Complexity: A Frontier for Management Education

Abstract

This article critiques the mechanistic grounding of traditional management education and proposes complexity science as a fitting explanatory model for an age of complexity, contributing timely and important educational content and instructional processes to management education. It highlights some of those contributions and reviews instructional methods exemplifying key features of complex adaptive systems and suggesting the value in harnessing natural tendencies of systems by working in harmony with them. The article concludes with a consideration of issues facing teachers who contemplate teaching in accordance with the implications of complexity science.