Structures and Transformations: An Interdisciplinary Matrix for Political Economy

The research project carried at the Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare 'Beniamino Segre' of the Italian National Lincei Academy Structural explores the implications of the following core set of principles: (i) attention for the relative positions of socio-economic groups, productive sectors, and institutions; (ii) relative invariance of certain patterns of interdependence vis à vis others; (iii) economic dynamics as structural transformation, that is, as change in the relative positions of socio-economic groups, productive sectors, and institutions subject to the condition of relative invariance. A further characterizing feature of this project is the consideration of a plurality of levels of aggregation for the economic, political and social systems under consideration. The analytically relevant components of each system may be not only the system’s elementary units (such as individual actors or productive tasks), or the system itself as a unit (the macro-system) but also the manifold intermediate levels at which effective causal relations can be found. The above principles characterize the structural analysis of economic, political and social systems vis à vis the analyses privileging either individual actors or the macro-system. Structural analysis has thus an intermediate position between macro- and micro-analysis. This makes it a privileged tool for investigating the internal configuration of economic, political and social systems, the opportunities and constraints specific to any given configuration, the transformations that are possible and those that are not possible under any such configuration. Structural analysis presupposes a complex system viewpoint in which the characterizing features of each system derive from the interdependencies between system components at different levels of aggregation, and from the relative speeds of transformation of system components subject to dynamic impulses. The research project has led to three workshops held at the Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare 'Beniamino Segre', National Lincei Academy, in the years 2014 and 2014, and to a final conference ('Structures and Transformations: An Interdisciplinary Matrix for Political Economy') held at the Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare 'Beniamino Segre', National Lincei Academy, on 26-27 October 2017.