Global Complexity

by John Urry

Global Complexity is a path-breaking book, which examines how the ideas of chaos and complexity can help us to analyse global processes. Urry argues that there are major advantages in thinking about global processes in this way. The idea of complexity emphasizes that systems are balanced between order and chaos, that a system does not necessarily move towards equilibrium and that events are both unpredictable and irreversible in their effects. Hence specific events can have unexpected effects, often distant in time and space from where they occurred.
This book combines new theory with many illustrations of how global processes operate. Urry distinguishes between ‘global networks’ and ‘global fluids’, and shows how forms of global emergence develop from the complex relationships between these networks and fluids. He draws out the implications of global complexity for our understanding of social order and argues that complexity requires us to reformulate the main categories of sociology and to reject any globalization thesis that is over-unified, dominant and unambiguous in its effects. Global systems are always ‘on the edge of chaos’.
This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics, geography and economics and to and to all those concerned with rethinking the nature of globalization.

Genres: Science

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2002

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a special book, one of the few that changed media/communication and cultural studies. Exploring the popular metaphor of the time - 'flow' - Urry offers an incisive, complex and convincing exploration of the relationship between local, regional and global formations. The metaphors of the book are fluid: shaping rather than structural. While there is also work on networks, which is perhaps dated now, the mobility analyses he would later develop are present in this monograph.

This is an important book for anyone interested in moving beyond glib cliches of globalization. It is a book of shapes, textures, patterns and flows.

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be an excellent starting place for a student of globalization or the application of complexity science to the social sciences. The opening chapters are a terrific synthesis and lit review (as of 2003), clear, well-observed, and with excellent summations of complex works (the Castells trilogy is brilliant, but it's some 1500 pages of eye-bleedingly dense prose: Urry's summaries alone are worth reading the book for).

As it was written in 2003, one needs to apply a discount factor to the globaloney and gee-whizzery: several of the chapters on the future of digital technologies and the decline of the nation-state are just skippable. Also, social scientists should simply be forbidden from coining neologisms and acronyms, but that vice is far from unique to Urry.

Urry's argument is that sociology has for too long taken an atomistic approach to "societies," which, if it was ever justifiable, certainly isn't anymore. He employs complexity science without over-analogizing between physical and cultural systems, an easy trap to fall into.

In all, while a bit dated, Urry's brevity and clarity makes this a solid and useful read.