COMPLEXITY & MANAGEMENT

A tendency exists in management theory and practice today to accept that our linear and deterministic ways of thinking about managerial problems create more problems than they solve. In the field of strategy studies, for instance, one can observe a growing interest in learning and organisational flexibility — IT gives importance to distributed cognition and adaptive systems. Management theorists are keenly observing developments surrounding complexity and chaos theory in science, and management researchers are attempting to apply emerging theories to managerial problems.Although there are still a limited number of applications in the managerial world, the Santa Fe Institute and the Los Alamos Center for Nonlinear Studies (both in the US) have been active for several years in closely related fields and, more important, adopt a multidisciplinary approach. Such applied research is seldom present in academic management journals. It seems, however, that the business community is interested in the implications of chaos and complexity for management as well as adopting a multidisciplinary approach to strategy and organisational change.This volume, constituting the proceedings of the Summer School on Managerial Complexity, held in Granada, Spain, on 11-25 July 1998, will benefit students and researchers in chaos and dynamical systems.