Complexity as a domain between order and chaos: Implications for organizational scholarship

Organizations are grappling with increasingly complex challenges, including those stemming from technological disruptions, geopolitical uncertainty, and climate change. Despite the increasing acknowledgment of the complexity inherent in many organizational problems, complexity theory has had limited impact on mainstream management scholarship. Synthesizing contemporary complexity literature, we conceptualize complexity as a systemic property of a certain—and, we argue, rather broad—domain of organizational problems, and complexity theory as a theory of change in such organizational contexts. This view of complexity implies that complexity theory has important implications to organizational scholarship at large, indicates limitations of using conventional scientific methods, and suggests that the credibility and replication crises in many branches of organizational research may not be treatable simply by better statistical designs. Instead, methodological choices in complex organizational domains should take account of the properties of non-linearity and emergence, and organizational scholars should embrace complexity theory not only as an explanatory framework but also to inform research design.