In life, we often face unavoidable complexities in terms of our ability to understand or influence outcomes. Some questions which arise due to these complexities are: Why can’t the future be made certain? Why do the some people or events always end up at the center of controversy? Why do only a select few get ahead of their peers? Each question pertains to three central elements of complexities and these elements are: uncertainty, inequality and unfairness. Simplifying Complexity explains the scientific study of complex cognitive networks, as well as the methods scientists use to parse difficult problems into manageable pieces. Readers are introduced to scientific methodology and thought processes, followed by a discourse on perspectives on the three elements of complexity through concepts such as normal and non-normal statistics, scaling and complexity management. Simplifying Complexity combines basic cognitive science and scientific philosophy for both advanced students (in the fields of sociology, cognitive science, complex networks and change management) and for general readers looking for a more scientific guide to understanding and managing the nature of change in a complex world.

Loneliness has been described by modern psychologists as a 21st century epidemic, as it has been the subject of numerous news headlines in many regions. While many elderly people are affected by loneliness, the phenomenon has been increasingly observed by sociologists in younger individuals as well, including adolescents and university students. The correlates of loneliness is a collection of articles written by leading experts in the fields of psychology, sociology, social work and education, which examine how loneliness affects the various aspects of human lives, such as mental health, relationships, growing up, educational experiences, and the ability to be and remain an integral part of society. The book explains the concept of loneliness in psychological theory and presents a few studies on loneliness among different populations (including a case study on Finnish people). Written in a clear and systematic manner, The correlates of loneliness is the definitive beginners reference on the topic of loneliness for academicians, sociologists, psychiatrists and general readers.

This e-book presents a crucial work in the systematic study of educators’ cinematic reflections and to what extent could these be interpreted in terms of the theoretical framework of Habermas’s domains of reflection and discursive acts. The chapters in this volume altogether describe important theoretical developments, data analysis, and significant findings about the importance of popular film in pedagogy. The topics in this book present an exploratory view of reflective practices, cinematic experiences and journaling. Sample essays are also provided for the benefit of readers. It is through these converging possible cinematic explorations that we may be able to move from solitary/monologic reflective practices to a rational reconstructive educational pedagogy. This e-book will be of interest to students, researchers and teachers in the realm of psychology, education and pedagogy.

What Beliefs Are Made From explores the nature and purpose of belief. The book describes several strange beliefs that have been shared by many members of whole communities. The intellectualistic, dispositional, feeling and eliminativist theories of belief are then examined critically. This is followed by a review of factors that can influence people in their beliefs. These include faulty use of evidence, unconscious reasoning biases, inability to withhold judgement, wishful thinking, prior beliefs, shared beliefs, personal experience, testimony, judgements about the source of testimony, personality, in-group psychology, emotions and feelings, language, symbolism, non-verbal communication, repetition, propaganda, mysticism, rumour, conspiracy theories, and illness. The book also covers beliefs of children and belief during dreaming. The regulation of inquiry by belief and disbelief is described. What Beliefs Are Made From is a useful reference for general readers interested in the philosophy of the mind, and the psychology of belief.

This book is a personal, political and philosophical exploration of doing both therapy and research: an enquiry into how the process of therapy shapes the therapist as well as the client, and how the researcher is shaped by her research. A guiding theme is the proposal, following Foucault and Nikolas Rose, that psychotherapy is constituted, through forms of modern power, as a crucial contemporary site of both governance and resistance. As well as giving an account of the author's clinical and research practices as an art psychotherapist and narrative therapist, the book offers a highly readable introduction to poststructural theory and innovative social sciences methodologies, while expanding the understanding and practice of these theories and methodologies. The book embodies and performs what it describes, engaging readers far more strongly in complex theoretical material than is possible in an expository text. The poststructural, autoethnographic approach taken in this book is unique in the field of the arts therapies.

This Ebook focuses theoretically, empirically and practically on a concept of the self that includes neurobiological, psychological and social dimensions in psychotherapy with adults. The theoretical perspective on the self that is developed in the Ebook can be the basis for how a therapist may use himself/herself professionally in a therapeutic relationship. It is expected that the book will be of interest to many persons in this field.

Governments all over Northern Europe have placed public innovation high on the political agenda and pursuing public innovation through multi-actor collaboration such as public-private partnerships and governance networks appears to have particular potential. Collaborative Governance and Public Innovation in Northern Europe draws up the emergent field of collaborative public innovation research and presents a series of cutting-edge case studies on collaborative forms of governance and public innovation in Northern Europe. The edited volume offers scholarly reflections, empirical testimonies and learning perspectives on recent transformations of governance and the way in which new public policies, services and procedures are formulated, realized and diffused. Through the empirical case studies, the book discusses some of the wider political and social drivers, barriers, promises and pitfalls of collaborative public innovation initiatives in some European nations. Collaborative Governance and Public Innovation in Northern Europe will stimulate debates among scholars and decision-makers on how new forms of collaborative governance might enhance the capacity for public innovation and help in developing solutions to some of the most acute and wicked governance problems of our time.

Refounding Corporate Governance: The Metaphysics of Corporate Leadership is a deconstructive tour-de-force and leads the reader to an understanding of the further evolution of corporate governance in considered ways and brings them together in a coherent and understandable way. This book looks at the role of the individual in the organization and allows readers to reflect on their own role and interaction within their organization. It focuses particularly on leaders, managers and corporate board members and on how power and leadership in the corporation are operating now. The volume also looks comparatively at the governance dynamics of other organizations, such as the Catholic Church and Universities. The book provides an in-depth look at the way society’s organizations operate in the most important spheres of society and, in so doing, presents a comprehensive understanding of governance. The book should prove to be very useful for scholars and professionals interested in management theory and organizational leadership studies.

Refounding Political Governance: The Metaphysics of Public Administration points to a possible paradigm shift in the way Anglo-American Public Administration should be understood and analyzed. The book presents a unique approach to the analysis of power, leadership and management in Public Administration. The central theme is that humans make organizations in their own image and these organizations, in turn, are a product of the way humans think and act. The book extrapolates from historical philosophy and personality typologies to explain the dynamics and evolution of Public Administration. With the philosophical framework and approach clearly explained, the book provides a critique of current practice and recommends what is required to re-invent Public Administration, rather than New Public Management, in Anglo-American contexts. The book explains a new, more complex, and more useful, understanding of the dynamics of contemporary US Public Administration situated within the American Constitution. This book is ground-breaking and should be useful in all graduate Public Administration courses and professionals in the field of Public Administration.

This volume presents an illuminating analysis of the ways in which normalization processes and practices operate in a welfare state in an age of neoliberalism. This informative book problematizes the meaning of the phrase ‘normalization processes and practices’, that for an Anglophone audience may smack of functionalism. The historical context of the deliberate adoption of normalization processes and practices in Sweden in the post-World War II era was, in the first instance, an expression of the inclusivity designed to decrease inequalities and to achieve social justice. However all the contributors to this volume, show very clearly how notions of normalcy, of normalization, in a neoliberal time operate not only to create an integrating and equalizing context but also, and much more critically, to exclude certain groups of people, and produce a structural inequality that in recent years has been discussed under the term of ‘utanförskap’ or outsiderhood. Critiquing these interventions, the contributors to this volume show how diverse groups of people - immigrants, families considered 'at risk' by social services, pregnant women, young girls - are variously the objects of context-specific normalization processes and practices that make any resistance to such interventions difficult, if not impossible. What people 'normally do', cloaks that 'normal doing' with a fog of invisibilization that suffocates any form of protest. Normalization thus takes on specific forms of repression in particular circumstances, for instance through the ethnocentric imposition of norms of behaviour on migrants where that ethnocentricity is neither made evident nor acknowledged. This system of normalization also operates in schools, resulting in the reproduction of inequalities and discrimination from an early age. In such normalization processes 'the normal' or 'the usual' becomes a means for reinterpreting structural inequalities in terms of individual choice, and for displacing the responsibilities for change onto those positioned as outsiders. The individual chapters highlight how the operations of normalizing processes work to obscure their functioning, thus making any critique of both the underlying assumptions and their operationalization almost impossible.