Knowledge Evolution and Societal Transformations: Action Theory for Solutions to Adaptive Problems

 Social science theory has fragmented into many different theory groups such as evolutionary theory, postmodernism, Marxism, functionalism, comparative institutional analysis, organizational theory, network theory, actor network theory, symbolic interactionism, role theory, dramaturgy, agency theory, etc. The book Knowledge Evolution and Societal Transformations: Action Theory to Solve Adaptive Problems synthesizes these different perspectives into new sociological paradigm for social change. The thesis of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) synthesizes three levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro) into a new and much more accurate meta-narrative. A key theoretical mechanism for successfully integrating theories, and in particular the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Merton, Parsons, Giddens, and Habermas, is the use of contingencies that argue that certain parts of their theories apply to the second stage of knowledge creation and that, with the addition of other ideas, their work can be updated to this, the third stage. Some 35 concepts, hypotheses, perspectives are synthesized.
   
   Unlike most evolutionary theories, the accent in this book is on adaptive failures, highly visible in the U.S. and Europe. The subtitle of Action Theory points to the need to build a novel society, a new economy and a robust democracy. Thus, it integrates economics and political sciences via a critique of neoclassical theory and the theory of democracy, again with the device of contingencies. Rather than either markets or state programs as solutions, the book advocates the role of networks and a new kind of social capital and explains how to create this. Networks allow one to handle such contemporary problems as policing, pandemics, and protests. However, the problems in implementing proposed solutions are clearly recognized and addressed.
   
   A unifying theme is the consequences of knowledge growth for explaining growing social inequality at the macro level and its micro level consequences for alienation, powerlessness, and social isolation. But rather than take a simplistic notion of one panacea, it argues that multiple solutions are necessary and each one should be evaluated by multiple criterial. Some fifty +action theory solutions are proposed for the many adaptive problems caused by punctuating of the previous equilibrium that we call the second wave.
   
    The hypotheses of this new paradigm are tested comparatively in a variety of different kind of research designs and across the last 150 years to demonstrate the concept of different historical pathways. Considerable emphasis in placed on evidence from Western Europe as well as the United States.
   
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