Struggling with change: The fragile resilience of collectives
Frank Schweitzer, Christian Zingg, Giona Casiraghi
Collectives form non-equilibrium social structures characterised by a volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state cannot be defined. We propose a novel resilience measure combining two dimensions: robustness and adaptivity. We demonstrate how they can be quantified using data from a software developer collective. Our analysis reveals a resilience life cycle, i.e., stages of increasing resilience are followed by stages of decreasing resilience. We explain the reasons for these observed dynamics and provide a formal model to reproduce them. The resilience life cycle allows distinguishing between short-term resilience, given by a sequence of resilient states, and long-term resilience, which requires collectives to survive through different cycles.
Read the full article at: arxiv.org
Many real systems can be modeled as networks, where the elements of the system are nodes and interactions between elements are edges. An even larger set of systems can be modeled using dynamical processes on networks, which are in turn affected by the dynamics. Networks thus represent the backbone of many complex systems, and their theoretical and computational analysis makes it possible to gain insights into numerous applications. Networks permeate almost every conceivable discipline —including sociology, transportation, economics and finance, biology, and myriad others — and the study of “network science” has thus become a crucial component of modern scientific education.
