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'Embracing Complexity:
Advancing Ecological Understanding in Organization Studies'
5–7 June 2008, Pissouri, Cyprus
About the Topic
"We are observing the birth of a science
that is no longer limited to idealized and simplified
situations but reflects the complexity of the real world, a
science that views us and our creativity as part of a
fundamental trend present at all levels of nature."
Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and
the New Laws of Nature
"Once we begin to think in ecological terms, we shall
soon learn that every niche or habitat is one of its own
kind, and that its demands call for a careful eye to its
particular, local, and timely circumstances. The Newtonian
view encouraged hierarchy and rigidity, standardization and
uniformity: an ecological perspective emphasizes, rather,
differentiation and diversity, equity and adaptability."
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of
Modernity
At the end of The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl
Weick urges practitioners to "complicate" themselves. A complex
practitioner sees patterns, says Weick, a less complex one misses.
It is, in effect, a variation of Ashby's law of requisite variety,
which Weick often refers to in his book: only complexity can cope
with complexity. But Weick directs this particular advice not only
to practitioners: organization theorists, too, need to acknowledge
the complexity of their object of study – organization(s) – and
reflect it in their theoretical frameworks and research designs.
Indeed, the entire The Social Psychology of Organizing may be
seen in such terms: how social systems in general, and organizations
in particular, might be rethought in terms of processes; how
emergence is an irreducible part of organization; how it is more
complex to think in terms of verbs than nouns; and how thinking is
complexified when it embraces ambivalence and paradox. Weick invites
us to see organization not merely as a system of authoritative
allocation of resources, but also as a self-generating pattern – a
system of immanently generated order. His notion of organizing makes
this concept suitable for the analysis of socioeconomic phenomena at
different levels: from small groups, right up to large-scale
processes of socioeconomic change.
Similar themes are echoed in James March's work. Issues of
ambiguity, retrospective sensemaking, confused and unstable
preferences, negotiated goals, and limited rationality have been
consistently highlighted in March's research. The vocabulary may be
different from that of Weick but the outcome is similar: to obtain a
more complex understanding of what organizations are and how they
function. For March, rationality is not only bounded but, also,
adaptive, contextual and retrospective. Organizations resemble more
garbage cans than neat pyramids. Reason is not omniscient – it is
developmental, experiential and embedded in social practices.
Ambiguity is part of the human condition; individuals are both
observers and participants in the decision making processes they are
part of.
March and Weick have helped shift organization studies from the "Newtonian
style" of abstract formalism, or what philosopher Stephen Toulmin
calls "the decontextualized ideal", according to which the sciences
at large, and organization studies in particular, should search for
the universal, the general and the timeless. The Newtonian style is
acontextual and ahistorical: contextual influences upon the
phenomenon under study must be turned off so that its intrinsic
properties may be reveled; time is reversible, and prediction is
symmetrical with explanation. The Newtonian style seeks to dispense
with the contingent experience of empirical diversity to identify,
under controlled conditions, universal principles. The style of
thinking that underlies March and Weick's work is different. It
resonates with developments in strands of traditional cybernetics
and systems thinking, secondorder cybernetics and, more recently,
chaos and complexity science, autopoietic systems, and post-modern
philosophy. According to Toulmin, post-War intellectual, social and
technological developments made it increasingly possible to
challenge the reductionism involved in the Newtonian ideal and
articulate what he calls the "ecological style", a style of thinking
that embraces complexity by reinstating the importance of the
particular, the local, and the timely. The ecological style
acknowledges connectivity, recursive patterns of communication,
feedback, nonlinearity, emergence, tacitness, change.
From an ecological perspective, organizational phenomena are seen
to consist not of dissociated collections of parts but of wholes
emerging out of the interactivity of constituent parts, embedded in
broader wholes, especially societal institutions,
interorganizational fields, and technological paradigms.
Organization is not only imposed from outside but is also immanently
generated from within – self-organization is an irreducible feature
of social systems. The patterns we observe are crucially shaped by
initial conditions and path-dependent processes. Organizations
cannot escape finitude, historicity and circularity: they reproduce
the beliefs and institutional practices of the societies in which
they are embedded. Interacting with their environments,
organizations do not confront independent, meaning-free entities but
engage in processes whereby organizations create opportunities for
understanding themselves, and, in so doing, they shape their links
with other organizations in their own image. Individual as well as
organizational action is never purely instrumental – it is highly
performative. Organizational members are not presented with
objective problems but they actively construct the problems they
face through the application of the symbols, categories, labels and
assumptions contained in the tools they use and the practices they
draw upon. Change is not an epiphenomenon, but deeply involved in
the generation of stability. Novelty is not an exception but
immanent in the carrying out of routine action. Improvisation is not
an optional extra but permeates rule-governed behavior. Situatedness
matters. Materiality cannot be discounted. Time and irreversibility
are generative of new forms. Unintended consequences cannot be
ignored. Chance and contingencies are critical.
Unlike the Newtonian style, therefore, the ecological style seeks
to embrace complexity rather than reduce it; it is sensitive to
process, context and time; it makes links between abstract analysis
and lived experience; is aware of the realityconstituting (as
opposed to merely representational) role of language; accepts chance,
feedback loops, and human agency as fundamental features of social
life; acknowledges the social and bodily embeddedness of cognition;
seeks to make connections between hitherto opposed notions, such as
structure vs. agency, mind vs. body, individuality vs. sociality,
organization vs. environment, ideas vs. objects, abstraction vs.
materiality, mind vs. body, thinking vs. practice, substance vs.
process, knowable vs. unknowable, explicit vs. tacit, rationality
vs. politics, substantive vs. symbolic, formal knowledge vs.
experiential knowledge, system vs. lifeworld.
The commanding vision of the ecological style is, to use Gregory
Bateson's language, to establish a new unity between mind and
nature, or, in Toulmin's terms, a new cosmopolis. Such an
aspiration naturally places a high premium on interdisciplinarity,
theoretical cross-fertilization, and conceptual connectivity. The
interconnectedness of the phenomena we study needs to be reflected
in disciplinary interconnectedness. Only complexity can cope with
complexity.
In the Fourth Organization Studies Summer Workshop we aim
at exploring further the implications of the ecological style of
thinking about organizations and how it might be incorporated in
organizational research. Topics and issues may indicatively include
the following:
Modeling organizations as: complex adaptive systems,
far-from-equilibrium systems • Connectionist images/models of
organizations • Organizations as living systems • Understanding:
path-dependencies; emergence; recursiveness; and embeddedness in
organizational phenomena • Secondorder cybernetics, autopoiesis
and cyber-semiotic perspectives in organization studies • How
order is generated and sustained in social systems •
Conceptualizing organizational complexity • How organizations
cope with complexity – Understanding organizational change and
strategy making in complex terms • Rethinking: rationality;
cognition; and power in organizations in complex terms • Herbert
Simon, complexity and organization design – Austrian economics,
complexity and firms • Chaos & complexity science and
organization studies: More than metaphor? • Self-organization in
social systems • Routine and novelty in organizations •
Ecological communication and organizations • Time, history and
complex organizational behavior – Complex theorizing of complex
organizations • Capturing complexity through appropriate
research designs • The ecological style and post-rationalist
philosophy • Phenomenology, pragmatism, process philosophy and
complex thinking in organization studies • Complexity and
practical reason: Enhancing practitioners' complex thinking •
Complexity, ecological understanding and narratives – Complexity,
language and aesthetics • Organization studies as a science of
qualities.
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