Significant sources I've recently encountered on emergence include Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: the New Biology of Machines (1994), and Steven Johnson's Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software (2001). Both are in the 'popular science' genre, but point to substantial scientific literatures on emergent systems and behaviors. The work of the Emergent Systems Working Group at Bryn Mawr's Center for Science in Society suggests that liberal arts colleges are at work in this realm.
From Kelly 1994 (emphasis added):
Technology, particularly the technology of knowledge, shapes our thought. The possibility space created by each technology permits certain kinds of thinking and discourages others. A blackboard encourages repeated modification, erasure, casual thinking, spontaneity. A quill pen on writing paper demands care, attention to grammar, tidiness, controlled thinking. A printed page solicits rewritten drafts, proofing, introspection, editing. Hypertext, on the other hand, stimulates yet another way of thinking: telegraphic, modular, nonlinear, malleable, cooperative... (463)Networks rearrange the writing space of the printed book into a writing space many orders larger and many ways more complex than [that] of ink on paper. The entire instrumentation of our lives can be seen as part of that "writing space". As data from weather sensors, demographic surveys, traffic recorders, cash registers, and all the millions of electronic information generators pour their "words" or representation into the Net, they enlarge the writing space. Their information becomes part of what we know, part of what we talk about, part of our meaning... (465-466)
Our society is a working pandemonium of fragments... There is no central keeper of knowledge in a network, only curators of particular views. People in a highly connected yet deeply fragmented society can no longer rely on a central canon for guidance. They are forced into the modern existential blackness of creating their own culture, beliefs, markets, and identity from a sticky mess of interdependent pieces... (466)