The synchronized flashing of fireflies at night. The spiraling patterns of an aggregating slime mold. The anastomosing network of army-ant trails. The coordinat

The Self-Organizing Economy In the last few years the concept of self-organizing systems—complex systems in which randomness and chaos seem spontaneously to e

Technological systems become organized by commands from outside, as when human intentions lead to the building of structures or machines. But many nat ural syst

foreword by Hermann Haken For the past twenty years Scott Kelso's research has focused on extending the physical concepts of self- organization and the mathemat

This book integrates the theories of complex self-organizing systems with the rich body of discourse and literature developed in what might be called ‘social