Towards an Evolutionary Understanding of the Current Global Socio-economic Crisis and Restructuring: From a Conjunctural to a Structural and Evolutionary Perspective

Abstract

The current global socio-economic crisis and restructuring reshapes the terms of study of the global dynamics as a whole. A new generation of interdisciplinary socio-economic research on the matter in question seems to be progressively emerging in international literature.Against this background, it gradually emerges the understanding, that any attempt to interpret the individual contemporary socio-economic phenomena, which relate to the crisis and the attempt to restructure globalization, can only be inadequate and ineffective, since it fails to fully approach the current dynamics of globalization in synthetic, holistic terms.In this direction, new interpretative approaches seem to intensify interpenetration and conceptual syntheses between the different fields of socio-economic sciences, in an increasingly unified perspective, by extensively "borrowing" –in a direct and indirect way– methods and theoretical "lenses" derived from system science, chaos theory, and evolutionary economics.In the depth of this methodological rearrangement, according to the position put forward in the following paper, it is crucial that an effort is made to move from a conjunctural to a structural perception of the crisis. Ultimately, the great challenge for the field of study of global dynamics nowadays is the transition from the methodological principles of the traditional mechanistic interpretative method to a coherent and integrated evolutionary socio-economic perspective.