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internal organisation and l ows, and the metaphor of organisational closure may imply
too great a level of coherence, stability and endogeneity. Furthermore, what has not been
explained so far is how we might identify such organisational maintenance in regional
and local economies. What exactly are the key organisational connections, l ows and
interactions that dei ne this condition and are they l ows of money, value, people or
ideas?
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A further question is whether we can apply the idea of emergent properties to
economic places. According to O'Sullivan et al. (2006) 'the novelty of complexity lies in
a sustained attempt to grapple with the bottom up emergence of aggregate behaviour
on the one hand, and the top down impact of emergent structures on the behaviour
of constituent elements on the other' (p. 614). In this view, emergent characteristics
exercise 'downward causation' and inl uence the localised interactions between agents
(Gilbert, 2002, refers to this as 'second-order' emergence). There is now, of course, much
evidence that there are forms of positive feedback in regional and cluster development
so that initial advantages and i rm location decisions may initiate path dependent, self-
reinforcing trajectories, and indeed Krugman (1996) argues that such feedbacks and
spillovers are good examples of emergent ef ects.
However, there are also dii culties in applying the notion of emergence to economic
landscapes, largely because of the key role of knowledge. One of the conditions of
emergence is that local agents are unaware of the emergent ef ects of their actions and
relations (Manson and O'Sullivan, 2006). Complex emergent ef ects are generated by
relatively simple behavioural rules and interactions between agents. Clearly this does not
apply in the same way in Foster's (2005) 'fourth-order' complex systems where action is
to a far greater degree rel exive, intentional and subject to continuous monitoring and
cooperative behaviour. As Sawyer argues, because of the character of human symbolic
communication, processes of emergence in social systems are dif erent from those in
natural and biological systems: 'In social systems the components (individuals) contain
representations of the emergent macropatterns, unlike in any other complex system'
(Sawyer, 2005, p. 26). Thus, for example, to describe industrial clusters as emergent phe-
nomena may obscure some of the ways in which the knowledge and expectations that
maintain their success are not simply localised interactions but are also public, collec-
tive and interpretive. Economic knowledge may itself be continuously emergent, arising
from exchanges of information (Potts, 2000; Ramlogan and Metcalfe, 2006). But if that
knowledge then acts as the basis for further change and economic growth, then the idea
of simple sequences of localised interactions generating emergent ef ects would seem too
simplistic.
5. Self-organisation in economic landscapes
As we have noted above, a key set of issues in complexity economics revolves around
the notion of self-organisation. While some complexity economists use the notions of
self-organisation and self-transformation fairly loosely, others hardly use the concepts
at all (see, for example, Beinhocker, 2006). Recall that self-organisation describes the
way in which systems order themselves without central direction or external control
such that they acquire and maintain structure and arrange selected parts to promote
(and reproduce) a specii c function. In this latter respect, the idea of self-organisation
is closely related to the notion of autopoiesis, which refers to the dynamics of a non-
equilibrium system that produces the components that in turn continue to maintain the
