of whole new products, industries and forms of ‘life ’ (Jones, 2004).