Introduction to the Special Issue: Applications of Complexity Theory to Organization Science

In crafting the call for papers for this special issue of Organization Science, the appointed editors wrote: Organizational scholars seldom come to grips with nonlinear phenomena. Instead, we tend to model phenomena as if they were linear in order to make them tractable, and we tend to model aggregate behavior as if it is produced by individual entities which all exhibit average behavior... a different view of complexity is emerging that may have important implications for organizational scholarship. Within the past decade, interest in the "sciences of complexity" has increased dramatically. The study of complex system dynamics has perhaps progressed furthest in the natural sciences, but it is also beginning to penetrate the social sciences. This interdisciplinary field of study is still pre-paradigmatic, and it embraces a wide variety of approaches. Although it is not yet clear whether a genuine science of complexity will emerge, it does seem clear that scholars in a variety of fields are viewing complexity in a different way than organizational scholars traditionally have. At this juncture, organizational researchers have few templates that suggest to them how to hypothesize about or model such behavior. It is difficult to know how to draw a conceptual model and how to report the results of empirical inquiries into complex organizational phenomena. The special issue aims to provide scholars with useful templates to follow when analyzing complex processes that involve organizations.