Repair: When and How to Improve Broken Objects, Ourselves, and Our Society

This book propagates a new way of thinking about managing our resources by integrating the perspectives of complex systems theory and social psychology. By resources, the authors mean objects, such as cell phones and cars, and human resources, such as family members, friends, and the small and large communities they belong to. As we all face the "replace or repair" dichotomy, readers will understand how to repair themselves, their relationships, and communities, accept the "new normal," and contribute to repairing the world. The book is offered to Zoomers,  growing up in a world where it seems everything is falling apart; people in their 30s and 40s, who are thinking about how to live a fulfilling life; people from the Boomers generation, who are thinking back on life and how to repair relationships. The Reader will enjoy the intellectual adventure of connecting the natural and social worlds and understanding the transition's pathways from a "throwaway society" to a "repair society.

Péter Érdi has served since 2002 as the Henry Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he teaches interdisciplinary classes and is cross-appointed in the physics and psychology departments. Péter Érdi grew up in Budapest, a research professor at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. Érdi served between 2015 and 2019 as the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Cognitive Systems Research, served as a vice-president of the International Neural Network Society, and was a board member of several learned societies scientific publishing houses. He has given around 200 invited lectures in the overlapping areas of computational, cognitive, and social sciences in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. He is a founding director of a study abroad program, the Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science, which takes international students to Budapest for a semester. Péter Érdi has written well-accepted bookspublished by Princeton University Press, MIT Press, and Springer (Complexity Explained, 2008; Stochastic Chemical Kinetics Theory and (Mostly) Systems Biological Applications (with Gábor Lente), 2014. His recent book, RANKING: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play (Oxford University Press, 2020) has been translated into Chinese, German, Hungarian, Japanese, and Korean.

Zsuzsanna Szvetelszky is a Hungarian social psychologist with a master’s degree in Librarianship and Information Management from Eötvös University Budapest and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Pécs. She has successfully combined her academic interest with practical applications during her career, as she has been able to transfer her academic research to business practice. She is affiliated to the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary and the Research Center for Educational and Network Studies, Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. Dr,Szvetelszky has also served as a corporate consultant focused on communication projects and systems. Her six books written in Hungarian, and her papers published in international journals, reflect her broad interests from gossip psychology to informal networking to corporate communication. She frequently appears in Hungarian newspapers and magazines and is often featured on radio and television programs.