Social Dynamics In A Systems Perspective

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers’ understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as complex adaptive systems, the impacts of psychological and emotional factors upon value co-creation exchanges, and ICT enablers of service network performance and service exchange fulfillment. Thanks to the chosen perspectives, all of which are based on different systems research streams, the book will support more consistent and robust decisions, leading to sustainable, wise, and viable systems dynamics. It will aid managers, practitioners, and consultants in their decision-making processes and will also be of interest for academics and scholars in management, systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing.

The central topic of this book is the mathematical analysis of social systems, understood in the following rather classical way: social systems consist of social actors who interact according to specific rules of interactions; the dynamics of social systems is then the consequences of these interactions, viz., the self-organization of social systems. According to particular demands of their environment, social systems are able to behave in an adaptive manner, that is they can change their rules of interaction by certain meta rules and thus generate a meta dynamics. It is possible to model and analyse mathematically both dynamics and meta dynamics, using cellular automata and genetic algorithms. These tools allow social systems theory to be carried through as precisely as the theories of natural systems, a feat that has not previously been possible. Readership: Researchers and graduate students in the fields of theoretical sociology and social and general systems theory and other interested scientists. No specialised knowledge of mathematics and/or computer science is required.

A dynamical system refers to a set of elements that interact in complex, often nonlinear ways to form coherent patterns. Because of the complexity of these interactions, the system as a whole may evolve over time in seemingly unpredictable ways as new patterns of behavior emerge. This metatheory has proven useful in understanding diverse phenomena in meteorology, population biology, statistical mechanics, economics, and cosmology. The book demonstrates how the dynamical systems perspective can be applied to theory construction and research in social psychology, and in doing so, provides fresh insight into such complex phenomena as interpersonal behavior, social relations, attitudes, and social cognition.

Actor-systems dynamics is an innovative, multidisciplinary methodology for investigating and analyzing social struggles over economic resources and the related interplay between economic and socio-political institutions and processes. The authors, sociologists and economists, offer a systemic perspective on contemporary socio-economic issues such as economic crisis, unemployment, inflation, economic democracy and development; in their analyses, they identify several of the key factors that drive people to interact, to initiate change and transformation as well as to resist such change. Major underlying themes in the book are: Conflict over the distribution of economic resources and economic policies and institutions; the structural bases of economic inequality and conflict; the shaping and reshaping of socio-economic institutions, and the contradictions, conflicts and instabilities evoked by such developments; the failure of orthodox economic theories, including Keynesianism, in the face of recurrent economic crises and instabilities; the development and application of an open, dynamic actor-oriented systems theory – grounded in the social sciences – addressing complex socio-economic phenomena in ways diverging substantially from conventional economics. All in all, the papers collected here deal, on the one hand, with social power, conflict, and struggle concerning economic resources and institutions and, on the other hand, the structural and other factors which drive powering initiatives, conflict, and social innovation and transformation. The book is addressed to a broad spectrum of social and managerial scientists concerned with socio-economic issues, institutions, and development.

This book is a social—ecological system description and feedback analysis of the Lake Tana Basin, the headwater catchment of the Upper Blue Nile River. This basin is an important local, national, and international resource, and concern about its sustainable development is growing at many levels. Lake Tana Basin outflows of water, sediments, nutrients, and contaminants affect water that flows downstream in the Blue Nile across international boundaries into the Nile River; the lake and surrounding land have recently been proposed as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve; the basin has been designated as a key national economic growth corridor in the Ethiopian Growth and Transformation Plan. In spite of the Lake Tana Basin’s importance, there is no comprehensive, integrated, system-wide description of its characteristics and dynamics that can serve as a basis for its sustainable development. This book presents both the social and ecological characteristics of the region and an integrated, system-wide perspective of the feedback links that shape social and ecological change in the basin. Finally, it summarizes key research needs for sustainable development.

In The Emerging Consensus of Social Systems Theory Bausch summarizes the works of over 30 major systemic theorists. He then goes on to show the converging areas of consensus among these out-standing thinkers. Bausch categorizes the social aspects of current systemic thinking as falling into five broadly thematic areas: designing social systems, the structure of the social world, communication, cognition and epistemology. These five areas are foundational for a theoretic and practical systemic synthesis. They were topics of contention in a historic debate between Habermas and Luhmann in the early 1970's. They continue to be contentious topics within the study of social philosophy. Since the 1970's, systemic thinking has taken great strides in the areas of mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. This book presents a spectrum of those theoretical advances. It synthesizes what various strains of contemporary systems science have to say about social processes and assesses the quality of the resulting integrated explanations. Bausch gives a detailed study of the works of many present-day systems theorists, both in general terms, and with regard to social processes. He then creates and validates integrated representations of their thoughts with respect to his own thematic classifications. He provides a background of systemic thinking from an historical context, as well as detailed studies of developments in sociological, cognitive and evolutionary theory. This book presents a coherent, dynamic model of a self-organizing world. It proposes a creative and ethical method of decision-making and design. It makes explicit the relations between structure and process in the realms of knowledge and being. The new methodology that evolves in this book allows us to deal with enormous complexity, and to relate ideas so as to draw out previously unsuspected conclusions and syntheses. Therein lies the elegance and utility of this model.

The dynamic systems approach is a rapidly expanding advancement in the study of developmental research, particularly in the domain of adolescent development. It provides a unique way of examining the subject, and this innovative study of developmental processes helps social scientists to translate dynamic systems conceptualizations into clear empirical research that readers will be able to implement themselves. The first part of this edited book discusses techniques that describe and assess specific process characteristics such as variability, sudden jumps and attractor states. The second part explores the different techniques for building a dynamic systems model, which can simulate the behaviour of a system to investigate the mechanisms behind the processes. Each chapter describes one technique and is based on a specific practical example of its application in adolescent development. Step-by-step instructions for model-building and examples of ready-made models are provided on the website that belongs to the book: www.psypress.com/dynamic-systems-approach. This book provides a clear step-by-step description of theories and techniques that are designed for the study of developmental processes, and is therefore ideal for researchers of developmental psychology who do not specialise in statistics or research methods.

When I started with this book several years ago I originally intended to write an introduction to mathematical systems theory for social scientists. Yet the more I thought about systems theory on the one side and theoretical sociology on the other the more I became convinced that the classical mathematical tools are not very well suited for the problems of sociology. Then I became acquainted with the researches on complex systems by the Santa Fe Institute and in particular with cellular automata, Boolean networks and genetic algorithms. These mathematically very simple but extremely efficient tools are, in my opinion, very well appropriate for modeling social dynamics. Therefore I tried to reformulate several classical problems of theoretical sociology in terms of these formal systems and outline new possibilities for a mathematical sociology which is able to join immediately on the great traditions of theoretical sociology. The result is this book; whether I succeeded with it is of course up to the readers. As the readers will perceive, the book could not have been written by me alone but only by the joint labors of the computer group at the Interdisciplinary Center of Research in Higher Education at the University of Essen. The members of the group, Christina Stoica, Jom Schmidt and Ralph Kier, are named in several subchapters as co-authors. Yet even more important than their contributions to this book were the permanent discussions with them and their patience with my new and very speculative ideas. Many thanks.