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In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential...
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Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as...
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In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, Francois Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese stategies work in several domains (the battle-field, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and...
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Complexity science has seriously challenged long-held views in the scientific community about how the world works. These ideas, particularly about the living world, also have radical and profound implications for organizations and society as a whole. Available in paperback for the first time, this insightful book describes and considers ideas from complexity science and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change. Author McMillan...
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The current model of public policy-making is no longer right for a government that has set itself the challenge of delivery. Improvements are driven by central policy initiatives which assume a direct relationship between action and outcome - but this is a false assumption. Public services are complex adaptive systems which are subject to the law of unintended consequences, so intervention can make problems worse. That is why the carrot-and-stick approach to reform which links increased...
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Dao De Jing is one of the richest, most suggestive, and most popular works of philosophy and literature. Composed in China between the late sixth and the late fourth centuries b.c., its enigmatic verses have inspired artists, philosophers, poets, religious thinkers, and general readers down to our own times. This new translation, both revelatory and authentic, captures much of the beauty and nuance of the original work. In an extensive and accessible commentary to his translation, Moss...
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Here, for the first time, development studies encounters the set of ideas popularly known as 'Chaos Theory'. Samir Rihani applies to the processes of economic development, ideas from complex adaptive systems like uncertainty, complexity, and unpredictability. Rihani examines various aspects of the development process - including the World Bank, debt, and the struggle against poverty - and demonstrates the limitations of fundamentally linear thinking in an essentially non-linear world.
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In the third edition of this successful text, Ralph Stacey continues to question the view that organisations operate and succeed in relatively stable environments. He argues that in order to succeed in uncertainty and continual change, organisations need to create new perspectives and learn from the chaos within which they operate. This edition continues to focus on this radically different approach to strategic management. The central tenets of this approach have to do with unpredictability...