Complexity and Management : Fad or Radical Challenge? (Complexity and Emergence in Organisations)

Rating:
Summary: Leaves so many more questions than it answers
Review: I was very excited about this book upon reading the first half of it, but I'm afraid I was far less excited about how it ended.

I've read Stuart Kauffmann and the like before, and had my own ponderings about how you would translate this into a framework which makes sense in the context of human interactions, rather than molecular ones. Several natural scientists claim that their theories could be equally relevant for human complexity. It's a daunting task to try to find out just how - and one which is all about finding good ways to resolve paradoxes, just like the authors state.

The introduction to the breadth of existing theoretical frameworks is pretty impressive. They take us though philosophy, natural science, and management-related theories through the ages. I expect this is one thing that makes the book hard to review. Very few people know enough about all of these areas to be able to truly understand whether these arguments are sound.

I'm comforted by the fact that two of the authors have long experience in dealing with complexity science - one in economics and the other in physics. This gives them an opportunity to avoid the trap that other social scientists have fallen into when dealing with these issues - namely that they lack the necessary depth of understanding, and sometimes seriously misuse the scientific concepts in their work.

I'm not an expert in quantum physics, so I'm not qualified to judge how they've used that. However, my overall impression is that they are not far off in their arguments, they don't use obscure language to wrap it in, in fact, they offer clear tabular comparisons and have well written chapter conclusions. They are also clear about the fact that they use the scientific theories as an analogy only. At this point in time, there are few opportunities to obtain direct proof, and theorising may be necessary to uncover more such opportunities.

Any attempt at resolution to this topic is bound to be controversial. In the end though, I think the book fails to deliver what it promises: A framework for unification of modern natural scientific theories with the human sciences. All it does is to try to re-establish the postmodernist research agenda, with the associated risk for falling into the "nothing is really real - trap". Purely phenomenological research does not take human biological aspects into account, such as neurophysiology, personality, etc.

I don't think, however, that any one method could do this. I just read "Unity of Science" (Ed. Damasio) - it quotes a researcher that says that asking whether nature or nurture is more important for human development is like asking whether the length or the breadth of a rectangle contributes most to its shape. It goes on to say that the study of "lengths" and "breadths" separately is unlikely to truly answer questions about "shape". If all the authors want to do is to switch from studying "lengths" to "breadths", I'm not sure this will be very successful.

I'm still giving the book four stars for the very breadth of their review, and for establishing exactly how poorly we as yet understand how complexity theory relates to society.