Complexity

Abstract

Instability and risk increasingly impact the global business world, and corporations need to embrace change to stay competitive and survive. Complexity theory offers one approach to dealing with the uncertainty. This entry provides a brief history and explains the theory's key concepts such as connectionism, self‐organization, relationships, and social responsibility. The necessity for organizations to interact with constantly fluctuating internal and external environments makes the relevance of complexity characteristics for strategic communication in organizations evident. Future communication managers will not control or lead change; instead they will embrace contradictions and ambiguity by encouraging their stakeholders to self‐organize to cocreate contingent strategy.