From Complexity Science to Complex Thinking: Organization as Simple Location

Abstract

Recent developments in the sciences of complexity have led to a rise in interest in the application of such insights to the understanding of social phenomena such as organization. This essay seeks to examine the fundamental differences between social and natural systems and to thereby render more transparent the possible limitations of a science of complexity for the analysis of organization. Against this science of complexity, it counterposes the kind of complex thinking inspired by philosophy, literature, art and the humanities to show how such forms of thinking may be more adequate to the task of revealing to us the whole spectrum of human lived experiences; something which we argue here that the complexity sciences, in the current form they take, remain unable to access.