Experiencing Emergence in Organizations: Local Interaction and the Emergence of Global Patterns

The perspective of complex responsive processes draws on analogies from the complexity sciences, bringing in the essential characteristics of human agents, understood to emerge in social processes of communicative interaction and power-relating. The result is a way of thinking about life in organizations that focuses attention on how organizational members cope with unknown as they perpetually create organizational futures together. Providing a natural successor to the Editors' earlier series (Complexity and Emergence in Organizations) this series Complexity as the Experience of Organizing, aims to take this work further by taking very seriously the experience of organizational practitioners, and showing how taking the perspective of complex responsive process yields deeper insight into practice and so develops that practice. In this book, all of the contributors work as leaders, consultants or managers in organizations. They provide narrative accounts of their actual work addressing questionssuch as: How do widespread or global patterns, such as government or corporate policies, emerge and evolve, in the local interactions between people? What actually happens in global change programmes such as installing competencies, managing diversity and assuring quality? What does this imply about the relationship between the local and the global? In considering such questions in terms of their daily experience, the contributors explore how the perspective of complex responsive processes assists them to make sense of their experience and so to develop their practice.Experiencing Emergence in Organizationsoffers a different method for making sense of an experience in a rapidly changing world by using reflective accounts of ordinary everyday life in organizations rather than idealized accounts. The editors' commentary introduces and contextualizes these experiences as well as drawing out key themes for further research. Experiencing Emergence inOrganizationswill be of value to readers from amongst those academics and business school students and practitioners who are looking for reflective accounts of real life experiences of researching in organizations rather than further prescriptions of what like in organizations ought to be like.