Held in conjunction with Oxford University Press, the Clarendon Lectures are designed to inform a general academic audience of important issues in management and the social sciences. Mauro Guillén presents The Architecture of Collapse: The Global System in the 21st Century The global system is both highly structured and predictable. And yet, crises and other episodes of abrupt change do occur rather frequently. These three lectures will develop a new theoretical framework to think about the evolution of the global system in terms of its interactive complexity and degree of coupling. These two variables will be examined at the level of the global network of nation-states, and within countries. Economic, political and social factors will be taken into consideration when it comes to assessing the structure of the global system and its evolution over time. The lectures will show how management theory and organizational sociology can be used to understand dynamics at the global level. Lecture 1 - Complexity and Coupling in the Global System Is the global system becoming more interactively complex and tightly coupled? Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives—world-system, world-society, open-economy politics, new international trade theory, normal accidents—Professor Guillen will lay out the paradoxical development of the global system along economic, political, and social dimensions. He will focus on the paradoxes of predictability, coupling, and differentiated convergence, and offer a variety of empirical indicators over time. The attention will be placed on both nodes in the global system and relationships among them. Lecture 2 - Two Intriguing Cases of Complexity & Coupling: The Eurozone & the U.S./China Relationship http://goo.gl/uqLIXp Lecture 3 - Isomorphism, Impermeability, and Institutional Diversity http://goo.gl/vbIhHp www.sbs.oxford.edu/events @OxfordSBS

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