ABSTRACT
Over the period 2000 to 2002, a number of us at the Complexity and Management Centre at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire published a series of books called Complexity and Emergence in Organizations (Stacey et al., 2000; Stacey, 2001; Fonseca, 2001; Griffin, 2002; Streatfield, 2001; Shaw, 2002). These books developed a perspective according to which organizations are understood to be ongoing, iterated processes of cooperative and competitive relating between people. We argued that organizations are not systems but the ongoing patterning of interactions between people. Patterns of human interaction produce further patterns of interaction, not some thing outside of the interaction. We called this perspective complex responsive processes of relating.
