Shortcuts: Main menu | Content | Secondary Menu

“Social systems”

Inter-personal networks, labour organisations, political and economic systems: all those relations between human beings, considered either individually or as a group, can be considered complex structures surprisingly similar to natural systems.
An approach based on the interaction between paradigms from different disciplines, in the conviction that the traditional split between disciplines must be re-thought, can lead to greater understanding of human beings and their condition in all its ambivalence and contradictions.

How do these reflections affect social living? What contribution can be made to the study of social phenomenon born of apparently unforeseeable, random individual decisions? What are the collective effects on, for example, financial markets without in some way the causes being located back in the choice of single operators? What contribution can be made by new sciences to explain reality, such as econophysics using physics to analyse economic and financial conditions?
Complex systems are open, in that they are critically dependent on external factors: how do trends in our day and age influence the balance and historical-political dynamics of international systems; on the one hand globalisation and, on the other, the defence of the individual characteristics of a group?

Will the opportunity to highlight laws within systems that do not seem to be regulated, such as traffic in a city, enable us to forecast those more critical situations which we can seek to solve by better urban planning?

 

session programme >>