The Next Global Scenarios: the systemic approach and the 21st century challenges

The System Theory, as we recognize it today, consolidated its methods in the post-Modern era, the time (and we may still be in it) that “corresponds to the decline of the great narrations, which became dysfunctional” (Lyotard 1979; Azuma 2010). Nonetheless, despite the irrational, subjective aberrations of the post-Modern period, the sociosystemic approach stands as a forerunner and builder for a pathway of neo-Enlightenment governance. As Ardigò (1989: 13-14) wrote in 1989: «From the discovery of the complexity of the contemporary world, socio-systemic theories now condemn the limits (of comprehension and selection) of individual reason and of spontaneous inter-subject communications. In Sociology, the entire system approach from the second half of the Sixties to the early Eighties was characterized by the predominance of the social system as the required and functionally preeminent means available to the individual – leaning increasingly to limited rationality – for interfacing with the hyper-complex world»(Prigogine 1997). After the 1980s, the debate involving the System Theory, Radical Constructivism, new theories of complexity and neo-Darwinism, definitively established that: a) systems are all open, which is to say “not isolated” from what surrounds them, therefore perturbable and subject to exchange of information with the exterior; b) systems are characterized by a state of equilibrium that can be defined as “stationary” – some use the clearly paradoxical oxymoron “deterministic chaos” – since they are typified by a continuous flow of construction phases via components, between the interior and the exterior, and the disintegration of this construction; c) the same finals status can be reached in various ways, starting off from different conditions (the equifinality principle);d) systems are destroyed and rebuilt, creating tension between organization(order/negentropy) and dissipation (disorder/entropy). The essays collected in this volume establish another step in the existing considerations. The intention is to comprehend the changes occurring in social systems, fighting the risk of de-subjectivation4 present in the System Theory, with a view to “humanization” (as intended by Donati) of the way systems are perceived, seeking a systems relationships still without a stable foundation.