Thomas Baumgartner, Tom Burns, Philippe DeVille

Foreword. 1. Introduction Part 1. Modelling Socio-Economic Systems and Contemporary Problems 2. The Shaping of Socio-Economic Crisis: Societal Change and Theoretical Future 3. Inflation, Politics and Social Change: Actor-Oriented Systems Analysis 4. The Dynamics of Inflation and Unemployment in Belgium: Actors, Institutional Settings, and Social Structure 5. Socio-Political Cleavages: The Illegitimate State and Inflation in Latin America Part 2. Institutional Innovation and Alternative Societal Development: Studies in Economic Democracy 6. Conflict Resolution and Conflict Development: The Workers' Take-Over at the Lip Factory 7. Yugoslav Post-War Development Patterns and Dialectics: Self-Management, Market and Political Institutions in Conflict 8. Institutional Conflict and Power: Capital, Market and Other Constraints on Self-Management Part 3. Development and Underdevelopment 9. Wealth and Poverty Among Nations: A Social System Perspective on Inequality, Uneven Development and Dependence in the World Economy 10. Dependent Development: The Case of Mexico 11. Technology, Underdevelopment and Social Systems: Problems of Technology Transfer

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.