1) Name: E. Andres Garcia
2) Email address: egarcia@stern.nyu.edu
3) Postal address: New York University
Stern School of Business
Department of Management
44 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012-1126
4) Phone: School: (212) 998-0217
Fax: (212) 995-4234
Office: (201) 330-3227
Home: (201) 330-1158
5) Affiliations:
a) Ph.D. student at NYU's Stern Business School
b) "Managerial & Organizational Cognition" Interest Group -
Academy of Management
c) "Organizations and the Natural Environment" Interest Group -
Academy of Management
d) "Simulation" Section - Institute for Operations Research and
the Management Sciences
e) Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences
f) "Sociocybernetics and Social Systems" Thematic Group -
International Sociological Association
6) How did you hear about PCP:
At the "Evolution of Complexity" symposium within the "Einstein
Meets Magritte" conference held at V.U.B.
7) Describe your work and how it might relate to PCP:
Organizations, and the decision-making processes that occur
within them, can be modeled as complex adaptive systems, where
social actors at a micro-level of analysis are continually
interacting, adapting, and generating (typically unintended)
collective outcomes. These outcomes may exhibit, at a
macro-level of analysis, dynamic regularities, patterns or
"order" which may be interpreted and objectified as social
"facts" by actors. Social facts are then intersubjectively
negotiated, modified and diffused between actors in the course of
their interactions, which may in turn affect subsequent
collective outcomes. In this way social reality is both
physically produced and cognitively constructed, via continuous
personal interactions combined with cognitive feedback loops
between macro and micro levels.
My goal is to improve our understanding of the above phenomena by
applying the conceptual framework or "paradigm" of general
systems/complexity science/sociocybernetics to the field of
organizational and managerial studies. It is particularly urgent
that we improve our understanding of the relationship between the
above phenomena and ecological sustainability.
To this end, I am involved in a research project, funded by a
National Science Foundation grant, entitled "Research,
Development and Industrial Testing of a Sustainability Impact
Assessment System." We are attempting to incorporate concepts
from the new complex systems paradigm into a methodology for
assessing the socioeconomic and environmental sustainability of
corporate decisions.