Explaining the complexity of social life remains the central challenge of the social sciences. This book offers a variety of theoretical-empirical explorations and applications inspired by an important neo-institutional approach to tackling this complexity - the rule systems theory. Its point of departure is the assumption that institutions and cultural formations possess causal powers and relative autonomy, constraining and enabling people's social actions and interactions. Structural and cultural properties of society are carried by, transmitted, and reformed by human agents whose interactions generate, reproduce, elaborate and transform structures. The contributors are highly accomplished economists, sociologists and political scientists who come from the US and several European countries. The book is meant as a Festschrift for Tom Burns, a central figure in the development of the rule systems theory.

However, unlike conventional legal theory, this volume seeks to provide an answer in terms of a general social theory: a methodology that answers this question in a manner applicable not only to law, but also to all the other complex and highly differentiated systems within modern society, such as politics, the economy, religion, the media, and education. This truly sociological approach offers profound insights into the relationships between law and all of these other social systems.

The central topic of this book is the mathematical analysis of social systems, understood in the following rather classical way: social systems consist of social actors who interact according to specific rules of interactions; the dynamics of social systems is then the consequences of these interactions, viz., the self-organization of social systems. According to particular demands of their environment, social systems are able to behave in an adaptive manner, that is they can change their rules of interaction by certain meta rules and thus generate a meta dynamics. It is possible to model and analyse mathematically both dynamics and meta dynamics, using cellular automata and genetic algorithms. These tools allow social systems theory to be carried through as precisely as the theories of natural systems, a feat that has not previously been possible. Readership: Researchers and graduate students in the fields of theoretical sociology and social and general systems theory and other interested scientists. No specialised knowledge of mathematics and/or computer science is required.

"To discover who rules, follow the gold." This is the argument of Golden Rule, a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics. Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption. Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues—that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party"—has been ignored by most political scientists. Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, Golden Rule shows that voters are "right on the money." Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics. In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures—between large firms and sectors—can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy. Golden Rule presents revised versions of widely read essays in which Ferguson advanced and tested his theory, including his seminal study of the role played by capital intensive multinationals and international financiers in the New Deal. The chapter "Studies in Money Driven Politics" brings this aspect of American politics into better focus, along with other studies of Federal Reserve policy making and campaign finance in the 1936 election. Ferguson analyzes how a changing world economy and other social developments broke up the New Deal system in our own time, through careful studies of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The essay on 1992 contains an extended analysis of the emergence of the Clinton coalition and Ross Perot's dramatic independent insurgency. A postscript on the 1994 elections demonstrates the controlling impact of money on several key campaigns. This controversial work by a theorist of money and politics in the U.S. relates to issues in campaign finance reform, PACs, policymaking, public financing, and how today's elections work.

The classic book on a major modern theory

The concept of CAST, computer aided systems Theory, was introduced by F. Pichler of Linz in the late 1980s to include those computer theoretical and practical developments used as tools to solve problems in system science. It was considered as the third component (the other two being CAD and CAM) that would provide for a complete picture of the path from computer and systems sciences to practical developments in science and engineering. The University of Linz organized the first CAST workshop in April 1988, which demonstrated the acceptance of the concepts by the scientific and technical community. Next, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria joined the University of Linz to organize the first international meeting on CAST (Las Palmas February 1989), under the name EUROCAST 1989, a very successful gathering of systems theorists, computer scientists and engineers from most European countries, North America and Japan. It was agreed that EUROCAST international conferences would be organized every two years. Thus, the following EUROCAST meetings took place in Krems (1991), Las Palmas (1993), Innsbruck (1995), Las Palmas (1997), Vienna (1999), Las Palmas (2001) and Las Palmas (2003) in addition to an extra-European CAST conference in Ottawa in 1994. Selected papers from those meetings were published as Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science vols. 410, 585, 763, 1030, 1333, 1728, 2178 and 2809 and in several special issues of Cybernetics and Systems: an lnternational Journal.

Introduces a systems world view in the context of family therapy. Describes some of the basic constructs by means of which social systems, particularly the family, may be understood, with chapters on systems theory and cybernetics, family interpretive systems as stories which participate in the creation of reality, traditional models of family development and a dynamic process model, and critiques and defense of a system perspective. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR