Dr. Norman Johnson has been active in pure and applied research programs nationally and internationally. He seeks to understand for the greater good: the interplay between top-down centralized structures and bottoms-up distributed processes – across all types of social structures from extended families to organizations to societies to natural systems. He sees collective organization through the lenses of social identity (awareness of us-versus-them), the tradeoffs between structure and options in evolving systems, and the power of emergent problem solving of diverse collectives – particularly as the source of all deep social change.
