(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. | 9/6/10 11:39 AM Page 262 Chapter 11 Systemic applications of complexity sciences to organisations Restating the dominant discourse This chapter invites you to draw on your own experience to reflect on and consider the implications of: • The different quantitative and qualitative ways of applying the complexity sciences to organisations. • What new and challenging insights some of the approaches to complexity and organisations have to offer. • How some of the applications of the complexity sciences to organisations may simply continue to reflect the position of the external objective observer of a system and so lose the potentially radical insights coming from the natural complexity sciences. • How many applications retain the central concern of organisational theorists with control. This chapter is important because it invites reflection on how insights coming from the complexity sciences are being taken up by some writers on organisations and how these insights may be easily subjugated and absorbed into the dominant discourse on organisations. Understanding the material in this chapter aids in understanding the distinction to be made in the approach to management in Part 3 of the book which draws on relevant insights from the complexity sciences in a different way. Introduction Chapter 10 argued that during the 1970s and 1980s the complexity sciences developed further the thinking about the fundamental dynamics of systems. These new systems theories, like the first wave of twentieth-century systems theories in the 1950s, have 9/6/10 11:39 AM Page 263 Chapter 11 Systemic applications of complexity sciences to organisations 263 been developed largely by natural scientists. I have argued that they are potentially radical in that they point to the self-referential, self-organising capacities of such systems. What this means is that agents in a complex system interact locally with each other on .
