The newest developments in my research concern multiple timescale analysis. Briefly, the key assumptions here are that:
Complex social-ecological systems are organized on multiple timescales
On each level of organization characteristic processes run at very different rates
Structural patterns on each level have lifetimes determined by these rates
Semiotic artifacts mediate integration of the system across different timescales
All relevant phenomena need to be re-defined relative to each timescale of measurement, observation, or action
Changes in patterns of semiotic coupling between non-adjacent levels are critical for the emergence of new levels of organization
New levels of organization always emerge between existing levels and timescales
New levels re-organize information from the level below as meaning for the level above
Re-organization frequently alternates between discrete and continuous types of meaning for adjacent levels
The most relevant papers on these themes are:
Opening Up Closures: Semiotics across Scales -- Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Ghent Conference
Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in Ecosocial Systems -- in Mind, Culture, and Activity
Learning
Academic Language Identities: Multiple
Timescales in the Social Ecology of Education
-- TEXT
Invited
paper at University of California, Berkeley (March 2000); to appear in a volume
Newer work begins to look at relations between types of texts or modes of meaningful action in a society and its forms of social organization and control, exploring the semiotic mediation hypothesis:
Discursive Technologies and the Social Organization of Meaning -- draft ms for Folia Linguistica; more on traversals -- Do Not Cite!!
Toward a Theory of Traversals -- new theoretical work, Spring 2001
A new project in development will apply multiple timescale analysis (which is a special case of dynamic complex system analysis) to the study of institutional change and sustainability in urban systems and non-local networks. Urban systemic reform in education and online educational communities will be initial areas of focus.