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"Complex organizations."
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Civic Action
Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize 'the civic' as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex organizations that may span institutional sectors. The authors show how researchers can locate scene styles, and with an extensive literature review, they portray several common styles and suggest that different civic styles often lead to different outcomes. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
The comparative archaeology of complex societies
\"Eleven leading archeologists describe their research on ancient empires, states, and chiefdoms using a comparative perspective. By making comparisons among sites, regions, and artifacts, these scholars produce new understanding of diverse specific cases, from the towering ruins of Angkor to the houses of Inca peasants. The reader learns about the political strategies of kings and chiefs, the daily choices of ordinary households, and the creative ways in which ancient peoples built their cities and shaped their landscapes. In the process, these chapters illustrate how to do comparative analysis using archeological data\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Diversity, Social Capital, and Cohesion
We review the bourgeoning literature on ethno-racial diversity and its alleged effects on public trust and cohesion in the context of the evolution of the concept of social capital and earlier claims about its manifold positive effects. We present evidence that questions such claims and points to the roots of civicness and trust in deep historical processes associated with race and immigration. We examine the claims that immigration reduces social cohesion by drawing on the sociological classics to show the forms of cohesion that actually keep modern societies together. This leads to a typology that shows \"communitarianism\" to be just one such form and one not required, and not necessarily ideal, for the smooth operation of complex organizations and institutions. Implications of our conclusions for future research and immigration policy are discussed.
Journal Article
A Complexity Perspective on Researching Organisations
Part of the Complexity as the Experience of Organizing series, this book applies complex responsiveness theory to real-life leadership experiences. It features contributions from and details the experience of organizational practitioners, leaders, consultants and managers from various organizations through narrative accounts. It addresses questions such as:
How do widespread or global patterns emerge and evolve in the local interactions between people?
What actually happens in global change programmes?
What does this imply about the relationship between the local and the global?
Exploring the perspective of complex responsive processes, the book’s contributors examine how this assists them in making sense of their experience, and how this awareness then leads to their development.
This book is a valuable study for academics, business school students and practitioners, as rather than offering mere descriptions of organizational life, it provides reflective accounts of real-life experiences of researching in organizations.
eBook
Complexity Theory and Organization Science
Complex organizations exhibit surprising, nonlinear behavior. Although organization scientists have studied complex organizations for many years, a developing set of conceptual and computational tools makes possible new approaches to modeling nonlinear interactions within and between organizations. Complex adaptive system models represent a genuinely new way of simplifying the complex. They are characterized by four key elements: agents with schemata, self-organizing networks sustained by importing energy, coevolution to the edge of chaos, and system evolution based on recombination. New types of models that incorporate these elements will push organization science forward by merging empirical observation with computational agent-based simulation. Applying complex adaptive systems models to strategic management leads to an emphasis on building systems that can rapidly evolve effective adaptive solutions. Strategic direction of complex organizations consists of establishing and modifying environments within which effective, improvised, self-organized solutions can evolve. Managers influence strategic behavior by altering the fitness landscape for local agents and reconfiguring the organizational architecture within which agents adapt.
Journal Article
The dynamics of risk: changing technologies and collective action in seismic events
Earthquakes are a huge global threat. In thirty-six countries, severe seismic risks threaten populations and their increasingly interdependent systems of transportation, communication, energy, and finance. in this important book, the author provides an unprecedented examination of how twelve communities in nine countries responded to destructive earthquakes between 1999 and 2015. And many of the book's lessons can also be applied to other large-scale risks. This book sets the global problem of seismic risk in the framework of complex adaptive systems to explore how the consequences of such events ripple across jurisdictions, communities, and organizations in complex societies, triggering unexpected alliances but also exposing social, economic, and legal gaps. This book assesses how the networks of organizations involved in response and recovery adapted and acted collectively after the twelve earthquakes it examines. It describes how advances in information technology enabled some communities to anticipate seismic risk better and to manage response and recovery operations more effectively, decreasing losses. Finally, the book shows why investing substantively in global information infrastructure would create shared awareness of seismic risk and make postdisaster relief more effective and less expensive. The result is a landmark study of how to improve the way we prepare for and respond to earthquakes and other disasters in our ever-more-complex world.
Book
Drift into Failure
This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to better understand how complex systems drift into failure. It studies sensitive dependence on initial conditions, unruly technology, tipping points, diversity - and finds that failure emerges opportunistically, non-randomly, from the very webs of relationships that breed success and that are supposed to protect organizations from disaster. It develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find new ways of managing drift.
eBook