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Complexity and Governance

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Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance

Definition

Complexity has been coped with in many disciplines and has been described in many ways. In organizational terms, it characterizes every situation in which the government body perceives uncertainty due to insufficient knowledge of the observed object or emerging conditions characterizing it.

Introduction

Proper management of complexity has been recognized as a way to facilitate the governance of any system (Polese et al. 2014), even if sometimes it has been inappropriately considered the determinant of entrepreneurial failure, thus trivializing decision making that underpin the existential path of the business system.

The exegesis of the term is then of fundamental importance, even though the various approaches to the study of complexity – such as the theory of algorithmic complexity (Solomonoff 1964), the epistemology of complexity (Gell-Mann 1994), the theory of computational complexity (Chaitin 1966), and adaptive complex systems (Barile et al. 2012) – define study and...

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Correspondence to Sergio Barile .

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Barile, S., Polese, F., Pels, J., Sarno, D. (2018). Complexity and Governance. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3413-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3413-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31816-5

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