A Complexity Perspective on Researching Organizations: Taking Experience Seriously

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.

The perspective of complex responsive processes draws on analogies from the complexity sciences, bringing in the essential characteristics of human agents, understood to emerge in social processes of communicative interaction and power-relating. The result is a way of thinking about life in organizations that focuses attention on how organizational members cope with unknown as they perpetually create organizational futures together.

Providing a natural successor to the Editors' earlier series (Complexity and Emergence in Organizations) this series Complexity as the Experience of Organizing, aims to take this work further by taking very seriously the experience of organizational practitioners, and showing how taking the perspective of complex responsive process yields deeper insight into practice and so develops that practice.

In this book, all of the contributors work as leaders, consultants or managers in organizations. They provide narrative accounts of their actual work addressing questions such as:
· How does the work of the researcher actually assist managers when the uncertainty is so great that they do no know what they are doing yet?
· What does research in organizations actually achieve?
· If patters of human interaction produced nothing but further patterns of human interaction, in the creation of which we are all participating, is there a detached way of understanding organizations from the position of the objective observer?

In considering such questions in terms of their daily experience, the contributors explore how the perspective of complex responsive processes assists them to make sense of their experience and so to develop their practice. A Complexity Perspective on Researching Organizations offers a different method for making sense of experience in a rapidly changing world by using reflective accounts of ordinary everyday life in organizations rather than idealized accounts. The editors' commentary introduces and contextualizes these experiences as well as drawing out key themes for further research.

A Complexity Perspective on Researching Organizations will be of value to readers from amongst those academics and business school students and practitioners who are looking for reflective accounts of real life experiences of researching in organizations, rather than further prescriptions of what life in organizations ought to be like.