ABSTRACT
The core ideas from chaos, complexity, and related self-organizing theories, what Gleick (1988) calls the “new sciences,” have become popular in organizational research. Key concepts from both chaos and complexity theory have been used in the organizational sciences to explain and understand a broad range of management issues. Although chaos, complexity, and self-organizing theories each have a distinct history and focus, they seem to have more in common with each other than they differ: at their core, they are a set of ideas about dynamic transformation in nonlinear systems. Applied to social systems, these theories reveal that most social phenomena are intrinsically dynamic, complex, and often unpredictable.
