Introduction

A whole range of physical, biological, psychological and social systems constitute our lives, largely influencing how, when and where we are born, what the quality of our lives and lived experiences will be, and ultimately how we will die, and what we leave behind. Of course, in our efforts to survive and flourish, we have a tendency to try and reduce uncertainty to provide us with at least the illusion of control as we try to navigate the multitude of systems in which we live, leading to an innately reductionist approach (see Jennings, Chapter Two).

The same applies if we work in public services such as criminal justice or social work, when we are probably more used to thinking about systems in the formal sense of partnership/multi-agency working, or team work for example; but, even then, what is the extent of our observation and understanding of what constitutes systems or the contribution that we make to the overarching, under-arching or whole systems of criminal justice or social work? What is the totality of our contribution to the outcomes from those systems, not just for the people that we directly work with, but for those from whom we are further removed or who are unknown to us, and, indeed, how would we know what our impact has been, and could it be measured in any meaningful way? In asking these questions and in attempting to provide a framework for answering them, one of the key arguments of complexity theory is that we need to understand that, as individuals, we are constitutive components of the various systems (as individual human beings, we are also a system) that we live and work in, whether we are conscious of it or not; furthermore, we need to understand that we impact upon the behaviour of that whole system, including that which lies beyond our immediate and observable environs.

In this chapter, to help to understand this idea of being constitutive components of systems, the key tenets of complexity theory from differing perspectives will be introduced and examined. .