Complexity and Organisations: Researching Practice

Virtually everyone accepts that workplaces are complex, but there is little insight into how we might engage with complexity more skilfully. If complexity isn’t something that managers can control and leaders cannot harness, then what does a complexity perspective offer?

This fourth book in the complexity series describes how taking complexity seriously can inform approaches to understanding organisations. It focuses on the ways that managers and researchers can engage with their own histories to better understand their working lives, how they may be participating in maintaining the very processes they are trying to change and how research methods can shed light on politics of working together. The chapter authors work in a wide variety of sectors and draw on their experience to produce vibrant writing which will resonate with managers and leaders who want to explore how they might understand their working lives differently, and to students who are using first-person reflexive research methodologies.

Drawn from contemporary research in a wide variety of organisations, this book makes a valuable contribution to manager-researchers wanting to think differently about their intractable and enduring everyday dilemmas.

Kiran Chauhan is an organisational consultant at The King’s Fund, a health and care policy think tank in the UK. He is also a visiting lecturer at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire.

Chris Mowles is Professor of Complexity and Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire.