Complexity - The experience of organising
An internationally acclaimed look at the theory of complex responsive processes.
Series editors
Ralph Stacey, Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw
Complexity: the Experience of Organising is a sequel to the highly successful series Complexity and Emergence in Organisations.
The first series has attracted international attention for its development of the theory of complex responsive processes and its implications for those working in organisations.
The perspective of complex responsive processes draws on analogies from the complexity sciences.
This brings in the essential characteristics of human agents namely consciousness and self-consciousness, understood to emerge in:
- social processes of communicative interaction
- power relating and evaluative choice
The result is a way of thinking about life in organisations that focuses attention on how organisational members cope with the unknown as they perpetually create organisational futures together.
Aims of the series
This second series aims to develop that work by taking seriously the experience of organisational practitioners, showing how taking the perspective of complex responsive processes yields deeper insight into practice and so develops that practice.
Contributors to the volumes in the series work in organisations as:
- leaders
- consultants
- managers
The contributors provide narrative accounts of their actual work, addressing questions such as:
- What does it mean, in ordinary everyday terms, to lead a large organisation?
- How do leaders learn to lead?
- What does it mean, in ordinary everyday terms to consult to managers in an organisation?
- How does the work of the consultant assist managers when the uncertainty is so great that they do not yet know what they are doing?
- What does executive coaching achieve?
- What happens in global change programmes such as installing competencies, managing diversity and assuring quality?
- Why do organisations get stuck in repetitive patterns of behaviour?
- What kinds of change can be facilitated?
In considering such questions in terms of their daily experience, the contributors explore how the perspective of complex responsive processes assists them in making sense of their experience and so develop their practices.
The books in the series are addressed to organisational practitioners and academics who are looking for a different way of making sense of their own experience in a rapidly changing world.
The books will attract readers looking for reflective accounts of ordinary everyday life in organisations rather than idealised accounts or further idealises prescriptions.