Complexity and emergence in organisations

Using the complexity sciences to talk about complexity in organisations.

Series editors

Ralph Stacey, Douglas Griffin, Patricia Shaw

Complexity and Management Centre, University of Hertfordshire - Published by Routledge in London  

The aim of this series is to give expression to a particular way of speaking about complexity in organisations, one that emphasises:

• the self-referential, reflexive nature of humans
• the essentially responsive and participative nature of human processes of relating
• and the radical unpredictability of their evolution

It draws on the complexity sciences, which can be brought together with psychology and sociology in many different ways to form a whole spectrum of theories of human organisation.  

At one end of this spectrum, there is the dominant voice in organisation and management theory, which speaks in the language of intention, regularity and control.

In this language, managers stand outside the organisational system, which is thought of as an objective, pre-given reality that can be modelled and designed, and they control it.

Managers here are concerned with the functional aspects of a system as they search for causal links that promise sophisticated tools for predicting its behaviour.

The dominant voice talks about the individual as:

• autonomous
• self contained
• masterful
• and at the centre of an organisation.

Many complexity theorists talk in a language that is immediately compatible with this dominant voice.

They talk about

• complex adaptive systems as networks of autonomous agents that behave on the basis of regularities extracted from their environments.
• complex systems as objective realities that scientists can stand outside of and model.
• the predictable aspects of these systems and see their modelling work as a route to increasing the ability of humans to control complex worlds.  

At the other end of the spectrum there are voices from the fringes of organisational theory, complexity sciences, psychology and sociology who are defining a participative perspective.

They argue that humans are themselves members of the complex networks that they form and are drawing attention to the impossibility of standing outside of them in order to objectify and model them.

With this intersubjective voice people speak as subjects interacting with others in the co-evolution of a jointly constructed reality.

These voices emphasise the radically unpredictable aspects of self-organising processes and their creative potential. These are the voices of decanted agency, which talk about agents and the social world in which they live as mutually created and sustained.

This way of thinking weaves together relationship psychologies and the work of complexity theorists who focus on the emergent and radically unpredictable aspects of complex systems. The result is a participative approach to understanding the complexities of organisational life.

This series is intended to give expression to the second of these voices defining a participative perspective.

Titles in the series

• Complexity and Management: Fad or radical challenge to systems thinking? by Ralph Stacey, Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw
• Complex Responsive Processes in Organisations: Learning and knowledge creation by Ralph Stacey
• Changing the Conversation: Organisational change from a complexity perspective by Patricia Shaw.
• The Emergence of Leadership: Linking self organisation and ethics by Douglas Griffin.
• Complexity and Innovation in Organisations by Jose Fonseca.
• The Paradox of Control in Organisations by Philip Streatfield.