nÃo hà / Nesta pesquisa, analisamos as caracterÃsticas e mecanismos que tornam a categorizaÃÃo, como processo cognitivo, um Sistema Adaptativo Complexo e as estratÃgias de categorizaÃÃo que atuam na emergÃncia de inferÃncias para a conceitualizaÃÃo da categoria VIOLÃNCIA e a subcategoria VIOLÃNCIA URBANA. Nosso suporte teÃrico para a investigaÃÃo dos nossos objetivos sÃo os pressupostos do paradigma do caos, da complexidade e dos sistemas complexos, conforme delineados por Bertalanffy (1977), Morin (2005), Holland (1995; 1998) e Larsen- Freeman e Cameron (2008; 2012), que propÃem os conceitos de sistemas, complexidade, atratores, espaÃo fase e caracterÃsticas e mecanismos de um Sistema Adaptativo Complexo. No caso do processo inferencial, buscamos amparo teÃrico na Teoria da RelevÃncia, conforme proposta por Sperber e Wilson (1995; 2001), Feltes (1999; 2007), Alves e GonÃalves (2006) e Yus (2008; 2013). Para chegarmos à caracterizaÃÃo da categorizaÃÃo como Sistema Adaptativo Complexo, levamos em consideraÃÃo as propriedades apresentadas por Holland (1995) e Larsen- Freeman e Cameron (2008), buscando ampliar o conceito e explicar a instabilidade do sistema categorizacional à luz da complexidade (MORIN, 1977). Para essa investigaÃÃo com base na complexidade foi necessÃrio ainda incluir o conceito de sistema, espaÃo fase e atratores tÃo caros à abordagem metodolÃgica utilizada. Esse procedimento resultou em uma tipologia de estratÃgias de categorizaÃÃo para anÃlise e explicitaÃÃo de como se aciona os diversos espaÃos possÃveis para conceitualizaÃÃo de VIOLÃNCIA. Escolhemos a categoria VIOLÃNCIA para investigar nosso objetivo tendo em vista a atualizaÃÃo do assunto nos Ãltimos vinte anos e pelos trabalhos com essa categoria realizados por Larsen-Freeman e Cameron, Macedo e Feltes, cujos estudos serviram de base para nossa proposta metodolÃgica. Para verificarmos nossas hipÃteses, utilizamos como desenho metodolÃgico uma pesquisa com observaÃÃo direta e intensiva de 33 categorizadores que responderam a questionÃrios sobre a categorizaÃÃo de VIOLÃNCIA e participaram de protocolos verbais para verificaÃÃo dos mecanismos de inferenciaÃÃo. Os resultados das anÃlises permitem as seguintes conclusÃes: a categorizaÃÃo de VIOLÃNCIA possui propriedades e mecanismos dos Sistemas Adaptativos Complexos, pois os sistemas apresentam no todo e nas partes, variedade dentro de uma estabilidade. Os categorizadores utilizam o processo inferencial para acionar os atratores que levam ao espaÃo fase em que se encontram diversos conhecimentos sobre violÃncia para sua conceitualizaÃÃo de forma estratÃgica. / In this research, I analyzed the characteristics and mechanisms that make categorization, as a cognitive process, a Complex Adaptive System and the strategies of categorization that work in the emergency of inferences for the conceptualization of the category VIOLENCE and subcategory URBAN VIOLENCE. The theoretical support for the investigation of the research aims are the assumptions of the paradigm of chaos, complexity and complex systems, as outlined by Bertalanffy (1977), Morin (2005), Holland (1995, 1998) and Larsen-Freeman and Cameron ( 2008; 2012), who propose the concepts of systems, complexity, attractors, phase space and characteristics and mechanisms of a Complex Adaptive System. In the case of inferential process, I sought theoretical support in Relevance Theory, as proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995, 2001), Feltes (1999, 2007), Alves and GonÃalves (2006) and Yus (2008, 2013). To get to the characterization of categorization as a Complex Adaptive System, I considered the properties presented by Holland (1995) and Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008), seeking to expand the concept and explain the instability of the categorical system based on the complexity theory (Morin, 1977). For this investigation, based on the complexity theory, it was also necessary to include the concept of system, phase space and attractors so relevant to the methodological approach used in this research. Such a procedure resulted in a typology of categorization strategies for the analysis and explanation of how the various feasible spaces for the conceptualizing of VIOLENCE are triggered. The category "VIOLENCE" was chosen for analysis in view of its update status in the last twenty years and the various researches on the subject carried out by Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, Macedo and Feltes, scholars whose studies served as basis for the methodological proposal of this thesis. In order to verify the research hypotheses, a methodological design which involved intensive direct observation of 33 categorizers was used. The participants answered questionnaires about the categorization of VIOLENCE and participated of verbal protocols to verify the inference mechanisms involved in the process. The analyses result allow for the following conclusions: VIOLENCE categorization has the properties and mechanisms of Complex Adaptive Systems because the systems present, in whole and in parts, variation within a stable range. The categorizers use the inferential process to trigger the attractors that lead to the phase space in which diverse knowledge about violence is available for its conceptualization in a strategic way.

Introduction/ Objectives: Stroke, the third leading cause of death in Canada, is projected to rise in the next 20 years as the population ages and obesity rates increase. Family caregivers fulfill pertinent roles in providing support for family members who have survived a stroke, from onset to re-integration into the community. However, the transition from rehabilitation to home is a crucial transition for both the stroke survivor and family caregiver. As the stroke survivor transitions home from a rehabilitation facility, family caregivers provide different types of support, including assistance with navigating the stroke rehabilitation system. They also are a constant source of support for the stroke survivor providing them with continuity during the transition. In this exploratory study we examined family caregivers’ perceptions and experiences navigating the stroke rehabilitation system. The theories of continuity care and complex adaptive systems were used to examine the transition home from hospital or stroke rehabilitation facility, and in some cases back to hospital. Methodology: Family caregivers (n=14) who provide care for a stroke survivor were recruited 4-12 weeks following the patient’s discharge from a stroke rehabilitation facility. Interviews were conducted with family caregivers to examine their perceptions and experiences navigating the stroke rehabilitation system. Directed content analysis was used to explore the perceptions of family caregivers as they reflected on the transitions home. The theories of continuity of care and complex adaptive systems were used to interpret their experiences. Results/Conclusions: During the transition home from a rehabilitation facility, family caregivers are a constant source of support, providing the stroke survivor with continuity. Emergent themes highlight the importance of the caregiving role, and barriers and facilitators that impact the role, and influence continuity of care. Also, supports and services in the community were limited or did not meet the specific needs of the family caregiver. The acknowledgment of the unique attributes of each case will ensure supports and services are tailored to the family caregiver’s needs. Mitigation of systemic barriers would also decrease complexity experienced at the micro-level in the stroke rehabilitation system, and better support the family caregiver during the transition home from a stroke rehabilitation facility.

To tackle one of the world’s worst maternal, neonatal and child health outcomes and a chronic shortage of human resources for health, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health deployed volunteer Community Health Workers (CHW) in rural areas of Afghanistan in 2003. This thesis documents the Afghan CHW program, exploring organizational and community contexts. The research design in this study is a mixed methods case study. The actual Afghan CHW program was situated with an Afghan complex adapative health system, mainly guided by the policy of the health system but was also largely influenced by the power and gender dynamics of the community context in which it was implemented. The tasks of CHWs were numerous but CHWs role was more than just the sum of their tasks; they occupied a unique location juxtaposed between formal and informal HRH systems. It is important to acknowledge the assembly of so many national and international organizations in achieving a shared goal of providing health services to a large population in an unstable and partially insecure environment. The shared goal in the Afghan context may have been interpreted only in terms availability of services, though the goal carries with it, either explicitly or implicitly, the values of effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, and costliness – known as quality by some participants of this study. The community component was another layer of the complex adaptive system that made up the Afghan CHW program. Political-ethnic power in the community and legal-rational authority of the health system influenced the way communities were mapped in an inequitable manner, in turn, contributed to the unfair distribution of resources to the populations. Finally, the intersection of the gender equity approach and the gendered nature of the work as a cross-cutting layer added to the complexity of the Afghan health system.

The emerging, multi-disciplinary field of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) is an alternative to linear, reductionist thinking. It is based on the observations that real-world systems, regardless of scale, are emergent, complex, adaptive, and evolutionary. In this research the scale of CAS examined range from distances of Planck’s constant to Gigaparsecs. CAS has also heavily leveraged the interpretations of several recent Nobel Laureates and assumes too that the world is random, indeterministic, and chaotic. But randomness, chaos, and indeterminism can hardly create the progressive, increasingly harmonious world that we are a part of. At the heart of this issue lies confusion around what innovation in CAS really is. The essential approach to arriving at a mathematical basis of innovation for CAS here has been to view systems from the outside-in as opposed to from the inside-out and the bottom-up. In this approach innovation is conceptualized as existing in every single space-time point-instant in a system. There is a process of precipitation by which this innovation may express itself through a series of quaternary-based architectural forces that are the prime sources of innovation. These series or arrays of forces may further precipitate by informing organizational signatures. Organizations can be thought of as formations with a unique signature at their center, and can vary in complexity and scale. The unique signature for each organization is usually hidden though by common surface dynamics, and “to innovate” is to work through and change the habitual and common patterns in order to allow the deeper founts of innovation to become active at the surface level. When this happens, it is then that innovation occurs. Once that is more clearly seen then the erected probabilistic and uncertainty functions assumed to be true of the fundamental layers of nature, will be relegated to their place as interim devices in model building. The nature of innovation can be progressively elaborated through inductive reasoning to arrive at a mathematical framework for innovation in CAS. Rather than assume a chaotic, random, indeterministic world as a starting point, this framework can be built assuming a purposeful, ordered world characterized by qualified determinism. Equations to provide insight into the inherent innovation bias of our system, the nature of each point in the system, the broad architectural forces behind the development of organizations, the inherent uniqueness of each organization, the way to think about varying cultures or organizations, and the inherent dynamism of our system, form the edifice of this framework. The resulting model can then be used deductively to reinforce observations, and predictively to suggest directions and / or steps to emerging trends. This research hence, through deriving mathematical equations, and by further applying these to various domains ranging from the quantum, to the atomic, to the cellular, to the astrophysical, has been able to provide mathematical contributions to the theory of CAS and to various CAS application areas. With respect to the theory of CAS, mathematical contributions have been made to understanding the underlying directional bias of CAS activity, understanding the nature of each point in any CAS, and creating mathematical sets for architectural forces that are posited to be behind the development of any CAS. Further, mathematical contributions have been made to understanding the inherent dynamics in any CAS, the dynamics of stagnation and growth in CAS, and the balance of randomness and determinism of any CAS. Mathematical contributions also extend to framing complexity in CAS, understanding what can drive sustainability of CAS, and arriving at a general set of mathematical operators true of any CAS. In terms of application areas in the organizational space, mathematical contributions have been made to understanding uniqueness of organizations, the emergence of uniqueness in organizations, and what constitutes varying culture of organizations. Further, existing work done by Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and Alan Turing have been leveraged to further frame organizational transitions, and to frame and model shifts in innovations, respectively. Further mathematical contributions have been made in a range of CAS areas at different scale and level of complexity. Hence, a series of equations have been derived for the electromagnetic spectrum. Quantum, atomic, and cellular wave equations have been derived building off Schrodinger’s existing Wave Equation. Further qualifications have been derived for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and an equation has been derived for the integration of different layers of CAS also using Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Equations for space and time alteration as per Einstein’s Theory of Relativity have also been derived. Additionally, equations for the architectures of quantum particles, periodic table elements, and molecular plans at the cellular level have also been derived. Finally, equations for dark matter and dark energy, non-probabilistic quantum states in quantum computing, and the emergence of CAS in the universe have been derived. In all over 225 equations in 25 different areas have been derived in this dissertation. In fact, as suggested by the CAS equation derived for a unified field, everything, from unseen energy fields, to quantum particles, to atoms, to molecules, to cells, and therefore to all animate and even inanimate and even unseen objects, and therefore even any CAS system regardless of scale would have a high-degree of quaternary intelligence embedded in it and exist simultaneously. Quoting Schrodinger: “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances). The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” This implicit quaternary-based intelligence likely sheds new light on properties such as distributed control, uncertainty, paradox, co-evolution, emergence, amongst others, seen as fundamental to CAS. Thinking about CAS as purposeful, and animated by a mathematically-framed engine of innovation, allows existence to potentially be considered as a unified field. Further, it allows insight and additional solutions to a host of complex problems regardless of scale – at the quantum, cellular, human, organizational, sociotechnical, market, economical, political, and social levels - to be conceptualized, designed, elaborated, and managed differently. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Graduate School of Technology Management (GSTM) / PhD / Unrestricted

Military conflicts have become nonlinear and the interrelated political and socio-economic changes within these conflicts have created new challenges for American policymakers. A tool called Wallis' Propositional Analysis (PA) suggests a new paradigm that includes thinking about complexity and robustness/systemicity in a policy. The purpose of this single case study was to determine how the PA paradigm adds heuristic value to complex policy decision-making. A backdrop of Wallerstein's complexity theory and complex adaptive systems (CAS) guided this study. This study examined policy statements from the Obama administration on the Afghanistan and Pakistan conflicts in late December 2009. Data were coded and analyzed using Wallis' specific methodological approach that includes a systematic analysis of the policy's propositions and complexity and robustness/systemicity. Key findings indicated that the PA paradigm offers a heuristic method for how to think about the interrelated propositions within a policy that reflect the expected changes the policy intends to make. Specifically, this study demonstrated that an interwoven PA structural approach to policymaking affords the policymaker a method to consider the complex and nonlinear changes in the policy environment. By applying the PA paradigm, policymakers can positively impact social change by exploring policy options that consider a range of possible outcomes from the policy proposal, prior to policy implementation.

Health care providers in the United States expend more than $400 million in unnecessary direct costs annually managing the effects of widespread drug shortages. Based on the theory of complexity and complex adaptive systems, the purpose of this exploratory multiple case study was to identify the strategies that health care pharmaceutical procurement leaders from the Eastern region of the United States use to address widespread drug shortages. Data were collected from 5 semistructured interviews with pharmaceutical procurement leaders, recorded field notes, and a review of public documents from company websites. Data analysis included deductive and open coding techniques. Emergent themes included: (a) proactive planning for supply chain and distribution channel disruptions, (b) creating strategic processes for alternative procurement methods, and (c) relying on proven sources of actionable information. Findings may influence business practices for health care procurement leaders by contributing new knowledge to develop strategies to address disruptions and drug shortages. Health care policy makers may use the findings to assess key strategies in delivering pharmaceutical products from manufacturers to end users.

Linkages between Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) thinking and efficiency analysis remain in their infancy. This research associates the basic building blocks of the CAS 'flocking' metaphor with the essential building block concepts of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Within a proposed framework DEA "decision-making units" (DMUs) are represented as agents in the agent-based modeling (ABM) paradigm. Guided by simple rules, agent DMUs representing business units of a larger management system, 'align' with one another to achieve mutual protection/risk reduction and 'cohere' with the most efficient DMUs among them to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in the least possible time. Analysis of the resulting patterns of behavior can provide policy insights that are both evidence-based and intuitive. This research introduces a consistent methodology that will be called here the Complex Adaptive Productive Efficiency Method (CAPEM) and employs it to bridge these domains. This research formalizes CAPEM mathematically and graphically. It then conducts experimentation employing using the resulting CAPEM simulation using data of a sample of electric power plants obtained from Rungsuriyawiboon and Stefanou (2003). Guided by rules, individual agent DMUs (power plants) representing business units of a larger management system,'align' with one another to achieve mutual protection/risk reduction and 'cohere' with the most efficient DMUs among them to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in the least possible time. Using a CAS ABM simulation, it is found that the flocking rules (alignment, cohesion and separation), taken individually and in selected combinations, increased the mean technical efficiency of the power plant population and conversely decreased the time to reach the frontier. It is found however that these effects were limited to a smaller than expected sub-set of these combinations of the flocking factors. Having been successful in finding even a limited sub-set of flocking rules that increased efficiency was sufficient to support the hypotheses and conclude that employing the flocking metaphor offers useful options to decision-makers for increasing the efficiency of management systems. / Ph. D.

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Thesis advisor: Patrick McQuillan / Urban school districts' educational leaders face what seem to be an endless number of challenges, such as closing the achievement gap, enhancing student performance, building teacher capacity, creating leadership opportunities, and adapting to a student population that is changing rapidly and increasingly made up of students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds who are limited English speakers and/or English language learners. Through the lens of complexity theory, this three-year instrumental case study examined the leadership practices of two Lynch Leadership Academy Principal Fellows in relation to their leadership growth project that they determined would benefit from improvement and, as a result, would be implemented in their urban schools. Using principal and teachers’ interviews and observation fieldnotes of the professional learning communities meetings at the schools, this study chronicled the actions and behaviors of the principals and teachers through their interdependent and mutual relationships as they developed a theory of action and conducted their Leadership Growth Project, taking into account the concepts of complexity theory and the influence on the school community. The findings demonstrate that principals, through their leadership and relationships with their teachers and their engagement in professional learning community activities, complicated and disrupted the complacency, compliance, and comfort of the teachers. The formation of a theory of action, however, which was a way for the teachers and the principals to satisfy the needs of their urban school community in response to the challenges they faced, was sparked by such disruptions. Additionally, teachers had to reconsider how they interacted with their students as a result of their capacity for self-organization at the edge of chaos. A conclusion of this research is that in order to achieve successful professional learning outcomes and emergence through adapted change that incorporate the principal's leadership, teachers must be willing to communicate practice-related issues and to offer and accept constructive criticism in an environment of disequilibrium. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.