In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

This famous passage from Marshall’s Principles of Economics (it first appeared in the fifth edition which came out in 1907) nicely brings out two issues, which are as germane to economics today as they were when Marshall wrote. The first is the heavy reliance by economists in their formal theorizing on the notion of “equilibrium”. The other is the appeal that “biological conceptions3x201D; have for many economists, particularly when their focus is on economic change.

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Recent Evolutionary Theorizing About Economic Change

ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

EU regional policy is an investment policy. It supports job creation, competitiveness, economic growth, improved quality of life and sustainable development. These investments support the delivery of the Europe 2020 strategy. The present paper analysis two strategically different options of EU regional policy: place-neutral versus place-based policies for economic development. Our results suggest that in many EU regions the place-neutral policies may no be the best policy response to facing new challenges posed by deeper economic integration and globalisation.

An Agenda for a Reformed Cohesion Policy A place-based approach to meeting European Union challenges and expectations

This paper explores the relationship between uncertainty and innovation. It distinguishes three kinds of uncertainty: truth uncertainty, semantic uncertainty, and ontological uncertainty, the latter of which is particularly important for innovation processes. The paper then develops some implications of ontological uncertainty for innovation processes at three levels of organization, by means of three theories: a narrative theory of action at the level of individual economic actors; the theory of generative relationships at the meso-level of agent interaction; and the theory of scaffolding structures at the macro-level of market systems. These theories are illustrated by means of examples drawn from a prospective study on the emergence of a new market system around a technology for distributed control.

Ontological uncertainty and innovation

Introduction.- Section 1: From biology to society.- Ch 1: Lane, Maxfield, Read and van der Leeuw, From population to organization thinking.- Ch 2: Read, Lane and van der Leeuw, The innovation innovation.- Ch 3: van der Leeuw, Lane and Read, The long-term evolution of social organization.- Ch 4: Ginzburg, Biological metaphors in economics: Natural selection and competition.- Ch 5: White, Innovation in the context of networks, hierarchy and social cohesion.- Section 2: Innovation and urban systems.- Ch 6: Bretagnolle, Pumain, The organization of urban systems.- Ch 7: Bettancourt, Lobo and West, The self similarity of human social organization in cities.- Ch 8: Pumain, Paulus and Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, Innovation cycles and urban dynamics.- Section 3: Innovation and market systems.- Ch 9: Lane and Maxfield, Building a new market system.- Ch 10: Rossi, Bertossi, Gurisatti and Sovieni, Incorporating a new technology into agent-artifact space: The case of control system automation in Europe.- Ch 11: Russo and Rossi, Innovation policies: Levels and levers.- Section 4: Modeling innovation and social change.- Ch 12: Pumain, Sanders, Bretagnolle, Glisse, and Mathian, The future of urban systems: exploratory models.- Ch 13: Serra, Villani and Lane, Modeling innovation.- Ch 14: Ferrari, Read, van der Leeuw, An agent based model of information flows in social dynamics.- Ch 15: Villani, Bonacini, Ferrari and Serra, An agent based model of exaptive processes.- Ch 16: Helbing, Kuhnert, Lammer, Johannsen, Gelsen, Ammoser and West, Power laws in urban supply networks, social systems and dense pedestrian.- Ch 17: Knappett et al., Using statistical physics to understand relational space: A case study from Mediterranean.- Conclusion.- List of contributors

Complexity perspectives in innovation and social change

What is a strategy? The answer to this question ought to depend on the foresight horizon: how far ahead, and how much, the strategist thinks he can forsee. When the very structure of the firm's world is undergoing cascades of rapid change, and interpretations about the identity of agents and artifacts are characterized by ambiguity, we say that the foresight horizon is complex. We argue that strategy in the face of complex foresight horizons should consist of an on-going set of practices that interpret and construct the relationships that comprise the world in which the firm acts. Our discussion focuses on two intertwined kinds of strategic practices. The first is cognitive: a firm "populates its world" by positing who lives there and interpreting what they do. The second structural: the firm fosters generative relationships within and across its boundries---relationships that produce new sources of value that cannot be foreseen in advance. We illustrate the ideas advanced in the paper with a story about the entry of ROLM into the PDX market in 1975.

Foresight, Complexity, and Strategy

In this essay, we argue that rational choice (RC) provides an inadequate foundation for a theory of economic action. After defining RC sufficiently broadly to encompass much of the bounded rationality literature as well as neoclassical optimization theory, we present three principal arguments against RC. The first is cognitive: economic actors are experts at what they do, and the cognitive processes that underlie experitise are not consistent with RC, descriptively, prescriptively or positively. The second argument begins with the observation that economic action takes place in and through relationships between agents, and these relationships may generate actions that connot be localized to individual agents. We argue that these generative relationships are essential to understanding such fundamental economic phenomena as innovation, and the actions that result from them are not amenable to analysis from a RC perspective. Finally, we argue that most economic agents lack the judgement and execution coherence required by RC. In a companion paper, we propose an alternative foundation for a theory of economic action that builds on the critique of RC presented in this paper.

David Lane

Papers

Ontological uncertainty and innovation

Complexity perspectives in innovation and social change

Foresight, Complexity, and Strategy

Choice and action

Hierarchy, complexity, society