This article presents a social systems theoretical approach to the field of socio-economics.Drawing on actor-system dynamics, a social systems theory, developed in the 1970s, we report on how it has been applied to socio-economic questions and analyses in a series of reports and publications for the past 40+ years.Among the problems discussed are:(1) The discontents and conflicts of capitalism.(2) Economic inequality, uneven socio-economic development, conflict and instability.(3) The limits of orthodox economic theories and policies in the face of recurrent economic crises and instabilities.Introduction of the paper briefly outlines the social systems theory, actor-system dynamics (ASD).Part I discusses the continued relevance of the systems approach, possibly even more so as systemic failures have occurred in the post-Keynesian world.In Part II, we consider what next for social systems analysis and its application to socioeconomic problems.

Economic and political institutions are often judged by the farmers to be detrimental to their own welfare. However, recent history reveals a deep institutional inertia within many rural communities in Central Africa. The paper develops a framework to explain this socio-political inertia and its economic and political consequences. Traditional explanations focus on the peasants’ inadequate bargaining power to force the elites to accept changes. The reasons invoked are the burden of poverty constraining peasants’ expectations to the short run, the repressive nature of socio-political institutions to maintain the elites’ privileges and the farmers’ inability to develop autonomous collective organizations. However, they fall short of truly explaining the self-reproductive dynamics of these communities. To do this requires a model based on a rational costs/benefits analysis, specific to each class of agents, of their possible strategies for institutional changes. The model key features are the agents’ structure characterized by heterogeneous elites forming a “multicracy” which faces competing rural households, the assets distribution (land, capital, finance, symbolic power) and the farmers’ economic behavior constrained by the nature of their production, the capacity to commercialize (role of intermediaries) and the related market institutions (taxes, barriers to entry, size, location). It can be viewed as a “multi-game” framework, first among the elites, second among competing farmers and intermediaries, third between the “multicracy” and the rural households. Different dynamic equilibrium outcomes are possible, ranging from morphostatic selfreproduction to revolutionary paths. Empirical evidence supporting the analysis is based on farmers’ data coming out of a research on market failures and peasants’ welfare and on interviews of community leaders in three territories of South Kivu, Dem. Rep of Congo.

Data are everywhere. They pervade our world. From e-mails we send, online status we post or friends we call, to credit cards we swipe or papers we cite, most of our everyday actions leave digital traces. As our ability and capacity to measure natural and social phenomena is rapidly increasing at an unprecedented scale, we witness an exponential growth of all these digital traces. This growing digital information is what we call Big Data; Data that we generate and acquire far more rapidly than the rate at which we process, analyse and exploit it. In science, the ability to collect and analyse massive amounts of data traces have fuelled numerous advances and unambiguously transformed many research fields. But nowhere are these advances more important than in the study of social systems. Indeed, the flood of data capturing activities of individuals enables an entirely new scientific approach for social analysis, which this thesis aims at illustrating. More particularly, our contributions evolve around three different yet intrinsically related aspects of social dynamics: human mobility, social interactions and success. In the first part of this work, we focus on mobile phone data. We first demonstrate that these large-scale social data can provide reliable and dynamical estimates of population densities over large geographical extents, offering concrete solutions to population mapping issues in low-income countries. We then show how these data can also reveal remarkable and unexpected social structures over entire countries, as well as help us uncover universal relationships between human mobility and social interactions, fuelling applications on epidemic spreading or traffic forecasting. In the second part, we investigate the social mechanisms of success through the analysis of large-scale publication data. Publication data are a valuable source of individual information as mobility, interaction and citation information can be extracted from these. Based on these data, we investigate the patterns of scientific success as well as its connection with human mobility.

Books, essays and articles on the causes, dynamics and impacts of the 2007+ global economic/financial crisis and the related economic depression are numerous and growing. Widespread agreement exists on the sequence of events leading to the crisis (European Parliament, 2009; US Government Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 2011): from the housing bubble and the subprime crisis in the US market to the risk of default and the federal rescue with large amounts of public money of the two giants of US housing credit firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and one of the largest US insurance companies AIG; from the crisis of the five largest American investment banks that were at the core of global finance (the default of Lehman Brothers and the acquisition or transformation of the others) to the financial panic caused by the vast proliferation of the toxic products of the shadow finance system that fostered a generalised crisis of confidence in banks, firms and families, thus contributing ultimately to the recession of the real economy.

Our discussion will proceed in three parts. In section 1, we set out what we believe to be the canonical view of fair competition which underlies most defences of competition as a fair and efficient procedure. In section 2, we challenge this canonical view and argue that the fundamental dynamics of the competitive process leads to unfairness (due to the progressive curtailment of competitors’ choice sets) even if the competition was initially fair in the sense of section 1. Finally, in section 3, we summarize the ethical issues which we deem crucial, and we challenge the relevance of the concept of a “competitive equilibrium” as an adequate benchmark for an appropriate understanding of what the fairness-of-competition debate is all about.

Contemporary Capitalism, Its Discontents and Dynamics : Institutional and Political Considerations

This article develops a multi-faceted approach to the institution of money. A complex of interlinked, socio-economic theories are used to understand and explain several key aspects of money and money systems in modern societies: (1) money as a means to represent and communicate value; (2) money as technology (money, like other technologies, embodies in its design particular rules and collective representation(s) and is associated with a variety of techniques for using it); (3) monetary orders as socio-technical systems that are designed, administered and regulated; (4) the multiple views, meanings, and uses of money within diverse institutional domains and social settings; (5) contradictory uses and purposes of money in modern societies: among others, as a medium of exchange, as a standard or measure of value; as a basis for expanding productive capacity ("capital") or initiating projects; as a source of social power.

Equilibrium in economics solely concerns efficiency properties defined over the commodity space. But, in different and often conflicting ways, members of society judge market performances also on equity rounds and express preferences not only over bundles of commodities but also over social relations and social orders. Social equilibria are states of the system where institutional arrangements, including market processes and outcomes, that make up for the quality of social life are considered just, i.e. fair and legitimate. “Justice” entails guaranteeing minimum efficiency levels in the allocation of resources, fairness in distributive outcomes and freedom to choose among alternative organisational arrangements. Legitimacy of procedures and outcomes derives from constitutionally grounded democratic decision-making processes. A conceptual framework is elaborated to discuss types of social equilibria and conditions for their emergence and reproduction.

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

industrialized countries, particularly when inflation can only be regulated at the substantial cost of high unemployment and the underutilization of production capacity. Economic advisors and political leaders have failed thus far to come up with a coherent counter-inflationary strategy, one effective as well as politically sustainable over the long-run. This paper stems from a long-term, comparative and multi-disciplinary project to investigate inflation as well as stagnation processes in several industrialized countries. We posit that inflation results from institutionalized societal conflict over the distribution of income. The state, unable to resolve these conflicts, accommodates them-with the intentional or unintentional cooperation of the banking system-through an expansion of credit and of the