Introduction: Chaos, Complexity and Organization Theory

Abstract

Chaos and complexity science are part of an emerging new imagery in the scientific and lay cultures, which helps us conceive of the social world as chaosmos-a combination of chaos and cosmos, disorder and order. Notions like nonlinearity, sensitivity to initial conditions, iteration, feedback loops, novelty, process, emergence and unpredictability, which for a long time were not part of mainstream science, have now come to the fore and furnish us with a new vocabulary in terms of which we may attempt to redescribe organizations, and the social world in general. The Newtonian style, whose most significant feature has been the pursuit of the decontextualized ideal, is gradually receding in favour of the chaotic style—the ability to notice instability, disorder, novelty, emergence and self-organization. For organization theory, it is argued that such developments are of great importance for they make central to our study of organizations) the notions of time, history, human finitude, freedom and circularity of behaviour. Moreover, the chaotic style, by privileging qualitative analysis, favours narrative descriptions of organizational phenomena.