ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests that context-related concepts of natural science can be used as a theoretical lens for research in projects and their management—for example, in social phenomena such as projects. It provides a literature review of the theories behind a comparative analysis and explores the complex adaptive systems, which is the perspective taken for theory building. The study of complex adaptive systems—a subset of nonlinear dynamical systems—has become a major focus of interdisciplinary research in both the social and natural sciences. The natural-to-social-science comparative model was developed with the aim of determining whether observations to phenomena in the natural science world could help to provide alternative explanations to the social science phenomena. The chapter focuses on a gene-based Universal Darwinism extension to derive the model and a gene- and nongene-based Universal Darwinism extension to build the theory behind the model.