Perhaps no space in New York City is governed by as complex a set of social rules as the cramped subway car, that lurching human Petri dish that has spawned a thousand sociology papers.
Social institutions need to be distinguished from less complex social forms such as conventions, rules, social norms, roles and rituals.
Rather, Cheney and Seyfarth suggest that baboons and other primates with complex social societies organize individuals into rule-governed classes, or concepts.
It is important to bear in mind the positionality of the patient-caregiver and physician in a power-knowledge-practice complex; and also to consider the social rules of engagement and interaction, the social location of the patient and family member, time constraints, and that the illness narrative can be both formed and changed by the medical encounter (co-creation).
Gilson [ 6] follows Giddens [ 7] in noting that although complex public health systems require generalised or disembedded trust (trust in complex social systems and institutions following sets of rules, norms, laws and customs) these trust relationships are also 'rooted in the inter-personal relationships that regularly affirm its affective bases.
While the idea that the brain is hard-wired for social networking has been around a long time, he says it is controversial because it seems too "reductionistic" for such a simple rule to determine our complex social lives.
Just as the robotic pioneer Rodney Brooks argued that intelligence is not the result of a mind following internal rules and representations but the result of interaction with a particular environment, Holland argued that complex social and physical systems are not the product of abstract rules but the consequence of diverse agents and their interactions.
Considering that health systems are interconnected, dynamic and complex in nature, and that they consist of independent agents whose behaviour is based on physical, psychological and social rules, the use of other research frameworks which acknowledge health systems as complex and adaptive systems would help provide additional insights on this subject.
Notwithstanding our understanding of social institutions as complex social forms, some theoretical accounts of institutions identify institutions with relatively simple social forms especially conventions, social norms or rules.
"The rules that led to the Haymores' ordeal go no way towards addressing the deeper and more complex social problems that contribute to some children repeatedly missing school".
