Chaotics: An Agenda for Business and Society in the 21st Century

By Georges Anderla, Simon Forge, Simon Anderla, Georges; Dunning, Anthony; Forge

The new discipline of chaotics will alter our thinking about the real forces of change in our society. As presented here, chaotics emphasizes that the real world cannot be understood in terms of conventional deterministic philosophies or standard chaos theory, but that complexity in itself has a powerful but subtle role to play. How does this apply to business and society? To what degree are our lives governed by misguided notions--or do our businesses succeed by chance--because real societal and business forces and their effects are not really understood? Beginning with the foundations of the discipline, this book applies chaotics to business and wealth creation and to society. On the social side, it examines a sea-change in the philosophy of everyday living, be it the concept of employment or our relationship to the environment. The book examines personal identity and its loss in modern society, as well as the search for new contacts and gratification through technology. The authors look at the stunted growth of philosophy against science but emphasize what philosophy has to tell us in a chaotic world. A major new text which will be of interest to professionals and scholars in business, government, and society.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0275958825
• ISBN13: 9780275958824
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Chaotics: Implications for Education

This book takes an interesting look at chaos theory and complex systems theory (especially self-organizing behaviors) and promotes a new theory, Chaotics. Chaotics is seen as a bridge between the shortcomings of chaos theory and ideas surrounding complexity in today's rapidly changing world. Using chaotics, the authors look at a wide range of areas in which the application of the theory can be used to provide new insights into how current, degrading societal and business systems can be re-thought in order to facilitate the saving of or recreation of those failing systems. The authors spend a great deal of time in the first chapters of the book explaining their view of chaos theory and complex systems theory. This examination includes an interesting look at the history of not only chaos and complexity, but the deterministic scientific theories which, they say, have led to the decay of many of our world's current societal, educational, and environmental beliefs. Building upon this foundation, proposals are offered for re-thinking the way problems within these decaying systems are examined. Examples include viewing unemployment as a natural state of one's working life, an educational system shaped by the shrinking time-space compression of today's technological environment, and the possibility that 'advances' realized by today's information driven countries may, in fact, be in declines and not advances. In terms of education, which is my focus, the implications for using chaotics to address the monumental changes required of this aging and inefficient system may be significant. That our educational systems may be pushed towards more effective and efficient methods of operations by orchestrating changes within it, using chaotics, is certainly intriguing. That our educational systems need to undergo radical change if we are going to attempt to educate our children is not in question. Inserting chaotics into our education al change strategies is neither 'new fangled' nor 're-done', and could have a dramatic impact upon how we begin turning the bow of this monstrous ship we call education in America (for real). A bit of a tough read, Chaotics is certainly worth a close examination by anyone new to chaos or complexity theories. The ideas put forth in this book are worthy of consideration and will minimally alter the reader's perspective of change, happenstance and decay within complex systems.