# What Sociologists Should Know About Complexity

*Page · Complexity & Systems, Critique & Boundary · Annual Review of Sociology · 2015 · Paywalled*

Page writes the bridge between formal complexity science and the study of human social systems, and does it with unusual discipline. His aim is to explain to social scientists why complexity is not a vague gesture at interconnectedness but a specific set of features that demand different models and different evidence: heterogeneity among the actors, networks of interdependence, adaptation and learning, feedback, and emergence, whereby patterns at the level of the whole arise from interaction and cannot be read off the parts. The most useful move for this corpus is his insistence on distinguishing the genuinely complex from the merely complicated and from the loosely metaphorical: he is explicitly resisting the everything-is-connected version of complexity that lets people wave the word around without changing anything about how they think or measure. Because complex systems produce outcomes that are path-dependent, tipping-prone and often unpredictable, Page argues that conventional variable-based social science, which seeks stable average effects, systematically misses what matters, and that formal models and computational methods are needed to reason about the mechanisms instead. For a map that is sceptical of the commodification of complexity language, Page is the rigorous friend: he takes the ideas seriously enough to say precisely what they do and do not license. Its limit is that it is written for and from a modelling tradition, so its remedies lean towards a formalism that not every organisational reader will want to adopt. (Text drawn from the 2015 Annual Review of Sociology paper, 41, pp. 21-41.)

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- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112230
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## Connected concepts (5)

- [Complex Adaptive Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/holland-1992.md) (paper)
- [More Is Different](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/anderson-1972.md) (paper)
- [The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/kurtz-snowden-2003.md) (paper)
- [Complexity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/complexity.md)
- [PS in Diverse Groups](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-foundations-of-psychological-safety-in-diverse-groups.md)