Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations,Complex Adaptive Systemsfocuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents. John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

This paper estimates peer effects in a university context where students are randomly assigned to sections. While students benefit from better peers on average, low-achieving students are harmed by high-achieving peers. Analyzing students’ course evaluations suggests that peer effects are driven by improved group interaction rather than adjustments in teachers’ behavior or students’ effort. Building on Angrist’s research, we further show that classical measurement error in a setting where group assignment is systematic can lead to a substantial overestimation of peer effects. However, when group assignment is random—like in our setting—peer effect estimates are biased toward zero.

Can we understand important social issues by studying individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow more than the people in them? Sociologists have long believed that psychology can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that if we have an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them, we can explain pretty much everything about social life. Social Emergence takes a new approach to these longstanding questions. Sawyer argues that societies are complex dynamical systems, and that the best way to resolve these debates is by developing the concept of emergence, focusing on multiple levels of analysis - individuals, interactions, and groups - and with a dynamic focus on how social group phenomena emerge from communication processes among individual members. This book makes a unique contribution not only to complex systems research but also to social theory.

System justification theory proposes that people are motivated to perceive the existing social system as fair, legitimate, and desirable. However, status-legitimacy effect, understood as the most disadvantaged living in the most unequal contexts experiencing this need most strongly, has only found mixed support in empirical works. This article presents a comprehensive test of the original reading of status-legitimacy hypothesis which implied that those with lower objective status are the most motivated to system justify and of the respecified version that posits subjective powerlessness to be the driver of undue system legitimization. Multilevel mixed-effects linear regression analysis of International Social Survey Programme modules on social inequality, covering almost 50,000 respondents from 28 countries, shows that the mean effects of both subjective and objective status are in line with predictions of economic rationality. To model contextual inequality, we distinguish between an objective measure, Gini, and perceived amounts of income differences as reported by respondents. The analysis testing contextual moderation lends support for the original reading of status-legitimacy hypothesis—the objectively, rather than subjectively, disadvantaged experience greater motivation to defend the system.

Michael Bommes was one of the most brilliant and original migration studies scholars of our time. This posthumous collection brings together a selection of his most important work on immigration and the welfare state, immigrant integration, discrimination, irregular migration, migrant networks and migration policy research.

How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world? What binds societies together and how can these social orders be structured in a fair way? This book addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others—the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest—are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. The book demonstrates that solidarity creates inclusive and exclusive social structures, and shows how they can be repaired. It is not perfect, it is not absolute, and the horrors which occur in its lapses have been seen all too frequently in the forms of discrimination, genocide, and war. Despite its worldly flaws and contradictions, however, solidarity and the project of civil society remain our best hope—the antidote to every divisive institution, every unfair distribution, and every abusive and dominating hierarchy. A grand and sweeping statement, the book is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.

Job insecurity causes far-reaching negative outcomes. The fear of job loss damages the health of employees and reduces the productivity of firms. Thus, job insecurity should result in increasing social costs. Analysing representative data from 17 European countries, this paper investigates self-perceived job insecurity. Our multi-level analysis reveals significant cross-country differences in individuals' perception of job insecurity. This finding is not only driven by social-structural or institutional differences, but the perception of job insecurity is also influenced by nation-specific unobserved characteristics.

The Imbalance of Power demonstrates that the indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of 'simple' political units with 'egalitarian' political ideologies and 'harmonious' relationships with nature.

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the \"cybernetic society,\" a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization—such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego—in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community.