Margins of the establishment is a positionality concept to describe being situated close enough inside elite institutions to know how they operate, yet far enough to perceive their blind spots and exclusions.

Directed Improvisation: United States as Demonstration refers to Yuen Yuen Ang’s use of twentieth-century U.S. innovation policy as a comparative reference point, showing that directed improvisation is not unique to China.

Coevolutionary Development: United States as Demonstration refers to Yuen Yuen Ang’s use of 19th-century U.S. development to show how the economy and fiscal capacities coevolved through improvisation and crisis-driven adaptation, rather than by establishing “good institutions” from the start.

Coevolutionary Development: Nigeria as Demonstration refers to Yuen Yuen Ang’s use of Nigeria to illustrate how markets can emerge through informal, normatively weak arrangements in the absence of strong state capacity, demonstrating the generalizable logic of Coevolutionary Development beyond China.

Directed Improvisation: China as Demonstration refers to Yuen Yuen Ang’s use of reform-era China (1980s-2012) to empirically demonstrate the model of Directed Improvisation: top-down direction + bottom-up improvisation = diverse coevolutionary paths.

Directed Improvisation is a model for enabling collective creativity that combines top-down direction with bottom-up improvisation.

Uncertainty vs. Risk is a conceptual distinction articulated by Yuen Yuen Ang to differentiate the nature of indeterminacy in complex versus complicated settings.

Influence vs. Control is a conceptual distinction articulated by Yuen Yuen Ang to differentiate appropriate modes of action in complex versus complicated settings.

Normatively Weak, Functionally Strong captures the idea that institutions or practices judged “weak,” “wrong,” or “backward” by first-world normative standards may nonetheless function effectively at early stages of development.

Stage-Variant Institutions is a concept coined by Yuen Yuen Ang to capture the idea that the institutional forms and strategies that work at one stage of development may not work at another.

Market-Building vs. Market-Preserving is a stage-variant concept coined by Yuen Yuen Ang to distinguish institutions or approaches that create new markets from those that preserve established markets.

Mapping Coevolution is a qualitative method for tracing and modeling endogenous (bicausal) processes of mutual change between two or more domains over time.

Coevolutionary Development: China as Demonstration explains China’s development as a coevolutionary process in which the economy, society, and political institutions mutually adapt over time, rather than by first establishing “good governance” that conforms to Western standards.

Coevolutionary Development explains political-economic development as a non-linear (mutually adaptive) process in which the economy, governance, or institutions evolve together over time, rather than in a linear sequence.

The chicken-and-egg fallacy of development refers to a circular reasoning problem in which economic growth is said to require good institutions, while good institutions are said to require economic growth.

Complex describes systems made up of many interconnected parts that interact with and adapt to one another and to their environment—such as trees.

Complicated describes machine-like objects made up of many separate parts whose operations are linear, decomposable, and controllable—such as a toaster.

In Yuen Yuen Ang’s critique, mechanical thinking is ill-suited to complex societies because it strips away the inherent realities of multiple causation, feedback loops, and emergence.

In Yuen Yuen Ang’s analysis, while polycrisis names the convergence of crises, it does not diagnose their root causes or provide solutions.

The Industrial–Colonial Paradigm describes the dominant worldview that emerged in the eighteenth century alongside industrialization and colonial expansion and continues to shape political economy into the early twenty-first century.