Families as Complex Systems: Love-Force, Change and Resilience (Complexity in Social Science)

This book presents an innovative framework for conceptualising families as complex systems and for understanding and supporting positive change, adaptation and resilience. The development of this framework was based on a qualitative and abductive research process targeting change and resilience processes in multi-challenged families.

The theoretical novelty of this book is mostly expressed in the notion of Love-Force: a relational force emerging from the coupling processes between individuals with potential transformative effects on them, their interactions and environments. This book introduces a new vocabulary for understanding the complexity of families as complex systems and their change and resilience processes. Love-Force is presented as a supreme expression of the complexity of families and human bonds. It elaborates on the complexity of the family bonds, on the relation of Love-Force to change and resilience and its contributions to the conceptualisation of the Potential for Family Change.

Raising important theoretical and methodological challenges and questions, it presents a guide for future interdisciplinary research in the domains of complexity and family sciences and advances in practice. As such, it will be of interest to anyone interested in the complexity of human relations and to complexity scientists as much as family theorists, researchers and practitioners.

Ana Teixeira de Melo is a psychologist and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She has been tracing a highly interdisciplinary research pathway working at the crossroads of different domains and in close contact with contexts of professional practice. She has been exploring contributions of complexity-informed frameworks to understanding change processes in human systems and to guide the management of change and interventions in complex human systems. She is the author of Performing Complexity: Building Foundations for the Practice of Complex Thinking (2020) and of family programs such as the Integrated Family Assessment and Intervention Model (2011), Travelling Through Lands of Parenthood (2014) and Searching Family Treasure (2009).