| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
Chaos or complexity theory distinguishes the presence of social disorder from order within social disorder. The notion of patterned regularities operating deep within the apparent randomness of dynamic systems (including the behavior of society as a macro/micro system) challenges the assumptions informing correctional, psychiatric, and/or legal practice. It draws attention away from modernist convictions of linear cause-effect inquiry, precise prediction, and rigid control, toward postmodernist notions of nonlinear causality, spontaneity, and chance that can exist simultaneously with order.
Moreover chaos theory asserts that individual differences must be allowed to exist ; that is, tolerance for individual, nonlinear behavior does not dispose a social system to unmanageable disorder. The fractal nature of human existence tends toward a strange attractor : a naturally occurring order within the disorder of a system. Excessive regulation at the personal or local level does not ensure stability at the societal or global levels. Concern must be directed toward those key parameters that are loosely and unstably constructed. It is not possible to control chaos by means that defeat variation. change and flux.
Adopting a chaos approach to conflict recognizes the normality of instability, "far from equilibrium conditions", and views flux, social disorganization, heterogeneity, diversity, and spontaneity as the expected manifestation of any complex system of interacting agents. By emphasizing far-from-equilibrium conditions, chaos theorists are able to articulate a model of conflict resolution that is much more dynamic and capable of capturing the volatile nature of complex, dynamic social systems. Chaos theory suggests that small changes in initial conditions may have profound consequences at the macro-structural level.
|
