An Introduction to the Special Issue on Managing Complexity within and Across Organizational Boundaries

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12261
• Author: Bill Harley,Penny Dick,Dries Faems
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017

An Introduction to the Special Issue on Managing

Complexity within and Across Organizational

Boundaries

The Editors

Penny Dick, Dries Faems and Bill Harley

University of Sheffield; University of Groningen; University of Melbourne

Claims that we are living through a period of unprecedented volatility, complexity and

even chaos are not new. Consultants and business gurus routinely pronounce epochal

shifts and put forward prescriptions for managing in a complex age. Social scientists

have produced a variety of labels in attempts to capture what they see as the essence of

changes such as the network society, risk society and audit society.

Numerous changes appear to contribute to greater complexity within and outside

organizations. We see how the emergence of economic and political disruptions ques-

tion traditional governance structures and management practices. Moreover, respond-

ing to such changes often requires engaging in complex interactions with a wide variety

of internal and external stakeholders. At the same time, organizations face increasingly

complex regulatory frameworks, with a plethora of regulatory institutions at local, pro-

vincial, national, regional and global levels. Such increased scrutiny of organizational

actions renders ceremonial responses to complexity ever more problematic. Whereas

new technologies might help organizations to deal with increased demands from differ-

ent institutions, their implementation often entails new modes of complexity, which

jeopardize their actual success. All of this has massive implications for how organiza-

tional actors respond to and manage complexity as both an environmental condition

and as the generator of different types of internal, external and inter-organizational

demands.

This special issue brings together a set of articles that theorize on the management of

complexity within and across organizational boundaries from different conceptual and

methodological perspectives. In his conceptual paper, Tsoukas emphasizes that theoreti-

cal complexity is needed to account for organizational complexity. This implies that,

Address for reprints: Dries Faems, University of Groningen (D.L.M.Faems@rug.nl).

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C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 54:2 March 2017

doi: 10.1111/joms.12261