Chapter 1: Reflecting on Seam in the 21st Century: New Ideas, New Advances¹

For the past 10 years, micro-theories have been developed focusing in particular on human behavior in organizations. Emerging but dispersed concepts have been hatched. In the early 2010s, these micro-theories and concepts were integrated into a general model explaining the research results capitalized by ISEOR since the beginning of its work in 1973. What might be called today a “meta socio-economic theory,” represented schematically in Figure 1.1, was the subject of previous publications in French and English (Savall & Zardet, 2004, 2005, 2012). A theory of knowledge has emerged, and the different scattered sub-models were built around the clover that symbolized the socio-economic analysis model (SEAM). This chapter is dedicated to presenting the new model of the socioeconomic theory and to further developing the concept of human potential. Finally, the theoretical implications of the model, focused on the strategic management of companies and organizations, and on the sharing of value-added between stakeholders and the discovery of a new hidden costs factor through tetranormalization are explained. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the contribution of the socio-economic model of businesses and organizations in meso- and macro-economic analysis.