Social Emergence（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　Can we understand important social issues by studying
individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow
more than the people in them? Sociologists have long believed that
psychology can’t explain what happens when people work together in
complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and
economists believe that if we have an accurate theory of how
individuals make choices and act on them, we can explain pretty
much everything about social life. Social Emergence takes a new
approach to these longstanding questions. Sawyer argues that
societies are complex dynamical systems, and that the best way to
resolve these debates is by developing the concept of emergence,
focusing on multiple levels of analysis – individuals,
interactions, and groups – and with a dynamic focus on how social
group phenomena emerge from communication processes among
individual members. This book makes a unique contribution not only
to complex systems research but also to social theory.

Acknowledgements
1. Emergence, complexity, and social science
2. Emergence, complexity, and the third wave of social systems
theory
3. The history of emergence
4. Emergence in psychology
5. Emergence in sociology
6. Durkheim’s theory of social emergence
7. Emergence and elisionism
8. Simulating social emergence with artificial societies
9. Communication and improvisation
10. The Emergence paradigm