Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations

Ralph Stacey is Professor of Management and Director of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire, and a member of the Institute of Group Analysis. He is also consultant to managers at many levels accross a range of organizations and the author of a number of books and articles on strategy and complexity theory in management.

List of illustrations, Series preface, Acknowledgements, 1. Introduction: can learning and knowledge creation in organizations really be managed?, Part I. The foundations of mainstream views on learning and knowledge creation in organizations: systems thinking, 2. Mainstream thinking about learning and knowledge creation in organizations, 3. Different levels of learning and knowledge creation in organizations: the individual and the social, Part II. Toward a complexity perspective: the emergence of knowledge in complex responsive processes of relating, 4. The emergence of the individual and the social in communicative interaction, 5. Communicative action in the medium of symbols, 6. The organization of communicative action: rule-based or self-organizing knowledge?, 7. The emergence of enabling constraints: power relations and unconscious processes, 8. Organization as communicating in the living present: how knowledge emerges in complex responsive processes of relating, Part III. Systems thinking and the perspective of complex responsive processes: comparisons and implications, 9. Comparing systems thinking and the perspective of complex responsive processes, 10. The organizational implications of complex responsive processes of knowledge creation, Appendix: Autopoiesis: an inappropriate analogy for human action, Bibliography, Index