Complexity Theory in Organization Science: Seizing the Promise or Becoming a Fad?

Over the past thirty-five years complexity theory has become a broad ranging subject that is appreciated in a variety of ways, illustrated more or less in the books by Anderson, Arrow, and Pines (1988), Nicolis and Prigogine (1989), Mainzer (1994), Favre et al. (1995), Belew and Mitchell (1996), and Arthur, Durlauf, and Lane (1997). The study of “complex adaptive systems” (Cowan, Pines, and Meltzer, 1994) has become the ultimate interdisciplinary science, focusing its modeling activities on how microstate events, whether particles, molecules, genes, neurons, human agents, or firms, self-organize into emergent aggregate structure. Clearly, the mission of this and subsequent issues of Emergence is to systematically build up a base of high quality scientific activity aimed at supporting complexity applications to management and organization science— thereby thwarting faddish tendencies. In this founding issue I suggest a bottom-up focus on organizational microstates and the adoption of the “semantic conception” of scientific theory. The union of these two hallmarks of current science and philosophy, along with computational modeling, may prevent complexity theory from becoming just another fad.