Complexity science has rapidly moved across different domains of knowledge and expertise over the last two decades and, beginning with chaos theory in the 1980s, has attracted much media attention. This paper investigates some uncertainties in that movement with two questions in mind. One concerns how complexity theory can be used in domains such as the social sciences or humanities. The other ...

This paper investigates how hospital affiliation in a multi-hospital system (contract managed, owned, sponsored), the number of system hospitals, HMO and PPO contracts, and other factors, impacts hospital cost efficiency. Using a 1996-1999 panel of 248 hospitals, results show that for urban hospitals, increasing the number of hospitals in the system, system ownership and contract management/spo...

BACKGROUND This paper argues that the global health agenda tends to privilege short-term global interests at the expense of long-term capacity building within national and community health systems. The Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) movement needs to focus on developing the capacity of local organizations and the institutions that influence how such organizations interact with local and int...

How are learning and innovation linked with each other, and how can a perspective based on complexity theory, contribute towards an understanding of the linkage between learning and innovation? And how may learning and innovation as a consequence be managed differently? These are the topics I will deal with in this paper. Departing from a real-life case of a company that has set learning within...

The concept of emergence is closely related to complexity theory. While this agentbased approach is on its way of becoming a new paradigm in management science, the system dynamics approach is suffering from a lack of management attention, although both are applied to similar problems with similar outcomes. In previous research, scholars have compared system dynamics and agent-based modeling. T...

Contemporary issues such as increases in operational scope, connectivity, and dynamism in organizations have meant also a corresponding increase of complexity in producing everyday interaction. A simple task on the individual level can be approached as a part of complicated whole or even as adding to complexity on the organizational level. In this paper, we compare two strong metaphors for stud...

Recently, commentators have applied insights from complexity theory to legal analysis generally and to administrative law in particular. This Article focuses on one of the central problems that complexity theory addresses, the importance and mechanisms of adaptation within complex systems. In Part I, the Article uses three features of complex adaptive systems—emergence from self-assembly, nonli...

The motivation for this multi-part series is solely my observation that much of the writing on complexity theory seems to have arbitrarily ignored the vast systems theory literature. I don’t know whether this omission is deliberate (i.e., motivated by the political need to differentiate and promote one set of topical boundaries from another; a situation unfortunately driven by a reductionist fu...

For international organizations, recruiting the right people is of paramount importance. Coping in the complex international environment requires organizations to employ the people with the competences they need. HR and recruitment departments, therefore, develop profiles containing these desired competences. Such profiles usually contain a listing of skills and character traits. Interestingly,...

In this master thesis two different worldviews are compared: a mechanistic, and an organic worldview. The way we think the world and the nature work reflects on how we think organizations work, or how they ought to work. The mechanistic worldview has dominated our way of thinking since the seventeenth century, and it compares the world with a machine. The organic worldview could use a number of...