So, what’s the big deal about this complexity business? Complexity has been hailed as the new paradigm of the century (like the other BIG C’s: chaos theory, control theory, cybernetics) or been battered as the next failure of scientific thought (like the other BIG C’s: chaos theory, control theory, cybernetics). The truth is - no, not in the middle - but something completely different. 
Complexity, as the other “theories”, is not to be seen as a new conceptual structure which explains phenomena. Rather it is a conceptual structure for structuring - a meta structure, if you like. It is a new way of looking at things, leaving disciplinary borders behind and striving to understand phenomena holistically.
Key concepts in the conceptual structure of complexity are: emergence, scaling, multi-level interdependencies (level crossing), interrelatedness (same level), agent-environment interaction, self-similarity (fractals).
This is all just the tip of the iceberg - more to come.
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