Abstract
A body of knowledge has recently come onto the scene which has produced some exciting new insights in the study of organizations. The ideas are found under headings such as new sciences, chaos theory, emerging sciences, and complexity science. Complexity science will be the term used in this paper. Many complexity science ideas have grown out of recent work in the natural sciences. The underlying rationale for applying to organizations ideas initially developed in the physical and life sciences is that if change processes, structural dynamics, cooperative and competitive dynamics, and other organizational phenomena work well in nature, then, perhaps, nature should serve as a guide for how organizations could function. It is commonly accepted that business organizations are complex adaptive systems (CAS), “composed of a diversity of agents that interact with each other, mutually affecting each other, and in so doing generate novel behavior for the system as a whole,” (Lewin and Regine, 2000, p. 18) operating according to the principles complexity science is unearthing.
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Dent, E.B. (2002). Reconciling Complexity Science in Organizations and Christian Spirituality. In: Ragsdell, G., West, D., Wilby, J. (eds) Systems Theory and Practice in the Knowledge Age. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0601-0_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0601-0_31
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