Abstract Understanding the processes by which societies change may be improved if they are treated as complex systems.
Complex systems are structures with maps of themselves that are embedded in environments.
Maps, structures and environments co-evolve, and, for systemic change to occur, variation in one or more must trigger changes in the others. Explanations of social change which exclusively favor idealistic or materialistic, individual or collective, contingent or deterministic causes are bound to be over simplified, therefore. Moreover, symbolic, behavioral, and environmental events must be accounted for, which leaves social change an immensely complicated problem. Models developed by the sciences of complexity to track chemical, biological, and ecological systems indicate problems are not intractable, however. Borrowing models from complex systems theory may make social change comprehensible without turning societies into mechanisms.