(BQ) Part 2 book "Strategic management and organisational dynamics" has contents: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking; complex responsive processes as a way of thinking about strategy and organisational dynamics. | Part 2 The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking Part 1 of this book has described how the 1940s and 1950s saw the development of a number of closely related ideas. At much the same time, engineers, mathematicians, biologists and psychologists were developing the application of systems theories, taking the form of open systems, cybernetics and systems dynamics. These systems theories were closely related to the development of computer languages, cognitivist psychology and the sender–receiver model of communication. Over the decades that followed, all of these theories and applications were used, in one way or another, to construct ways of making sense of organisational life. The central themes running through all of these developments are those of the autonomous individual who is primary and prior to the group, and the concern with the control of systems. This first wave of twentieth-century systems thinking raised a number of problems that second-order systems thinking sought to address. One of these problems had to do with the fact that the observer of a human system is also simultaneously a participant in that system. This led to soft and critical systems thinking, which shifted the focus of attention from the dynamical properties of systems as such to the social practices of those using systemic tools in human activities. Ideology, power, conflict, participation, learning and narratives in social processes all feature strongly in these explanations of decision making and change in organisations. The 1970s and 1980s bear some similarities to the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the development of systemic theories in that mathematicians, physicists, meteorologists, chemists, biologists, economists, psychologists and computer scientists worked across their disciplines to develop new theories of systems. Their work goes under titles such as chaos theory, dissipative structures, complex adaptive systems, and has come to be known as ‘nonlinear dynamics’ or the .
