Socio-economics: the Approach of Social Systems Theory in a Forty Year Perspective

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 socio-economic problems.