%0 eBook %M Solr-EB000389000 %A Ball, Philip %I Springer Berlin Heidelberg %D 2012 %C Berlin, Heidelberg %G English %@ 9783642290008 %T Why Society is a Complex Matter : Meeting Twenty-first Century Challenges with a New Kind of Science %U https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29000-8?nosfx=y %7 1st ed. 2012 %X Attempts to direct or manage such emergent properties generally reveal that ‘top-down’ approaches, which try to dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is needed instead is a ‘bottom-up’ approach that aims to guide self-organization towards desirable states. This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of complexity can be applied to the study and management of social phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion formation and the growth and structure of cities. Building on these successes, the book argues that the complex-systems view of the social sciences has now matured sufficiently for it to be possible, desirable and perhaps essential to attempt a grander objective: to integrate these efforts into a unified scheme for studying, understanding and ultimately predicting what happens in the world we have made.