The sciences of chaos and complexity include arcane investigations of complicated natural phenomena. Organizational applications of the sciences are no less complicated. Talented persons around the world are struggling to make sense out of the strange and surprising behaviors of complex adaptive systems in nature and in human organizations. This paper presents a brief introduction to some of th...

The paper stresses the need to emphasize social relationships in system design especially in systems that cross enterprise boundaries in a changing environment. The paper describes these systems as a new class of systems – complex adaptive systems. It describes ways to model collaboration networks in such systems both as the drivers of change and as indicators of knowledge requirements. The pap...

The issues of diversity, inclusion and effectiveness are of immense significance all over the globe, especially given recent developments in the world. How people belonging to different groups get along and what they accomplish is at the very heart of the human civilization in all its aspects, from teams to nation states and from the level of a tribal village to the level of the United Nations....

Building on the growing literature that views organizations as complex adaptive systems, this paper proposes a general model to analyze the relationship between organizational context and attitudes. In particular, we focus on how the system of formal and informal communication channels that characterize an organization and the timing of information flows affect the dynamic process of attitude c...

Recent work [Hazy 2012] has demonstrated computationally that collectives that are organized into networks which govern the flow of resources can learn to recognize newly emerging information about the opportunities distributed in the environment. When collectives recognize opportunities as a complex adaptive system [Holland, 2001] of interacting individuals, potentially they can exploit them, ...

Open source communities evolve. This evolution is, at times, driven by corporate engagement with those communities. In these corporate-communal contexts, open source foundations often serve as facilitators in the evolution process and make these arrangements more stable over time. This paper expands the application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to understand the role of open source f...

In this paper we consider the co-evolutionary dynamics of IS engagement where episodic change of implementation increasingly occurs within the context of linkages and interdependencies between systems and processes within and across organisations. Although there are many theories that interpret the various motors of change be it lifecycle, teleological, dialectic or evolutionary, our paper atte...

Current management thinking largely assumes that a well functioning organisation is akin to a well oiled machine. This leads to the notion that performance is optimised when work is specified in detail and shared out to distinct operational units. Clinicians often object to these detailed specifications, while managers bemoan a lack of cooperation. The first article in this series introduced an...

Theoretical study of complex systems receives more and more attention as most sciences broaden their perspectives. The paper first briefly overviews a few important complexity approaches, then it presents a triple-level model for describing and analyzing collaborating enterprises. The environment is treated as a stochastic process, the core topology of the collaboration is represented by a grap...