SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management

The SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management is the first substantive scholarly work to provide a map of the state of art research in the growing field emerging at the intersection of complexity science and management studies. Edited and written by internationally respected scholars from management and related disciplines, the Handbook will be the definitive reference source for understanding the implications of complexity science for management research and practice.

Part One: Foundations introduces complexity science and its implications for the foundations of scientific knowledge, including management knowledge.

Part Two: Applications presents the numerous ways in which complexity science models and tools, as well as complexity thinking, are being applied to management and organizational phenomena and the insights gained as a result.

Part Three: Interfaces highlights how complexity science is transforming various non-management fields and, in so doing, creating exciting interfaces for bridging between management and related disciplines.

Peter Allen is Head of the Complex Systems Management Centre in the School of Management at Cranfield University, co-Editor- in-Chief of Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Director and Co-Founder of The Complexity Society. Professor Allen has worked for 25years on the mathematical modelling of change and innovation in urban, social, economic, financial and ecological systems, and the development of integrated systems models. He has written and edited several books and published well over 200 articles in a range of fields including ecology, social science, urban and regional science, economics, systems theory, and physics. Steve Maguire,is Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization in the Faculty of Management at McGill University. He recently completed a comprehensive review (with Prof Bill McKelvey and PhD students Laurent Mirabeau and Nail Oztas) of the field of “Complexity Science and Organization Studies” which appears as a new commissioned chapter in the 2006 second edition of the our Handbook of Organization Studies. In addition, he co-edited (with Bill McKelvey) in 1999 a special issue of Emergence devoted to reviewing the plethora of books addressing “Complexity and Management”, and he has also authored several book chapters on the topic. Bill McKelvey received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1967 and is currently Professor of Strategic Organizing and Complexity Science at the UCLA. His book, Organizational Systematics (1982) remains the definitive treatment of organizational evolution and taxonomy. In 1997 he became Director of the Center for Rescuing Strategy and Organization Science (SOS). He was a founder of UCLA’s Center for Human Complex Systems & Computational Social Science. Recently McKelvey co-edited Variations in Organization Science (1999) and a special issue of the journal, Emergence. Forthcoming book is: Complexity Dynamics in Organizations: Applications of Order-Creation Science (Cambridge University Press).