ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the concept of ecological resilience and how financial regulation could seek to regulate complex financial systems. It is concerned with the tension between the reality of social existence as essentially complex, nonlinear and emergent, as compared with the constructed reality of law as largely determinate and thus predictable. The book explores the constant reinterpretation, establishment, implementation, policing and transformation of law. It provides an interesting and potentially useful model for considering the nature of 'ruleness' and the ways in which a system is at risk of regulative 'entropy', that is, the decay of rule-described behaviour and hence of the predictive value of the rules ascribed. The chapter concludes by considering ways in which insights from complex systems theory might help us design systems of regulation that are negatively entropic and better able to impede ethical fading and creative compliance.