A (Computational) Social Science Perspective to Societal Transitions

This paper aims to illustrate how social sciences, sociology in particular, have theorized on societal transitions. The first section introduces some preliminary definitions. The assumption is that a societal transition is more than a social, economic or technological change. It is a large-scale and long-term macro process through which a given social system radically changes its structural basis, in terms of new socio-technical practices, governance rules, social and economic institutions, cultural frames, and patterns of social life. The second section provides an excursus on social science accounts on transitions. In particular, the attention has been given to Norbert Elias' famous study on the rise and fall of the court society in France, between 17th and 18th century and to Manuel Castells' recent analysis of the emergence of the network society. The third section discusses problems and challenges of standard approaches and suggests some building blocks of societal transition models, taken from complexity and social simulation literature. The concluding section suggests some way-forward measures towards a computational social science approach to societal transition

Embedded, scattered, confused minds. What do hyper-conductive markets impose on investors’ social intelligence

This article discusses the observation theory developed by Elena Esposito, especially emphasising her critique of embeddedness. My understanding is that observation theory, if pushed to its limits, implies a never ending, infinite regression of meaning, cannot help to fully understand market behaviour. This is true for ‘scientific observers’ but also for ‘field observers’, e.g.., economic agents. Recent empirical findings indicate that the latter deal with (semantic, ontological and strategic) uncertainty, which is amplified by hyper-conductive, ICT-boosted, global markets, by drastically simplifying their strategies, adaptively segmenting and re-segmenting their epistemic, social “observation” space and creatively exploiting heuristics, emotions and social information. These findings seem to be more compatible with the idea of a continuous process of dis/re-embedding economic action. I argue that the involvement vs. detachment analogy formulated by Norbert Elias in his sociology of science studies could help us to develop an observation theory that does not merge individual and social dimensions and is more compatible with empirical evidence

The Agent-Based Modeling Approach through Some Foundational Monographs

L’article analyse quelques monographies fondamentales qui mettent en évidence la pertinence de la simulation multi-agents pour l’analyse sociologique. Ces ouvrages ont été sélectionnés au sein de travaux qui portent sur la coopération, les dynamiques sociales et les normes. Ils montrent l’importance de modéliser les comportements complexes des acteurs et leurs interactions pour comprendre les régularités sociales ainsi que les raisons pour lesquelles la modélisation et l’abstraction sont importantes pour l’analyse sociologique. La modélisation multi-agents peut nous aider à produire des théories des phénomènes sociaux plus cohérentes et vérifiables et nous permet de mieux organiser les théories avant de les tester et en vue de les répliquer. Enfin, dans l’esprit d’une approche collaborative, cet article argumente en faveur du besoin de liens plus étroits entre les approches expérimentales et la sociologie

Peering into Peer Review

This article examines the social mechanisms behind peer review and provides a complementary view to Mich\ue8le Lamont\u2019s book, How Professors Think. It emphasizes the need for outlook review of the entire process of evaluation in science in more general terms and suggests the added value of modelling to investigate it. It introduces experimental findings on the relevance of social sanctions and the counter-productive effect of economic incentives on peer review that can support the recent debate about its reform. It illustrates the relevance of reputational incentives to guarantee cooperation between the different figures involved in the evaluation process

Times, Noise and Institutional Complexity. A Comment on Graham Room’s Essay on the “Contingent Historical Model” of Social Dynamics

This comment on the essay \u201cThe Empirical Investigation of Non-Linear Dynamics in the Social World. Ontology, Methodology and Data\u201d, by Graham Room, focuses on the challenge of understanding institutional change in complex social systems. It discusses the evolutionary foundations of Room\u2019s \u201cContingent Historical Model\u201d by questioning the bio-social divide on selection mechanisms. It concentrates on Room\u2019s concept of temporalities of institutional change and discusses the role of noise

Economic Performance, Inter-Firm Relations and Local Institutional Engineering in a Computational Prototype of Industrial Districts

Industrial districts can be conceived as complex systems characterised by a network of interactions amongst heterogeneous, localised, functionally, integrated and complementary firms. In a previous paper, we have introduced an industrial district computational prototype, showing that the economic performance of an industrial district proceeds to the form through which firms interact and co-ordinate each others. In this paper, we use such computational framework to experiment different options of local institutional engineering', trying to understand how specific supporting institutions' could perform macro-collective activities, such as, i.e., technology research, transfer and information, improving the technological adaptation of firms. Is a district more than a simple aggregation of localised firms? What can explain the economic performance of firms localised into the same space? Could some options of 'local institutional engineering, improve the performance of a district? Could such options set aside the problem of how firms dynamically interact? These are questions explored in this paper

L’innovazione nelle medie imprese bresciane. Un’indagine empirica

L’articolo presenta i risultati di una indagine empirica su un campione di medie imprese della provincia di Brescia con particolare riferimento all’innovazione di prodotto e di processo. Le evidenze empiriche sugli investimenti in ricerca e sviluppo, sull’innovazione di prodotto e processo e sugli investimenti in nuove tecnologie mostrano la presenza di un gruppo di promettenti medie imprese innovative. Ma in generale il sistema delle imprese della provincia di Brescia è ancora segnato da alcune debolezze, quali una innovazione prevalentemente incrementale e non basata sulla ricerca, un basso livello di investimenti in ricerca e sviluppo, una bassa qualità del capitale umano impiegato, un debole impegno alla protezione delle innovazioni introdotte. L’articolo inquadra queste debolezze nei limiti sia dimensionali e organizzativi delle imprese che culturali di sistema dell’imprenditorialità del territorio indagato

Does Empirical Embeddedness Matter? Methodological Issues on Agent-Based Models for Analytical Social Science

The paper deals with the use of empirical data in social science agent-based models. Agent-based models are too often viewed just as highly abstract thought experiments conducted in artificial worlds, in which the purpose is to generate and not to test theoretical hypotheses in an empirical way. On the contrary, they should be viewed as models that need to be embedded into empirical data both to allow the calibration and the validation of their findings. As a consequence, the search for strategies to find and extract data from reality, and integrate agent-based models with other traditional empirical social science methods, such as qualitative, quantitative, experimental and participatory methods, becomes a fundamental step of the modelling process. The paper argues that the characteristics of the empirical target matter. According to characteristics of the target, ABMs can be differentiated into case-based models, typifications and theoretical abstractions. These differences pose different challenges for empirical data gathering, and imply the use of different validation strategies

Opening the Black-Box of Peer Review: An Agent-Based Model of Scientist Behaviour

This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness