Complexity and Organizational Realities ─ Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management After the Collapse of Investment Capitalism

Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously.

Ralph Stacey has turned to the sciences of uncertainty and complexity to develop an understanding of leadership and management as the ordinary politics of daily organizational life. In presenting organizations as a series of complex responsive processes, Stacey’s new book helps us to see organizational reality for what it actually is – human beings engaged in many, many local conversational interactions and power relations in which they negotiate their ideologically based choices. Organizational continuity and change emerge unpredictably, rather than as a result of any overall plan. This is a radically different picture from the one painted by most of the management literature, which explains "organizational continuity and change" as the realization of the global plans and choices of a few powerful executives within an organization.

Providing a new foundation for understanding complexity and management, this important book is required reading for managers and leaders wanting to understand the reality of complexity in organizations, including those engaged in postgraduate studies in leadership, organizational behaviour and change management.

Ralph Stacey is Professor of Management and Director of the Doctor of Management Program at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Preface 1. Contradiction: Experiencing the Reality of Uncertainty but Still Believing that Executives choose an Organization’s ‘Direction’ 2. How We came to Believe that Leaders and Managers choose an Organization’s Direction: Professional Identification with the Sciences of Certainty 3. Complexity and the Sciences of Uncertainty: The Importance of Local Interaction in the Emergence of Population-Wide Patterns of Continuity and Change 4. Complexity and What most Writers on Organizations do with it: Obscuring Local Interaction and mostly Re-Presenting the Dominant Discourse 5. Understanding Organizations as Games we are Pre-Occupied in: Finding Ourselves Immersed in Local Interaction and using Abstract Management Tools at the Same Time 6. Understanding Organizations as Social Processes: The Interplay of Abstracting and Immersing Producing Outcomes No-One Chooses 7. Managers Accomplish Whatever they Accomplish in Processes of Communication 8. Turning the Dominant Management Discourse on its Head: Organizational Continuity and Transformation Emerging in Local Interaction rather than being Chosen by Managers 9. Local and Population-Wide Patterns of Power Relations and Ideology: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Organizations 10. Implications of a Theory of Complex Responsive Processes for Policy Making, Consultancy, Leadership, Management, Organizational Research and Management Development