In popular terms, ‘tipping point’ refers to a critical point in time when everything changes at once and has been ascribed to everything from global financial crises, to impending environmental disasters.  As a metaphor, it was first used in sociology in 1958 to describe the critical threshold when white people would leave an increasingly black-dominated community.  Since then, it has been used to describe rapid technological change, the onset of rapid product adoption and similar transformations in both physical and socioeconomic systems.  It was further popularised in 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point: How little things can make a big difference.  Gladwell’s ideas stretch the definition of a tipping point into a particular branch of mathematics, namely a subset of complexity theory called bifurcation analysis.

The term ‘tipping point’ may not only be a metaphor, but suggest a behaviour that we can detect and possibly predict.  It might even have agency, if use of the term affects the very behaviour it sets out to describe.  Tipping Points, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, provides the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience (IHRR) with an opportunity to provide a fresh and original exploration of a term increasingly used to describe the world in which we live.  The relevance of understanding how tipping points occur could not come at a better time, as countries recover from near or complete financial collapse and as ecological devastation due to climate change continues to grow in scale.  If there are examples of systems that tip, then it will require a fundamentally different approach to the way in which we live.

Not everything that appears on this blog, including individual ideas or opinions, is necessarily endorsed by the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience or the Tipping Points project.

5 Responses “Introduction” →

  1. Nagham

    May 24, 2012

    Hi, I’m doing my thesis about the tipping point, and I want to use the above information. Can you please tell me who wrote it for citation purposes?

    • Hi, sure no problem. The name of the person who wrote the intro is Brett Cherry.


      • Nagham

        June 8, 2012

        Thanks a million for your support, would you please send me the date when it was written too?

      • 9 May 2010

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  1. Natural chaos in the markets « Front Street Asset

    [...] giving a short talk in a couple weeks at a meeting of a Leverhulme Trust project on tipping points in physical and social systems. The organizers just asked me to send a rough outline of what [...]

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