???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
This paper describes a complexity perspective on organizational life by drawing on three distinctive sources. First, we describe the way different natural scientists talk of their work in simulating complex dynamical systems. Second, we listen to the contribution of social scientists in describing the dynamics of human interaction and third, we describe group analytic practice as it illuminates the emotional, prelinguistic processes at work in the group matrix. We argue that together these insights allow us to speak of the nature of self-organization in human systems in a way that emphasizes inter subjectivity, emergence and de-centred agency in contrast to the dominant voice in much management thinking which emphasizes objectivity, control and individual agency. We then relate how the complexity perspective we describe informs our approach to organizational consulting in which we participate in networks of self-organizing everyday conversation whereby the patterned structure of organizational activity is paradoxically both sustained and change
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