A View from the Edge

We all seem agreed that relations and networks of people and organizations are a central focus of marketing. Of course, such ideas are not new though they take on new champions as new phrases such as ‘relationship marketing’ capture attention. I tried to show the intellectual history of ideas about relations and networks in marketing in this century elsewhere (Wilkinson, 2001), but I don’t want to quibble about such matters here. If, as we agree, firms and managers are participants in relations and networks involving many other actors then we have a problem in that managers are not in charge. In a sense they are in charge as relationship and network outcomes are coproduced by the actors involved, but no one manager controls the network. In short, managers are participants in complex adaptive systems in which order emerges in a bottom-up, self-organising way (Wilkinson et al., 1997). Even when there appears to be an engineered network of relations, as in Ikea’s, Nike’s or Dell’s systems, we may ask the question as to whether the leaders created the network or the network created the leaders. In truth it is probably a bit of both. The study of complex adaptive systems such as marketing relations and networks is what Ballantyne et al. are pointing to by referring to ‘edge of chaos’ and ‘dynamic complexity’. There is a rapidly growing body of research, spanning many disciplines, that is being referred to as complexity science (for a review, see Waldrop, 1992; Holland, 1999 or Capra, 1997). To date there has been only limited research in marketing drawing on these concepts and approaches. Some work on chaos theory has been carried out (e.g. Hibbert and Wilkinson, 1994) and, more recently, agent-based and biological models of marketing systems and