Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations

Part II: Toward a complexity perspective: the emergence of knowledge in complex responsive processes of relating

The five chapters of Part II develop a view of human action within a causal theory of Transformative Teleology (see Box 3.1). From this perspective, the future is under perpetual construction through continuous processes of relating, which have the inherent, spontaneous capacity for coherent patterning, paradoxically displaying both continuity and potential transformation at the same time. This perspective draws on particular strands of thought in the complexity sciences as source domain for analogies with human action. These analogies are translated into human terms through concepts developed by Mead and others who hold that the ...