文件名称：Changing places, engaging
文件大小：185KB
文件格式：PDF
更新时间：2013-06-21 17:52:19
places engaging
Despite their best efforts, researchers and policy-makers always have a limited understanding of the world as it was, is and will be. A common response to such uncertain complexity is to target concerns, to simplify them and to disconnect them from the wider systems in which they are located. Great science in the twentieth century made progress in quantum physics, electronics and biotechnology precisely because of such simplifying, or reductionist, approaches (see Kaku, 1998). The same century saw the great, sweeping syntheses of Adam Smith and Karl Marx decomposed into the more fragmented and forensic concerns of modern economics, sociology and political science. Equally, the major, radical social and economic reforms of the post-war welfare state also made impacts only because emphasis was put on the rapid formation and implementation of sectoral programmes for health, housing, education and so on. Urgent needs could not wait for a protracted, intellectual, empirical analysis of mutual synergies, spillovers and connections.