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We draw on complexity theory to explain the emergence of a new organizational collective, and we provide a much-needed empirical test of the theory at the collective level of analysis. Taking a case study approach, we use four dynamics of emergence posited by complexity theory's dissipative structures model--fluctuation, positive feedback, stabiliz...
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... Although emergence and self-organization have been considered anchor concepts of complexity theory (Chiles et al. 2004), a wide range of other concepts have also been associated with CT. Table 3 presents how complexity concepts were manifested in the studies. ...
Complexity theory (CT) refers to a collection of concepts and heuristics that can be used to study the developments emerging from interactions between phenomena, actors, and events. CT has increasingly been utilized in the study of public administration and policy. However, there is no comprehensive analysis of empirical or other research focused on the functioning of political-administrative phenomena applying CT. This article reports the results of a systematic literature review demonstrating how CT has been applied in empirical research in different stages of the policy cycle: policy preparation, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance. The study reveals empirical research utilizing CT offers practical implications that can be categorized into four themes: enabling leadership, leveraging experimentation , the holistic perspective, and the humble approach.
... They state that the greatest changes occur when the system is close to the edge of chaos or at the very point of edge of chaos (Boal & Schultz 2004). The first stage is called fluctuation dynamics (Chiles, Meyer & Hench 2004), initiating conditions (Plowman et al. 2007), dis-equilibrium state (Plowman et. al. 2007;Lichtenstein & Plowman 2009), emergence of non-equilibrium state (Jucevičius, Grumadaitė, Jucevičienė & Čeičytė 2019). ...
... • Setting main values and principles. The ecosystem mostly maintains natural-regulation and stabilisation based on self-referencing values and principles that aren't pushed from outside (Chiles et al. 2004). The values could be related to risk taking and tolerating uncertainty; learning; adaptation to new events; cooperation and sharing in order to emphasise the importance of unity and efforts to avoid individualism and competition (Grumadaitė, Jucevičius & Staniulienė 2022). ...
This paper presents and analyses the dynamics of the development of knowledge ecosystem, putting more emphasis on interorganisational context, such as industrial clusters or “geographical concentrations of interconnected companies, specialised suppliers, service providers, companies in related industries and associated institutions (trade / industry associations, universities, educational institutions) that compete but also cooperate” (Porter 2000). This paper contributes to scientific efforts to minimise the gap of research on organisational entities whose development reflects the essence of an ecosystem – a network of interacting actors, which compete and cooperate in order to create and apply new knowledge on the grounds of self-organisation. This paper, following a dynamic approach to the development of knowledge ecosystems, analyses four development stages, the preconditions behind the viability of knowledge ecosystems and their interconnections.
... These theoretical analogies have consistently shown that the dynamics of emergence can be parsimoniously summarized as four phases of dynamic activity that characterize the local choices and interactions of agents, as energy and resource conditions change. Over the past 35 years, the presence of these four phases has been empirically verified in studies of emergence across multiple levels of analysis, including group dynamics (Smith, 1986;Smith & Comer, 1994), innovation (Nonaka, 1994;Saviotti & Mani, 1998), entrepreneurship (Foster, 2011;Lichtenstein, 2000), radical organizational change (MacIntosh & MacLean, 1999;Plowman et al., 2007), and the development of collaborative and regional clusters (Browning et al., 1995;Chiles, Meyer & Hench, 2004). We open up a new application of this work, extending the fourphase model of emergence to explain the onset of system conditions that generate significant corruption risk. ...
... During the reconfiguration phase of dissipative structures theory, entire subsets of the system are isolated and thus harmed due to a structural disruption at the organization or macro level. As cooperating relationships are amplified during repeated interactions, and as internal structural momentum around a value sink increases beyond the tipping point (Smith-Crowe & Warren, 2014), the broader reference system may be totally reconfigured, such that the renegade agents can continually capture the new value (Chiles et al., 2004;Nonaka, 1988). This emergent order reduces systemic tensions and internal conflicts, generating new interaction patterns within workgroups with attendant power dynamics and social networks that normalize the actions, thus systematizing value-sink dynamics (Brass, Butterfield & Skaggs, 1998). ...
... Importantly, the systemic nature of the theory reveals similar dynamics across and between multiple levels of analysis, as numerous studies have shown (e.g. Chiles et al., 2004;Lichtenstein, 2000;MacIntosh & MacLean, 1999;Nonaka, 1988). These levels of structural hierarchy are shown along the vertical axis of Table 1. ...
Theories and studies of corruption typically focus on individual ethics and agency problems in organizations. In this paper, we use concepts from complexity science to propose a process theory that describes how corruption risk emerges from conditions of uncertainty that are intrinsic in social systems and social interactions. We posit that our theory is valid across multiple levels of scale in social systems. We theorize that corruption involves dynamics that emerge when agents in a system take actions that exploit disequilibrium conditions of uncertainty and ethical ambiguity. Further, systemic corruption emerges when agent interactions are amplified locally in ways that create a hidden value sink which we define as a structure that extracts, or 'drains,' resources from the system for the exclusive use of certain agents. For those participating in corruption, the presence of a value sink reduces local uncertainties about access to resources. This dynamic can attract others to join the value sink, allowing it to persist and grow as a dynamical system attractor, eventually challenging broader norms. We close by identifying four distinct types of corruption risk and suggest policy interventions to manage them. Finally, we discuss ways in which our theoretical approach could motivate future research.
... First, it offers the opportunity to focus on the creation of things. This point was raised by Chiles (2004), who highlighted the fundamental weakness of traditional management theory that assumes that organizations exist with their structures and boundaries. In contrast, the emergence lens focuses on the shift from the absence to the existence of some organization. ...
... Emergence hence favors further exploration of organizational survival (Gardner, 2013;Williams & Shepherd, 2021). It also outlines decentralized and systemic phenomena (Chiles, 2004) 9 that can fuel resilience and renewal without notice. ...
... Emergence offers multiple guidelines (including systemic and process-based views) to draw a highly structured view of organizational fuzziness (Abdallah et al., 2019). For years, however, scholars have acknowledged that addressing issues that are nonlinear, minimally predictable, and embedded in multiple levels, systems, or networks (Nijs, 2015) seems appealing but deeply challenging (Chiles, 2004). In particular, emergence implies a radically new organizational mindset (Cunha et al., 2001), if not a paradigm (Tsoukas, 2005;Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). ...
Emergence is inherent to organizational life and design. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, emergence has been appraised as a conceptual avenue that surpassed the limitations of traditional thinking and epistemology. In this essay, I suggest that, despite its relevance and popularity among management scholars, emergence has remained underused. I rely on Kuhn’s view (1962) to better understand the reasons for this paradox and propose some practical avenues to improve our understanding and use of the concept. This essay has three objectives: (1) to demonstrate that emergence is relevant to better understanding organizations; (2) to explain why emergence remains underused in management and organization theory (MOT); and (3) to propose practical guidelines to further rely on the concept of emergence.
... Thereupon, we utilized the FPMA and iteratively compared our observed empirical patterns to the theoretical patterns of our initial flexible pattern matching template ( Figure 2). The comparison of the empirical and theoretical patterns helped to (a) identify various overlaps confirming the findings from extant academic literature and (b) generate new empirical insights leading to the development of new theoretical components (Bouncken et al., 2021a(Bouncken et al., , 2021bChiles et al., 2004). The data structure of our empirical results consists of the aggregate dimensions (1) TE drivers, (2) TE input components, (3) TE process components, and (4) TE output components, which the next section of this study analyzes further ( Figure 5). ...
Innovation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is often the result of technology-driven or market-pull entrepreneurship activities. So far, although its importance in practice, as well as in academia continues to grow, extant research exhibits little theory about the process of technology-driven entrepreneurship in SMEs. The study aims to better understand how technology-driven entrepreneurship processes transform business in SMEs in the manufacturing industry. Therefore, we developed a technological entrepreneurship (TE) process framework by utilizing the flexible pattern matching approach (FPMA). We iteratively compared a priori patterns from existing theoretical knowledge to empirical findings that emerged from in-depth interviews with corporate executives in the manufacturing industry. The framework highlights the TE process in SMEs leading to four output components: (1) corporate-function-related, (2) business-model-related, (3) competitiveness-related, and (4) customer-related. This study makes a unique contribution to academia by being the first that develops a TE process framework tailored to SMEs from the manufacturing industry. We point out that sustainable growth and competitiveness of SMEs depends on appropriate TE process management, and we underline the strategic importance of TE-driven transformation for SME managers. Our study expands the scope of TE and SME research and provides empirically grounded insights into technology-driven innovation.
... The phenomenon of self-organisation highlighted in complex systems' theory is a process of "increase in order as well as a function or goal, to which the order contributes"; it is a "dynamic and adaptive process" that emerges from the interactions between the elements of a complex system without "external control" (Boons, 2008, p. 42). Self-organising has been widely used in organisational management to understand the rise and evolution of organisations (Chiles et al., 2004;A. Williams et al., 2017) or to improve their performance (Probst & Rakotobarison, 1994) without breaking with the hierarchical framework (Nederhand et al., 2016). ...
Abstract:
Since the 2010s, various actors - economic, governmental, civil society - have been advocating a transition towards a circular economy (TCE) in response to societal imbalances and actors’ respective challenges. They face management challenges, all related to cooperation, which are particularly present for the more radical transition towards a circular society (TCS). A preliminary literature review on the collective action of TCE shows the scientific management journals’ lack of interest, and, in particular, that what is crucially at stake is cooperation. This leads to setting down TCS as an organisation issue of collective action, at different territory levels. A second literature review, extended to interdisciplinary journals and theories of collective action, develops a conceptual framework around three theories: institutional change (Greenwood et al., 2002) to study at the macro level the challenge of institutionalisation of the concept; Follettian integrative self-organising (Stout & Love, 2016) at the micro level, for the challenge of the emergence of citizen-actor dynamics; and transition governance (Loorbach, 2017) at the meso level, for the challenge of governance of societal transition. Accompanying research is carried out via unique, embedded, longitudinal case study, from 2015 to 2019, of France, characterised by its territorial approach. According to my subjective posture of a radical constructivism critical as well as of a chrematistic management, I participate with restraint to limit my impact, in mirror image to accompany the actors. Floating attention enables the connection of diverse and abundant material, from which surface salient facts. They are processed by textual analysis and put into varied and abductive perspectives. Each challenge studies one level of the case, and is the subject of a paper of this paper-based thesis. The first paper studies the institutionalisation of the concept, and carries out an in-depth linguistic, semantic and contextualised analysis (Seignour, 2011) of a corpus of 20 texts representative of national level French discourse from 2008 to 2017. This paper shows that the French TCE apparatus indicates a CE in the process of theorisation, mobilising a wide range of actors and contributing to a process of societal change to take into account the impact of economic activity on nature. The second paper studies at the micro level, the emerging of TCS citizen-actor dynamics, and develops an accompanying research on a TCS project by a self-organising collective of citizen-actors. It highlights a dynamic surfacing from the need to cooperate at increasingly complex levels, to make practices consistent with values, and the co-design of a TCS project, resulting from an integrative self-organising loop process. Finally, a third paper studies, at the meso level in accompanying research, the governance challenges of a territory TCE, by a governmental body. This shows a governmental body taking up these challenges, by becoming facilitator of a self-organising network, but maintaining its responsibility and power and without co-constructing with citizen-actor initiatives. These results converge towards an essential role for self-organising in the face of the organisational challenges of TCE, which in fact becomes TCS, to adapt society to self-organising. Then, these results open up varied research paths: towards an object-frontier CE of transition between diverse actors, with the actor-network theory (ANT); the researcher’s central role in an eco-management transition (Avenier, 1993, 2016); an integrative mobilisation of TCS around societal values with the Follettian theory revisiting ANT; an experimentation of TCS governance with the X-scheme (Hebinck et al, 2022) and various theories, such as Ostrom's for the construction of laws and Follett's for the emergence of dynamics.
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Résumé :
Depuis les années 2010, divers acteurs – économiques, instances gouvernementales, société civile – prônent une transition vers une économie circulaire (TVEC) en réponse aux déséquilibres sociétaux et à leurs enjeux respectifs. Ils rencontrent des défis de management, tous liés à la coopération, particulièrement présents pour la transition vers une société circulaire (TVSC), plus radicale. Une première revue de littérature sur l’action collective de TVEC, montre notamment l’enjeu crucial de coopération et le manque d’intérêt des revues scientifiques de gestion. Elle conduit à poser la TVSC comme problématique d’organisation de l’action collective, à différents niveaux de territoire. Une seconde revue de littérature, élargie à des revues interdisciplinaires et aux théories de l’action collective, développe un cadre conceptuel autour de trois théories : le changement institutionnel (Greenwood et al., 2002) pour étudier le défi d’institutionnalisation du concept, au niveau macro ; l’auto-organisation intégrative Follettienne (Stout & Love, 2016), pour le défi d’émergence de dynamiques de citoyens-acteurs, au niveau micro ; et la gouvernance de transition (Loorbach, 2017), pour le défi de gouvernance de transition sociétale, au niveau méso. Une recherche-accompagnement est menée par l’étude longitudinale, de 2015 à 2019, du cas unique imbriqué de la France, caractérisée par son approche territoriale. Selon ma posture subjective de constructivisme radical, et critique d’une gestion chrématistique, je participe avec retenue pour limiter mon impact, positionnée en miroir pour accompagner les acteurs. L’attention flottante permet de collecter un matériau divers, abondant, d’où émergent des faits saillants. Ils sont traités par analyses textuelles et mises en perspectives variées et abductives. Chaque défi étudie un niveau du cas, par un essai de cette thèse sur essais. Le premier essai étudie l’institutionnalisation de l’EC, il réalise une analyse en profondeur, linguistique, sémantique et contextualisée (Seignour, 2011) d’un corpus de 20 textes représentatifs du discours français au niveau national de 2008 et 2017. Il montre que le dispositif français de TVEC indique une EC en cours de théorisation, mobilisant un large panel d’acteurs et contribuant à un processus de changement sociétal de prise en compte de l’impact de l’activité économique sur la nature. Le second essai étudie, au niveau micro, l’émergence de dynamiques de citoyens-acteurs de TVSC, il développe une recherche-accompagnement sur un projet de TVSC par un collectif auto-organisé de citoyens-acteurs. Il met en lumière une dynamique émergeant de besoins de coopérer à des niveaux de plus en plus complexes, pour mettre en cohérence des pratiques avec des valeurs, et la co-conception d’un projet de TVSC, résultant d’un processus par boucles d’auto-organisation intégrative. Enfin, un troisième essai étudie, en recherche-accompagnement, au niveau méso, les défis de gouvernance de la TVEC d’un territoire, par une instance gouvernementale. Il montre une instance gouvernementale relevant ces défis, en devenant animatrice de réseau auto-organisé, mais en conservant responsabilité et pouvoir, et sans coconstruire avec les initiatives de citoyens-acteurs. Ces résultats convergent vers un rôle essentiel de l’auto-organisation face aux défis d’organisation de la TVEC, qui, de fait, devient TVSC pour adapter la société à l’auto-organisation. Ils ouvrent des pistes de recherche : vers une EC objet-frontière de transition entre acteurs divers, avec la théorie de l’acteur réseau (ANT) ; un rôle central du chercheur dans une transition par l’éco-management (Avenier, 1993, 2016) ; une mobilisation intégrative de TVSC autour de valeurs sociétales avec la théorie Follettienne revisitant l’ANT ; une expérimentation de gouvernance de TVSC avec le schéma en X (Hebinck et al., 2022) et diverses théories, comme celle d’Ostrom pour construire les lois et de Follett pour l’émergence des dynamiques.
... Strategy literature has for a long time applied the level of the single firm as its empirical focus and level of analysis. Thus, even in multiple case studies or analyses of broader market structures or institutions, the driving dynamic is interpreted as the interplay of firm-level agency with macro-level institutional structures (Chiles, Meyer and Hench, 2004;Grodal, Gotsopoulos and Suarez, 2015;Fisher, Kotha and Lahiri, 2016;Jacobides, MacDuffie and Tae, 2016). This is also true for research that more specifically delves into the creation of new market categories, niches and value systems. ...
This working paper reviews the academic discourse on the key sub-streams of innovation-related literature on ecosystems, with a main focus on the concept of innovation ecosystems. The paper highlights hitherto unanswered theory implications rising from the literature and discourse surrounding ecosystems, and contributes to the literature on innovation and new market formation by identifying a research agenda to enrich the study of early-stage innovation ecosystems that integrates theoretical approaches beyond the current focus. The proposed research agenda builds on the growing and increasingly robust analytical approaches in the study of business ecosystems, but foregrounds expanding attention from looking at the structure of mature ecosystems in settled industry spaces to instead looking at the social practices and institutional negotiation of early-stage ecosystem relations in unsettled industry settings, particularly in the spanning of boundaries between legacy stakeholders and new ventures. Building on the findings and open questions highlighted by the review section, the subsequent empirical appendix of the paper outlines and discusses current dynamics in the UK Space sector from a perspective of early-stage ecosystems.
... In OOO's contrasting view, change is only possible if things change, by combining with other objects in novel ways so as to generate a new actual object that is neither reduceable downwards to the combined objects, nor upwards to what it does elsewhere (Harman, 2012(Harman, , 2018. While organization theory has yet to embrace actual organizations, entrepreneurship studies long ago pointed out the lack of a more specific theory on organizations as emergent objects (Chiles et al., 2004;Gartner, 1993). However, by turning to processual and relational ontologies (Steyaert, 2007), both entrepreneurship and organization theory have ignored how new organizations are capable of relating with other organizations, institutions, and things. ...
... Following OOO's core premises, some objects-including organizations yet also some (but not all) other objects-must possess a distinctive quality that grants them the ability to emerge as organizations and not, for example, as paper mills or sunflowers. In search for a term for this as-yet unnamed quality, we draw on entrepreneurship, which extant theories regard as the process of organization creation (Chiles et al., 2004;Elias et al., 2021;Hjorth et al., 2015;Hjorth et al., 2018), and arrive at 'the entrepreneurial', which in other circumstances might sound (too) tautological. The entrepreneurial is a quality rather than an object; it characterizes an object as innovative and unprecedented (Schumpeter, 1947) yet is not the object itself (Harman, 2018). ...
Avant-garde entrepreneurship studies have contributed to organization theory through a strong process ontology on the creation of new potentialities for organizing; however, this has also further diminished scholarly attention to organizations as objects. It follows that the core entities of organization theory-real organizations-matter very little for theorizing organizational emergence. Based on Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology (OOO), we develop the argument that objects, not unlike processes, can be entrepreneurial. Laying the ground for an object-oriented organization theory (OOOT), we posit that increased attention to viewing entrepreneurship as a quality invites organization theory into the weird reality of organizations as emergent autonomy-seeking objects. This becomes possible by way of a non-literal knowledge sustained by the commitment of another object that is neither reduceable to its components (including process itself) nor actions (including all forms of the relational determination of organizations). We close by discussing the uniqueness of OOOT through the example of Sun Ra and the Arkestra.
... The claim suggests that extending an order that enables individuals to self-organize autonomously is better for solving complex economic problems than using central authority to plan and manage resource allocation. In the management field, this perspective can be observed as the dynamics of the emergent self-organization among the interdependent agents in the organizational collectives (Chiles et al., 2004;Tsoukas, 1996). Especially in a free opensource software ecosystem, individuals can join existing projects or formulate a new project to resolve complex problems through self-organized communications (Foss et al., 2016). ...
As the sharing economy has grown rapidly and replaced the traditional businesses, new rules and norms for data and digital trade have emerged divergently in many countries. Such divergence in global e-commerce policies may be a major barrier to the internationalization of the sharing economy business. This paper aims to develop an internationalization theory that addresses how the sharing economy firms can internationalize under the condition of the divergence of global e-commerce policies. Drawing on Hayek’s knowledge economy approach, we build a new internationalization theory for the sharing economy firms that facilitate autonomously self-organized business ecosystems and adapt to the lack of harmonized rules and norms for the sharing economy. We first theorize on the attributes of the digital platform-based transactions for the internationalization of the sharing economy firms and then provide some insights into the current international debates of e-commerce policies. Our theory offers two main insights: (1) the competitive advantages of the sharing economy firms stem mainly from digital platform algorithms to catalyze digital platform-based transactions between autonomous actors; (2) the divergence of global e-commerce policies and different internet regimes in different countries may affect the internationalization of business models based on such digital platform-based transactions.
... Instead of focusing on emerging coordination in groups, Chiles et al. (2004) explain the emergence of new organizational collectives using the case of live musical performance theaters in Branson, Missouri. Over a single century, this small town evolved from a remote area of the Ozarks into the second most popular roadtrip destination in the US, with more than six million tourists visiting its live theaters every year. ...
Management and organization scholars have long been intrigued by the performing arts—music, theater, and dance—as a rich context for studying organizational phenomena. Indeed, a plethora of studies suggest that the performing arts are more than an interesting sideline for authors, as they offer unique theoretical and empirical lenses for organization studies. However, this stream of literature spreads across multiple research areas, varies with regard to its underlying theories and methods, and fails to pay sufficient attention to the contextuality of the findings. We address the resulting limitations by identifying and reviewing 89 articles on management and organization related to the performing arts published in 15 top-tier journals between 1976 and 2022. We find that research in the performing arts advances organizational theory and the understanding of organizational phenomena in four key ways, namely by studying (1) organizational phenomena in performing-arts contexts; (2) performing-arts phenomena in organizational contexts; (3) organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts theories; and (4) organizational phenomena through the prism of performing-arts practices. We also find that, in contrast to other settings, the performing arts are uniquely suited for immersive participant-observer research and for generating genuine insights into fundamental organizational structures and processes that are generic conditions of the performing arts and management alike, such as leadership, innovation, and the management of uncertainty. Finally, based on our consolidation of the research gaps and limitations of the reviewed studies, we develop a comprehensive agenda for future research.
