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Social systems are recognised as complex by most modern researchers in the social sciences, but sociology and political sciences are for historical reasons among the less penetrable fields of application for complex system scientists.

What can a complex system perspective bring to social sciences? Since Max Weber (1864 - 1920), a dominant paradigm in the research program of Social sciences has been methodological individualism: How to explain social phenomena from individual rationality.

This view is commonly shared in sociology or economics, but its connection to complex system research is accepted, and used, by a minority of social scientists, e.g. Kirman in Economics, Axelrod in Political sciences (and the BACH group in Ann Harbor, Michigan), Epstein, Axtell and P. Young (the Brookings INstitution) in Political Philosophy and Economics. In Europe, Gilbert and Conte e.g., are active in "simulating societies".

The descriptive approaches

The equivalent problem to functional organisation in biology is the problem of institutions in social sciences. In a bounded rationality perspective, institutions allow societies to meet the challenges that they face.

Social scientists, and not only structuralists, recognise that some social organisation allow individuals to act in society.

There are many kind of institutions, from what we obviously recognise as institutions such as schools, hospital, state, law, religions ... to less obvious instances such as cultural traits, routines, etiquette.

Even language is an institution.

Many questions have been asked about institutions but a central issue is the origin of institutions: how do individuals in a society "choose", adopt and maintain institutions?

How do institutions evolve? What make people abide or not by social norms?

The complex system approach as developed by Axelrod, Epstein, Axtell etc. interprete institutions as the attractors of the dynamics of interacting individuals. Axelrod for instance has launched the research program on the emergence of cooperation in a prisoner dilemma framework. Along this line of research, Epstein and Axtell discussed the emergence of a class system among social agents with a priori neutral labels. Luc Steels demonstrated the emergence of a common vocabulary among a set of communicating robots ("talking heads").

Interpreting institutions as attractors of the social dynamics among agents explain their emergence, their stability and robustness, and the fact that the history of institutions follows punctuated equilibria. If we think of social regimes in societies, one get an explanation of long stasis of organisations such as tribes, chiefdoms or modern states; transition among such metastable regimes occur fast and bring very different organisationnal forms ("revolutions").

Another line of research, also following complex system methodology is the search for scaling laws in social systems. Quantitative approaches to social systems started with scaling laws (Pareto, Levy, Zipf) reflecting for instance the abundance of structures according to their size. Zipf's laws for instance establish that the distribution of the size of cities roughly follows an 1/size law (1920's). The same kind of scaling was observed in the distribution of individual wealth, income, frequency of words in large corpuses, as in natural systems such as earthquakes or climatic events. They imply that there does not exist a city of "characteristic size" as would imply a normal distribution. The same scale free behaviour is observed in financial time series of returns or in firm size distributions.

Since the pioneering works of and Mandelbrot we have a simple explanation of the origin of these scaling laws: a simple mechanism such as "rich get richer" suffices to yield power law distributions.

A complex system perspective offers many opportunities in the most fundamental aspects of most social sciences. A few examples:

• Language

  one is looking for threads to answer questions about the origin and diversity of human language. Not only in terms of vocabulary, but also grammar. Why do we have a limited number of grammatical markers systems among the variety of human languages and why those?

  LINK to 'Multi-Agent Approaches in Language Evolution' (by Andrzej Nowak): http://shum.huji.ac.il/~sorin/report/Lang-Evol-Nowak.doc

  The challenges of linguistics and its applications to translation, information retrieving, human/computer communication, communication protocols are of tremoundous interest to the European Communities.

• Economic geography.

  Differences in economic activity, and especially in Europe, is stricking; it is a major challenge to European construction (of course the same can be said about cultures). In what respect is economic differentiation due to physical geography or to history?

  How much differentiation is "natural" or inevitable, because driven by economic growth itself and its aleas. Understanding cities, growth, shape, interactions, evolution etc. in connection with their inhabitants challenges, abilities and individual choices is a typical challenge of economic geography.

  Many challenges call for a complex system approach such as modeling land use, for which cellular automata approaches have been developped.

• Economics

  More generally Economics calls for complex systems methods and ideas as proposed by Nobel laureates in Economy (K. Arrow) and Physics (P.W. Anderson) and D. Pines

  ("The Economy as an Evolving complex system" 1987-8).

  With such "founding fathers" and followers this research program soon developped in the US (B. Arthur, SFI) and in Europe (the WEHIA conferences involving e.g. M. Gallegati and A. Kirman).

  Another factor which has facilitated these developments is the prevalence of mathematical culture among a large fraction of economists. But some tensions and competition with physicists (the econophysicists) and their contribution remains. It makes publication in economic reviews very hard to physicists.

• A second area which has been very successful is cognitive science, where complex systems methods helped to establish bridges between the (wet, biological) brain and cognition. The fast development of Cognitive sciences in Europe since the mid 80's is due to the conjunction of two factors, the use of complex sytems methods (especially neural nets) and new recording and imagery techniques (multi-recording,MRI etc.)

  Because of barriers to inter-discipline communication the progess has been much slower in areas such sociology, political sciences, political philosophy and even management.

  There exists some interest for complex systems among some scientists ion this disciplines, but most often for some "softer" versions.

• In the case of sociology in a wide sense (including e.g. political philosophy and political science), the chosen methodology is most often numerical simulation with little interest for complex systems concepts. This often translates into bringing all posible knowledge as input to the model, running the simulations (often under multi-agents ideology and platforms), and observing temporal or spatio-temporal patterns. This line of research has been active for more than ten years in Europe ("Simulating societies" with leaders such as Nigel Gilbert and Rosaria Conte).

  Application to present social challenges such as environment have been a strong incentive for these simulations.

  They are often developped in institutions closer to applications such as agriculture or halieutics rather than in inner academic circles.

• in the case of history, political philosophy and even in management the softer, (rather verbal than modeling) version of complexity is most often used: Edgar Morin in France is an example. Even when when complex systems concepts are invoked such as the importance of loops or of collectively constructed social representation (J-P. Dupuy). These communities often relate to cybernetics.

Normative approaches and design

Many applications of CSR concern priority areas of European research defined by the commission such as Health, Governance, Environment etc

In all these concrete challenges the picture involves on the one hand hard scientific knowledge either in medicine, climate, economy, and on the other hand choices by many inhomogeneous agents with incomplete information,

The agency, EC or national government has to extract information from a huge set of data, defined a policy acceptable for its constituants, and implement it. Any help in the different steps of the political action is awfully needed: from data to knowledge, defining a policy taking into account the conflicting requirements of production, environment and social needs, and imagine those measures acceptable by the constituency and helpful in bringing the sate of the world chosen by the political level.

All tools and methods of complex systems research are needed to get an integrated assesment of the issues and possibilities. A major challenge for complex system research is to be associated to the solution of these challenges. If we for instance take the case of global warming, the communities of climatologists and economics developed sophisticated models of climate on the one hand and of economics on the other hand. But the integration of these models to achieve some useful assesment has been terribly hard and unsuccessfull.

A challenge that is faced both by the scientific community and by funding agencies such as the EC is how to have projects in the priority areas of european research which bring together complex system scientists and specialists of the fields of application, whether agriculture,economics, medicine etc.

Design

The scientists vision of design starts taking into account the fact that designed object are to be used by humans (of course sellers already understood that, but for them consumers are only possible customers). The idea of human usage of technical products makes even more sense in our present well connected societies.

In the connected society, the success of any communication device largely relies on human factors which might overcome technical strengths or weaknesses. More than ever innovation means finding new use for sets of technical components that can be either already available or which development can be programmed.

  Research programs of the IST division is well aware of the importance of these

human factors and of the fact that a large part of innovation is driven by communication or based upon the development of ICT. The parallel assessment document for the IST division should be more explicit than ours about challenges and opportunities in IST.

Resource allocation problems are also a set of familiar problems in Operational Research. But new challenges in our present society such as local decision and the necessity of fast adaptation call for new algorithms. Supply chains methods for instance have to be re-adapted because of the large variability of consumers demand supplying local dealers with black Ford T in the 20's is a different challenge than supplying the specific model (in terms of color, motorization and color options etc.) requested by a 21th century customer. Scheduling cannot be completely made in advance and has to be adaptive.

The "Federal Express" problem

is a paradigm of many scheduling problems encountered today, from routing messages along the internet to handling natural catastrophes: what are the best algorithms to allocate vehicles collecting letters or parcels according to received calls?

Simple local optimization algorithms have been invented which parameters are adjusted according to past call history.

  The research community, and especially computer scientists, is more aware of applications in distributed computer science, but many other sectors in business administration call for local, adaptive approaches to resource allocation and scheduling.

   In a societies where services represent the largest part of the economic activity, a better adaptive allocation is a real challenge which is seldom met

(think for instance of the medical services crisis in Europe). One get the impression that the new developments in the field do not percolate to business through consulting firms or business schools which should be the normal channels (with fortunately exceptions).

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