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How can we make complexity work as part of a programme of engaged social science? This article attempts to answer that question by arguing that one way to do this is through a reconstruction of a central tool of a distinctively social science – the comparative method – understood as a procedure for elucidating the complex and multiple systems of causation that generate particular trajectories towards a desired future from the multiple sets of available futures. The article distinguishes between ‘simplistic complexity’ and ‘complex complexity’. ‘Simplistic complexity’ seeks to explain emergence in complex systems as the product of simple rules and defines complex science as the process of establishing such rules. It can and does serve as the basis of technocratic social engineering in the interest of the powerful. In contrast ‘complex complexity’ recognizes the significance of social structure and willed social agency and does not reduce emergence to the mere working out of a restricted set of rules. Research programmes informed by this second approach must necessarily engage with social actors in context – they must be dialogical. This opens up the possibility of ‘complex complexity’ as a frame of reference for action-research directed towards the transformation of complex social systems. Comparative methods, and in particular Ragin’s qualitative comparative analysis approach, when deployed as part of such a programme, can provide meaningful information about the range of possible futures and the different configurations of causes which might generate particular desired social outcomes.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. The social world is complex and emergent. Nomothetic inquiry, directed towards establishing universal empirical regularities, cannot establish causality. We can never assign a causal effect to any intervention without assessing the whole context of that intervention. However, we can develop generalizable knowledge if we adopt research approaches which recognize both the implications of assigning causal powers to context -the essence of the realist take on evaluation, and the significance of human agency in relation to 'the social type of causal nexus'. Useful literatures which can contribute to developing such knowledge include macropolitical science's concern with the importance of temporal ordering in relation to outcomes, Ragin's set theoretic understanding of causal relations and his development of systematic comparison as a basis for explicating those relations, and the presentation of causal narratives as foundation for process tracing. Every complex social intervention has to be considered as a case. Systematic comparison across cases allows us to generalize within limits but this still means we can transfer knowledge beyond the unique ideographically described instance.

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Almost free-standing single crystal mesoscale and nanoscale dots of ferroelectric BaTiO(3) have been made by direct focused ion beam patterning of bulk single crystal material. The domain structures which appear in these single crystal dots, after cooling through the Curie temperature, were observed to form into quadrants, with each quadrant consisting of fine 90 degrees stripe domains. The reason that these rather complex domain configurations form is uncertain, but we consider and discuss three possibilities for their genesis: first, that the quadrant features initially form to facilitate field-closure, but then develop 90 degrees shape compensating stripe domains in order to accommodate disclination stresses; second, that they are the result of the impingement of domain packets which nucleate at the sidewalls of the dots forming "Forsbergh" patterns (essentially the result of phase transition kinetics); and third, that 90 degrees domains form to conserve the shape of the nanodot as it is cooled through the Curie temperature but arrange into quadrant packets in order to minimize the energy associated with uncompensated surface charges (thus representing an equilibrium state). While the third model is the preferred one, we note that the second and third models are not mutually exclusive.

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