ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, members of the Complexity and Management Centre at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire have been developing a way of making sense of life in organizations which draws on particular insights from the natural complexity sciences (e.g. Goodwin, 1994; Kauffmann, 1995; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; see Waldrop, 1992) to do with unpredictability, diversity, self-organization and emergence. We have been arguing that notions such as ‘complex adaptive systems’ cannot simply be applied to organizations or human action in general (Stacey et al., 2000) because, unlike the agents in complex adaptive system simulations, human agents are conscious, self-conscious, reflexive, often spontaneous and capable of making choices. The natural complexity sciences, therefore, need to be interpreted according to some theory of human consciousness, reflexivity and choice. Concepts of self-organization and emergence had already been explored much earlier in the social sciences, particularly in the work of George Herbert Mead (1934), John Dewey (1934) and Norbert Elias (1939). The approach we have taken, therefore, is to turn to the natural complexity sciences as a source domain for analogies, to be understood, when it comes to human action, in terms of Mead’s theory of mind, self and society, Dewey’s theory of value, and Elias’ theory of power figurations, ideology and identity formation. The perspective we have
developed has come to be known as that of complex responsive processes of human relating (Fonseca, 2002; Griffin, 2002; Shaw, 2002; Stacey, 2001, 2003; Stacey et al., 2000; Streatfield, 2001).
