This concise article maintains that, in times of structural and persistent crisis, Europe needs to effectively tackle the multiple challenges and existential fears by cultivating a strong and dynamical digital skills ecosystem, based on collective values and the fundamental liberal principles of co-creation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence, over against the obsolete principles of optimisation and top-down administration and control. This will arguably result in upgrading humanism (humanism 2.0) and democracy (democracy 2.0), and in boosting responsible innovation and, therefore, adaptiveness, as well as in translating technological progress into inclusive and sustainable economic growth, and risks into creative opportunities for all citizens.
The central aim of this article is to sketch and outline a brief and critical presentation, overview and assessment of the (radically ambivalent) dynamics of the large family of technological developments pertaining to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), as well as of the so-called digitalisation of society. This assessment attempts to comprehensively overcome relevant analytical dualisms and the one-sided “either-or” logic, in favor of a synthetic, open and creative “both-and” framework of interdisciplinary thought.
The micro-macro or agency-structure question is indisputably one of the most important theoretical issues within the human and social sciences. The main purpose of this paper is to carefully explore, fruitfully overview and comprehensively critique the contemporary sociological literature on micro (agency) and macro (structure), from a reflexive-dialectical standpoint. This particular standpoint strategically emphasizes both the circularity and the relative autonomy of structures vis à vis actors, or of institutions vis à vis individuals. In this analytic context, it is critically discussed the varied notion of a middle position on the ongoing theoretical debate between positivism and constructivism, as well as the epistemologically beneficial role that meta-theoretical reflexivity and the internal conversation can potentially play in this debate. In specific, the internal conversation (Margaret Archer) gives a reflexive-dialectical impetus to the micro-macro relationship, while embracing a needed analytical dualism (not necessarily an ontological one)
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