Correction

This article refers to:

The modernisation of family justice before and beyond the pandemic: how can complexity theory help us understand the progress and limitations of the reforms?

Article title: The modernisation of family justice before and beyond the pandemic: how can complexity theory help us understand the progress and limitations of the reforms?

Authors: Richard Green

Journal: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND FAMILY LAW

Bibliometrics: Volume 43, Number 04, pages 439–454

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2021.1996080

When the above article was first published online, the following paragraph was blinded.

The Complexity-derived claim that a complex adaptive system does not readily bend to the will of the policymaker puts it at odds with the dominant model of UK policymaking, commonly referred to as the rational or orderly paradigm. Rationalism dates back to the late 17^th/early 18^th centuries and that period’s extraordinary advances in the fields of philosophy, science and industry (see Geyer and Rihani 2010 for a full account). Confidence grew in the power of humans to understand, predict and control their environment (determinism), as did a belief that phenomena could be broken down into their constituent parts and amended without implications for other parts of a system (reductionism) (Geyer and Rihani 2010, Webb and Geyer 2019). The reasoning behind this can be readily discerned with reference to, say, the development of steam power in the Industrial Revolution. Trains could be constructed using replicable technology and sent on their way down the tracks with (generally) predictable results. If one broke down the faulty part could be isolated and fixed, and the success of the fix attributed to the human intervention. Contention creeps in regarding the leap made by the rational model into the social sciences and the application of deterministic and reductionist assumptions to human systems. Further contention is derived from the mechanisms by which rational-paradigm policymaking seeks to control and predict. These include the performance indicators and targets that have underpinned the practices of one recent administration after another: the Conservative policy of New Public Management (Munro 2010); the Evidence-Based Policy-Making of New Labour (Ansell and Geyer 2017); and the ‘What Works’ philosophy of the subsequent coalition administration (Bovaird and Kenny 2015).