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THE EMERGING PARADIGM OF COMPLEXITY THEORY 33
Box 1.8
Differing approaches to the study of behaviour
Normative Interpretive Critical
Society and the social system The individual Societies, groups and individuals
Medium/large-scale research Small-scale research Small-scale research
Impersonal, anonymous forces
regulating behaviour
Human actions continuously
recreating social life
Political, ideological factors, power
and interests shaping behaviour
Model of natural sciences Non-statistical Ideology critique and action research
‘Objectivity’ ‘Subjectivity’ Collectivity
Research conducted ‘from the
outside’
Personal involvement of the
researcher
Participant researchers, researchers
and facilitators
Generalizing from the specific Interpreting the specific Critiquing the specific
Explaining behaviour/seeking causes
Assuming the taken-for-granted
Macro-concepts: society,
institutions, norms, positions, roles,
expectations
Structuralists
Technical interest
Understanding actions/meanings
rather than causes
Investigating the taken-for-granted
Micro-concepts: individual
perspective, personal constructs,
negotiated meanings, definitions of
situations
Phenomenologists, symbolic
interactionists, ethnomethodologists
Practical interest
Understanding, interrogating,
critiquing, transforming actions and
interests
Interrogating and critiquing the
taken for granted
Macro- and micro-concepts: political
and ideological interests, operations
of power
Critical theorists, action researchers,
practitioner researchers
Emancipatory interest
Chapter 1
The emerging paradigm of complexity
theory
An emerging fourth paradigm in educational
research is that of complexity theory (Morrison
2002a). Complexity theory looks at the world in
ways which break with simple cause-and-effect
models, linear predictability, and a dissection
approach to understanding phenomena, replacing
them with organic, non-linear and holistic
approaches (Santonus 1998: 3) in which relations
within interconnected networks are the order
of the day (Youngblood 1997: 27; Wheatley
1999: 10). Here key terms are feedback,
recursion, emergence, connectedness and selforganization.
Out go the simplistic views of
linear causality, the ability to predict, control and
manipulate, and in come uncertainty, networks
and connection, self-organization, emergence over
time through feedback and the relationships of
the internal and external environments, and
survival and development through adaptation and
change.
Chaos and complexity theories argue against
the linear, deterministic, patterned, universalizable,
stable, atomized, modernistic, objective,
mechanist, controlled, closed systems of law-like
behaviour which may be operating in the laboratory
but which do not operate in the social world
of education. These features of chaos and complexity
theories seriously undermine the value of
experiments and positivist research in education
(e.g. Gleick 1987; Waldrop 1992; Lewin 1993).
Complexity theory suggests that phenomena
must be looked at holistically; to atomize
phenomena into a restricted number of variables
and then to focus only on certain factors is
to miss the necessary dynamic interaction of
several parts. More fundamentally, complexity
theory suggests that the conventional units of
analysis in educational research (as in other
fields) should move away from, for example,
individuals, institutions, communities and systems
(cf. Lemke 2001). These should merge, so
that the unit of analysis becomes a web
or ecosystem (Capra 1996: 301), focused on,