Last year, in a famous paper, Bollen et al. (2010) made the claim that Twitter mood is correlated with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), and that it can be used to forecast the direction of DJIA changes with 87% accuracy. Besides its obvious significance in investing, this surprising result challenges several fundamental notions in the social sciences, such as the efficient market hypoth...

Integrated care is a key strategy in reforming health systems around the world. Despite its importance, the concept’s polymorphous nature and lack of specificity and clarity significantly hamper systematic understanding, successful application and meaningful evaluation. This article explores the many definitions, concepts, logics and methods found in health system and service integration. In ad...

Please do not cite without permission The concept of 'tradition' is used in a range of different ways within studies of British politics. Despite this there have been only a few attempts to theorise notions of tradition within British political science. Furthermore the different concepts of tradition forwarded by conservatives, interpretivists and realists have each been contested. This paper e...

This article examines applications of complexity theory within the behavioral and social sciences. Specific attention is given to the fundamental characteristics of complex adaptive systems (CAS)--such as individuals, groups, and societies-including the underlying structure of CAS, the internal dynamics of evolving CAS, and how CAS respond to their environment. Examples drawn from psychology, s...

1.2 ISARs and the Nature of Creativity There are many different perspectives on creativity. Theories span epistemological, artistic and social science venues. For our purposes here, let us adapt a theory about creativity that combines two generally acceptable theories: That creativity is the amusing, serendipitous or profound combination of ideas. Thus, an ISAR with the purpose of eliciting cre...

Theories in the social sciences are informed either by sociology or by economics. That is, they either draw generalizations from verbal descriptions of social interaction or from mathematical representations of interacting agents as constrained maximizers. The three models discussed in this paper are not less rigorous than economic models and, because they are validated relative to a formal log...

The application of complexity theory crosses many domains thereby reflecting the multidisciplinary perspective inherent within the concept. Within the social sciences, the advent of complexity theory has facilitated a re-examination of the concept of system, ‘...rejecting old assumptions about equilibrium in favour of the analysis of dynamic processes of systems far from equilibrium, and respec...

Heckman for North-Holland. The first and third authors acknowledge financial support from the UK Economic and Social Research Council under an award for General Equilibrium Analysis of UK Policy Issues; the third author also acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful to Andres Erosa and Gustavo Ventura for helpful comments on an earl...

the modern state is a renewable and evolutionary phenomenon and it cannot be evaluated so that it has single cause. therefore none of the fields of the human sciences alone cannot fully explain the emergence of the modern state without interaction with other disciplines. political superstructure in various countries, primarily influenced by the social and cultural systems of communities as the ...