Complexity Theory, Sociology, Social Integration: A New Theoretical and Methodological Paradigm for Social Sciences

This essay reflects on the main implications of the New General System Complex Theory for Science in general, redefining and dispelling myths of traditional science, and Sociology in particular. InSociology, the insights of Complexity Theory have contributed to a new way of thinking about socialsystems, by re-addressing some fundamental sociological issues starting to social system, emergence,change and predictability concepts, and re-specifying the relationship between micro-macro levels ofanalysis, system and environment, order and disorder, determinism and chance, differentiation andconnection/integration processes in the frame of an anti-reductionist/emergentist perspectivesynthesizing in the complex realism concept the tension between sociological critical realism and postmodernvitalism, between search for general theory and instances of contextual understandings. Thepaper focuses on these theoretical issues, and aims to re-read the social integration issue in aincreasingly differentiated, individualized and globalized modern society in the light of the mostrecent theoretical and methodological acquisitions in the field of complex systems. In this regard, itshows the profitable use of a non-linear differential equation in logistics structure, exhibiting arestrained or braking growth, in modelling the logic of the suicide decision making processresponsible for changes at aggregate level in growth rates (suicide rates in Italy, 1875 - 2010), and,therefore, in orienting an analysis on social integration issue connecting the Durkheimian Theory withthe Halbawachs’ Theory and most current visions of modernity such as the Baumanian one.Furthermore, it argues that the characterization of systems as able to self-organizing far fromequilibrium, far from complete differentiation, can be a useful reference point in order to reflect oncurrent cultural difference inclusion and integration policies in an era of globalization (pluralism,multiculturalism, interculturalism) and their implications for social integration