has consequences for many fields of endeavour including law and
management.
Uncertain Boundaries
Boundaries are hard to determine. This characteristic is intertwined with, and in
part flows from, the existence of openness and feedback loops. As these
operate, the change the subject and its behaviour, so they change the boundary
of the subject and also the boundary of its sphere of influence.
Openness
Complex systems are open to the outside environment. As has been note, they
interact with their environment as they adapt to new circumstances.
Unpatterned Connections
Complex systems may be scale free –
that is, there is no pattern about
connections between parts within the system and between the system and its
environment. There are only unpatterned connections or random connectivity.
Using a Web crawler, physicist Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues at
the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA, in 1999 mapped the
connectedness of the Web. To their surprise, the web did not have an even
distribution of connectivity (so-called "random connectivity"). Instead, some
network nodes had many more connections than the average. Seeking a simple
categorical label, Barabási and his collaborators called such highly connected
nodes "hubs". In physics, such right-skewed or heavy-tailed distributions
often have the form of a power law, because the probability P(k) that a node
in the network connects with k
other nodes was roughly proportional to k
-
?
,
and this function gave a roughly good fit to their observed data.
Feedback Loops
Relationships contain feedback loops. As an element or component of the
subject interacts with its environment, there can occur both damping (negative
feedback) and amplifying (positive feedback). For example, for a firm
operating in the market place one of the main feedback loops is provided by
the price mechanism. Feedback that is generated by an element comes back to
the subject and is likely to cause a change to the element or thus to the whole
subject. This outcome, and the non linear effect and the unpatterned
connections are enhanced by the system having memory and an ability to
process information. Its components therefore can engage in “collective
learning.”
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Hodgson (1998)
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