Although normal distributions and related current quantitative methods are still relevant for some organizational research, the growing ubiquity of power laws signifies that Pareto rank/frequency ...distributions, fractals, and underlying scale-free theories are increasingly pervasive and valid characterizations of organizational dynamics. When they apply, researchers ignoring power-law effects risk drawing false conclusions and promulgating useless advice to practitioners. This is because what is important to most managers are the extremes they face, not the averages. We show that power laws are pervasive in the organizational world and present 15 scale-free theories that apply to organizations. Next we discuss research implications embedded in Pareto rank/frequency distributions and draw statistical and methodological implications.
Practitioners find little value in academic research. Some see it as a knowledge flow problem; others see practitioner and academic knowledge as unrelated. Van de Ven and Johnson propose a ...pluralistic collective of researchers and practitioners using "engaged scholarship" and intellectual arbitrage to create practitioner-meaningful research. It's a nice dream, but not a solution; bias, disciplines, and particularism remain. Neither discipline-centric nor practitioner-driven research offers a solution. Earthquake science offers a better model for business school research.
Darwinian selectionist theory is characterized as equilibrium bound. Complexity science focuses on order creation, hence is a better platform for a science of entrepreneurship. "Self-organization ...biologists" study order creation in the context of all four Aristotelian causes: material, formal, final, and efficient, whereas normal science rests only on efficient cause. Mohr's process theory and Siggelkow's narrative about entrepreneurship rest on all four, standing as good representations of postmodernist ontology. Since modern epistemology still calls for model-centered science, agent models are proposed as an alternative to mathematics as a means of applying modern normal science standards to research on entrepreneurship - all without downgrading thick, postmodernist descriptions of complex causality. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The misalignment of information systems (IS) components with the rest of an organization remains a critical and chronic unsolved problem in today's complex and turbulent world. This paper argues that ...the coevolutionary and emergent nature of alignment has rarely been taken into consideration in IS research and that this is the reason behind why IS alignment is so difficult. A view of IS alignment is presented about organizations that draws and builds on complexity theory and especially its focus on coevolution-based self-organized emergent behaviour and structure, which provides important insights for dealing with the emergent nature of IS alignment. This view considers Business/IS alignment as a series of adjustments at three levels of analysis: individual, operational, and strategic, and suggests several enabling conditions – principles of adaptation and scale-free dynamics – aimed at speeding up the adaptive coevolutionary dynamics among the three levels.
Leadership models of the last century have been products of top-down, bureaucratic paradigms. These models are eminently effective for an economy premised on physical production but are not ...well-suited for a more knowledge-oriented economy. Complexity science suggests a different paradigm for leadership—one that frames leadership as a complex interactive dynamic from which adaptive outcomes (e.g., learning, innovation, and adaptability) emerge. This article draws from complexity science to develop an overarching framework for the study of Complexity Leadership Theory, a leadership paradigm that focuses on enabling the learning, creative, and adaptive capacity of complex adaptive systems (CAS) within a context of knowledge-producing organizations. This conceptual framework includes three entangled leadership roles (i.e., adaptive leadership, administrative leadership, and enabling leadership) that reflect a dynamic relationship between the bureaucratic, administrative functions of the organization and the emergent, informal dynamics of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Ian Cunningham McKelvey, Bill; Maxwell, Jeff
Veterinary record,
03/2018, Letnik:
182, Številka:
9
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A gifted scientist and a natural leader, Ian Cunningham was one of Scotland’s pre-eminent biological scientists; he also directed and chaired a number of key research and educational organisations.
A long-held assumption in entrepreneurship research is that normal (i.e., Gaussian) distributions characterize variables of interest for both theory and practice. We challenge this assumption by ...examining more than 12,000 nascent, young, and hyper-growth firms. Results reveal that variables which play central roles in resource-, cognition-, action-, and environment-based entrepreneurship theories exhibit highly skewed power law distributions, where a few outliers account for a disproportionate amount of the distribution's total output. Our results call for the development of new theory to explain and predict the mechanisms that generate these distributions and the outliers therein. We offer a research agenda, including a description of non-traditional methodological approaches, to answer this call.
•We examine more than 12,000 nascent, young, and hyper-growing firms.•We examine the distribution of key variables in entrepreneurship theories.•Forty eight of 49 variables are power law rather than normally distributed.•Variables should be assumed as power law distributed unless proven otherwise.•Power law distributions challenge and offer opportunities for entrepreneurship research.
Can firms and coevolutionary groups suffer from too much interdependent complexity? Is complexity theory an alternative explanation to competitive selection for the emergent order apparent in ...coevolutionary industry groups? The biologist Stewart Kauffman suggests a theory of complexity catastrophe offering universal principles explaining phenomena normally attributed to Darwinian natural selection theory. Kauffman's complexity theory seems to apply equally well to firms in coevolutionary pockets. Based on complexity theory, four kinds of complexity are identified. Kauffman's " NK C model" is positioned "at the edge of chaos" between complexity driven by "Newtonian" simple rules and rule-driven deterministic chaos. Kauffman's insight, which is the basis of the findings in this paper, is that complexity is both a consequence and a cause. Multicoevolutionary complexity in firms is defined by moving natural selection processes inside firms and down to a "parts" level of analysis, in this instance Porter's value chain level, to focus on microstate activities by agents. The assumptions of stochastically idiosyncratic microstates and coevolution in firms are analyzed. Competitive advantage, as a dependent variable, is defined in terms of Nash equilibrium fitness levels. This allows a translation of Kauffman's theory to firms, paying particular attention to (1) how value chain landscapes might be modeled, (2) assumptions underlying Kauffman's models making them amenable to firms, and (3) a delineation of seven of Kauffman's computational experiments. As part of the translation, possible parallels between the application of complexity catastrophe theory to coevolutionary pockets and studies by institutional theorists and social network analysts are discussed. The models derive from spin-glass microstate models resulting in Boolean games. Kauffman's Boolean statistical mechanics is introduced in developing the logic underlying the somewhat simplified NK C model. The model allows the use of computational experiments to better understand how the dependent variable—value chain fitness—is affected by changes in the number of internal interdependencies K , the number of coevolutionary links with opponents C , the size of the coevolutionary pocket S , and the number of simultaneous adaptive changes, among other things. Various computational experiments are presented that suggest strategic organizing approaches most likely to foster competitive advantage. High or low Nash equilibrium fitness levels are shown to result from internal and external coevolutionary densities as a function of links among value chain competencies within a firm and between a firm and an opponent. Complexity phenomena appear to suggest a number of expected (and thus validating) and surprising strategies with respect to complex organizational interdependencies. For example, moderate complexity fares best and external coevolutionary complexity sets an upper bound to advantages likely to be gained from internal complexity. Various complexity "lessons" are discussed. Models such as the NK C could offer insights into strategic organizing.
Competition between modernism and postmodernism has not been fruitful, and management researchers are divided in their preference, thereby undermining the legitimacy of truth claims in the field as a ...whole. Drawing on Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, on complexity science, and in particular on power-law-distributed phenomena, we show how the order-seeking regime of the modernists and the richness-seeking regime of the postmodernists draw on different ontological assumptions that can be integrated within a single overarching framework.
PDF
