Calls for greater collaboration between professionals in health and social care have led to pressures to move towards interprofessional education at both pre‐ and postregistration levels. Whilst this move has evolved out of ‘common sense’ demands, such a multiple systems approach to education does not fit easily into existing traditional disciplinary frameworks and there is, as yet, no proven theoretical framework to guide its development. What is more, it lacks a clear causality and predictability and therefore does not fit easily into traditional scientific frameworks with their focus on analysis, prediction and control. This article considers how complexity theory, with its focus on connectivity, diversity, self‐organization, and emergence, can provide interprofessional education with a coherent theoretical foundation, freeing it from the constraints of a traditional linear framework, enabling it to be better understood, questioned and challenged as a new paradigm of learning.

For much of the twentieth century UK public policy has been based on a strong centralist, rationalist and managerialist framework. This orientation was significantly amplified by New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s, leading to the development of 'evidence-based policy making' (EBPM) and the 'audit culture' -a trend that looks set to continue under the current government. Substantial criticisms have been raised against the targeting/audit strategies of the audit culture and other forms of EBPM, particularly in complex policy areas. This article accepts these criticisms and argues that in order to move beyond these problems one must not only look at the basic foundation of policy strategies, but also develop practical alternatives to those strategies. To that end, the article examines one of the most basic and common tools of the targeting/audit culture, the aggregate linear X-Y graph, and shows that when it has been applied to UK education policy, it leads to: (1) an extrapolation tendency; (2) a fluctuating 'crisis-success' policy response process; and (3) an intensifying targeting/auditing trend. To move beyond these problems, one needs a visual metaphor which combines an ability to see the direction of policy travel with an aspect of continual openness that undermines the extrapolation tendency, crisis-success policy response and targeting/auditing trend. Using a general complexity approach, and building on the work of Geyer and Rihani, this article will attempt to show that a 'complexity cascade' tool can be used to overcome these weaknesses and avoid their negative effects in both education and health policy in the UK.

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This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what differences it makes for the study of international affairs. Two important threads link all the contributions: (i) To which extent is this approach promising to understand global governance dynamics? (ii) How can this be implemented in practice?

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Recently, European integration (EI) and international relations (IR) debates have been locked into two camps: rationalists, modelling themselves on the natural sciences, and reflectivists, opposing themselves to the natural sciences. The division is based on an out-of-date view of the orderly nature of the natural sciences. Since the middle of the twentieth century a new complexity framework in the natural sciences has developed. This framework provides a new and intriguing ontological and epistemological foundation for addressing the problem of complexity and helps to explain and overcome the separation between the two poles of debate in European integration and international relations. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

This article proposes that complexity theory provides an interprofessional perspective for describing and understanding the processes involved, and provides working 'tools' for patients, carers and practitioners that capture the reality of managing this chronic disease in modern life.