In recent years there has been a turn to the complexity sciences by evaluation scholars as way of producing richer theories of the social. However, and at the same time, what might be considered some of the more radical insights from the non-linear sciences are sometimes lost when they are represented within what I understand as a dominant paradigm; that evaluation is primarily a rational, detached activity based on design. This is particularly the case with evaluation scholars who adopt a contingency approach to complexity, and who argue that social interventions are not always complex, or may only be partly so. In critiquing the way that the complexity sciences are adduced I am making stronger claims for their significance, but also urging greater caution. Lack of precision in the way theories are taken up from the complexity sciences in evaluative terms may lead both to under-and over-claiming their import. In under-claiming scholars may put forward the idea, for example, that emergence is a special category of human activity and means the opposite of being planned. In over-claiming, they may argue that 'complexity science' supports any number of arguments which seem unrelated to any particular manifestation of the non-linear sciences. Insights may also get lost an appeal to abstract systems, mechanisms and 'levels' of reality. In this article I claim that human interaction is always complex, that emergence can be understood as the interweaving of intentions, and that evaluation is a social activity like any other, and is therefore not exempt from the evaluative process. Making claims for the replicability of 'successful' social interventions is a probabilistic undertaking if we accept one of the central insights from complex adaptive systems theory, that global patterns may tell us very little about the micro-processes that brought them about.
???The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Wiley [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]This paper offers a critique of existing ways of understanding management practice in International Non-Government Organisations (INGOs) and compares and contrasts these with insights drawn from the complexity sciences. The authors put forward a more radical interpretation of complexity theory as it might be taken up in organisations rather than suggesting that it can be accommodated with existing theories based in systems thinking. They suggest that understanding the process of organising as contingent, paradoxical and experiential could profoundly refocus the attention of managers and practitioners alike and lead to an intensifying of practice as more consciously political. In being more open to others, including their partners and beneficiaries, staff in INGOs may be more ready to change themselves and their ideas. At the same time, the authors point out the existing dynamics of current practice and the way it perpetuates itself, no matter how problematic. Copyright#2008 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd
SUMMARYDevelopment management as a practice borrows extensively and uncritically from management theories developed in the private sector, which are based on ideas of predictability and control, and systemic 'whole' change. In contemporary management discourse, we are always rushing towards an idealised tomorrow. This article sets out an alternative theory of management, which the author calls post-foundational management, drawing on concepts of emergence. This privileges the local and the contextual, and argues that generalised plans and strategies are always taken up in particular contexts with particular actors engaged in political contestation about how to go on together. The future, then, is always provisional, even if idealised and will arise from the interweaving of many intentions.
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