Andres
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Date: 21 Feb 96 14:49:49 EST
From: Philip C. Anderson <Philip.C.Anderson@Dartmouth.EDU>
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Subject: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS [LONG]
Would you kindly post the following announcement to the listserv?
Thanks, Phil Anderson
Dartmouth College
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
APPLICATIONS OF COMPLEXITY THEORY TO ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
INFORMS NATIONAL MEETING
ATLANTA HILTON, NOVEMBER 4, 1996
The INFORMS (formerly ORSA/TIMS) College on Organization Science will
be holding a "conference within a conference" at the society's national meeting
this fall, addressing applications of complexity theory to organization
science. The conference theme is also the subject of a forthcoming special
issue of Organization Science. The College is now inviting scholars to submit
abstracts of theoretical and/or empirical papers to be presented at the
national meetings.
"Complex organizations" have been an important arena in organizational
studies for decades. Historically, organizational scholars have examined
vertical complexity (the number of levels in a hierarchy), horizontal
complexity (the number of differentiated departments), and spatial complexity
(the geographic dispersion of organizational subunits). Organizational
environments have also been characterized as more or less complex depending on
how heterogeneous and dispersed resources are within them.
However, a different view of complexity is emerging that may have
important implications for organizational scholarship. Within the past decade,
interest in the "sciences of complexity" has increased dramatically. The study
of complex system dynamics has perhaps progressed farthest in the natural
sciences, but it is also beginning to penetrate the social sciences. This
interdisciplinary field of study is still pre-paradigmatic, and it embraces a
wide variety of approaches. Although it is not yet clear whether a genuine
science of complexity will emerge, it does seem clear that scholars in a
variety of fields are viewing complexity in a different way than organizational
scholars traditionally have.
A number of findings now seem fairly well-established, including the
following:
* Many dynamic systems do not reach an equilibrium (either a fixed point
or a cyclical equilibrium).
* Processes that appear to be random may actually be chaotic, in other
words may revolve around identifiable types of "attractors." Tests exist that
can detect whether apparently random processes are in fact chaotic.
* Two entities with very similar initial states can follow radically
divergent paths over time. The behavior of complex processes can be quite
sensitive to small differences in initial conditions. This can lead to highly
path-dependent behavior, and historical accidents may "tip" outcomes strongly
in a particular direction.
* Very complex patterns can arise from the interaction of agents
following relatively simple rules. These patterns are "emergent" in the sense
that new properties appear at each level in a hierarchy.
* Complex systems may resist reductionist analyses. In other words, it
may not be possible to describe some systems simply by holding some of their
subsystems constant in order to study other subsystems.
* Time series that appear to be random walks may actually be fractals
with self-reinforcing trends. In such cases we may observe a "hand of the
past" in operation.
* Complex systems may tend to exhibit "self-organizing" behavior.
Starting in a random state, they may naturally evolve toward order instead of
disorder.
A number of government agencies have begun to take an interest in
serious academic studies of complex systems. One consequence is that scholars
who are familiar with techniques for analyzing complex systems but unfamiliar
with organizational science have begun to develop models of complex systems
including organizations, and models of organizations as complex systems. The
organization science community has a great deal to contribute to such
endeavors, and stands to gain important new insights about organizing in
return.
The INFORMS College on Organizational Science has decided to hold a
"conference within a conference" on complexity theory at the society's national
meeting this fall. We invite scholars who are interested in presenting papers
to submit four-page abstracts to the fall program chair by May 15. 15-20
papers will be selected from the pool of submissions. Papers based on the
accepted abstracts will be presented in five back-to-back sessions at the
Atlanta Hilton on November 4, 1996.
Additionally, Organization Science will soon announce a call for papers
for a special issue of the journal devoted to this topic. The special issue
will be guest edited by Alan Meyer (University of Oregon), Kathy Eisenhardt
(Stanford University), Andrew Pettigrew (Warwick University), Kathleen Carley
(Carnegie-Mellon University), and Philip Anderson (Dartmouth College). Papers
presented at the Atlanta meetings need not be submitted for the special issue,
nor is there any guarantee that papers presented at the conference will be
accepted for the special issue. However, the linkage between the conference
topic and the special issue topic is deliberate. Because complexity theory is
a novel topic in organization science, we hope to accelerate progress by
exposing people interested in this subject to each other's ideas at the
conference. We anticipate that the interchange between people interested in
this area at the conference will stimulate richer, more interesting papers for
the special issue, which will have a submission deadline in early 1997. We
encourage scholars who do not wish to present a paper but who are interested in
the topic to join the learning community we will construct in Atlanta.
Although studies of complex systems in other disciplines are often very
sophisticated technically, we do not view the conference or the special issue
as a methods forum. The most interesting research into complex systems sheds
fresh light on nonlinear dynamics, which usually evolve from interactions among
agents. Organizational scholars seldom come to grips with nonlinear phenomena.
Instead, we tend to model phenomena as if they were linear in order to make
them tractable, and we tend to model aggregate behavior as if it is produced by
individual entities which all exhibit average behavior. This conferences
focuses on research that examines complex, nonlinear, interactive behavior
within and between organizations. At this juncture, organizational researchers
have few templates that suggest to them how to hypothesize about or model such
behavior. It is difficult to know how to draw a conceptual model and how to
report the results of empirical inquiries into complex organizational
phenomena. Both the conference and the special issue aim to provide scholars
with useful templates to follow when analyzing complex processes that involve
organizations.
We wish to discourage submissions which are purely methodological;
appropriate manuscripts will examine some aspect of complexity as it applies to
organizations. We also are not receptive to papers that simply assert that a
particular phenomenon is complex or nonlinear, or which merely call for
scholars to take a different view of the world. We consider the stylized facts
listed above to be well-established, and are not looking for papers that merely
suggest these ideas apply to organizations as well. The question of interest
is how ideas that arise from studying complex systems can add to what we know
about organizations. Examples of appropriate topics might include, but
certainly are not limited to, the following:
* Research that specifies plausible sources of hidden order in apparently
random processes that occur within or among organizations. Can we illuminate
how that which appears random is actually ordered but in complex ways? Such
insights are particularly interesting if they generate testable implications.
* Research that explains how simple organizational processes become
complex ones. At what point do behaviors that are individually well-understood
interact in ways that create difficult-to-understand aggregate outcomes? What
are the consequences of rising complexity in this sense?
* Research that compares several plausible rule sets for a group of
interacting agents, and shows that behavior we observe in organizations can be
produced by one model of interactions but not by others.
A list of useful books and articles addressing complexity theory may be
found at the INFORMS College on Organization Science's Word Wide Web site:
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/informs/
Abstracts should be sent to the fall program chair at the following address, to
arrive by May 15, 1996.
Professor Philip Anderson
Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College
Hanover NH 03755-9000
Philip.Anderson@Dartmouth.edu
Abstracts should emphasize why the work is interesting to
organizational scholars, instead of focusing on extensive citations or
methodological descriptions. Authors whose abstracts are accepted for
inclusion in the conference program will be notified by June 1, 1996.