ABSTRACT

Chaos is a philosophy of science that sees order as unpredictable and prone to sudden exponential change produced by an accumulation of complex events. Complexity theory attempts to understand a social world where chaos is one possible state of change. The literature on social science and chaos and complexity theory can be divided into two main groups, those text that are meta-theoretical and those more applied volumes that seek to utilise complexity theory with regard to a specific empirical application. K. Kontopoulos defines a complex theoretical approach to social structure as ‘the strategy of heterarchy or heterarchical emergence’. He has developed a complex account of competing micro, meso and macro logics that he suggests account for a complex matrix of social structures. Kontopoulos’ theoretical method has included consideration of spatial characteristics in the emergence of social structure. S. Kauffman has also described the spatial aspects of structure.