Social entropy, technological change and international stability

The paper presents an entropy-based model for a self-organizing hierarchical social-economic system.,Different formalisms are analyzed, and the most suitable, based on a complex structure with decomposable levels having elementary actors as resource transfer units was proposed. The crucial observation is that a self-organizing system will tend towards differentiation along dimensions which are functional for its survival and consequently complex dynamic systems can be thus compared in terms of their evolution. Particular entropic concepts are adapted in order to models the dynamics of an economic-social system. Based on this model, several complex relations are presented, pointing on the importance of the technological change (and especially on the academic-industrial-economic-political relations) in the progress of the society. Finally, a possible global (world view) model with high stability presented as a generalization of several local entropic subsystems is discussed. Two typical conflicts with international consequences and the way to solve them are used as examples for the opportunities offered by the global model. The concluding remarks offer six basic implications which allow to develop further researches. Copyright (C) 1998 IFAC.