Premium
The COVID‐19 crisis and complexity: A soft systems approach
Author(s) -
ElTaliawi Ola G.,
Hartley Kris
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of contingencies and crisis management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.007
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5973
pISSN - 0966-0879
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5973.12337
Subject(s) - covid-19 , scholarship , ideology , pandemic , politics , epistemology , sociology , containment (computer programming) , political science , positive economics , law , economics , computer science , medicine , virology , philosophy , disease , pathology , outbreak , infectious disease (medical specialty) , programming language
The COVID‐19 pandemic is a crisis with high complexity and should be understood as such by scholarship. A complexity science approach situates increasingly divergent ideological and epistemological perspectives about the crisis within the practical exigencies of containment and mitigation measures. We ask which of the seven stages of soft systems methodology contributes to deeper understandings about COVID‐19 as a policy issue, beyond the contributions of current and conventional perspectives. The discussion outlines implications for practice and places them within broader debates about tensions between scientific facts and political values.