Chaos and Transformation Theories: A Theoretical Analysis with Implications for Organization Theory and Public Management
Abstract:
Chaos and transformation theories have emerged as new currencies in social sciences in general and in systems design and management, and in futuristic studies in particular.
This article analyzes chaos and transformation theories in historical and contemporary perspectives, their contributions to social science in general, and organization theory and public management in particular.
The notions of chaos and order, change and continuity, and uncertainty and certainty are analyzed along with the growing realization of complexity and non-linear dynamic features of modern organizations and the hard reality of a constant necessity to acquire new knowledge and learn to manage organizations with flexibility and innovation.
Finally, the article addresses some of the limitations of chaos theory and outlines a number of implications for organization theory and public management in the age of globalization.
Introduction:
Chaos and transformation theories have emerged as new currencies in the social sciences in general and in systems analysis and futuristic studies in particular.
However, the relevance and utility of chaos and transformation theories to organization theory are still being developed, with the present analysis offering a modest contribution.
These theories also have significant implications for governance, administration, environment, and global studies. Some social scientists have elevated the status of chaos theory to a ‘‘new science’’ (Gleick, 1987; Wheatley, 1999; Uri, 1995), telling us that we live in a complex world full of uncertainties, randomness, and unpredictable events that can scramble plans and drive systems, including organizations, into chaos and catastrophic breakdown.
Crises, surprises, sudden and rapid changes, confusions, and things out of control prevail in our world and characterize modern organizations and all complex systems; leaders and managers must be prepared to deal with such chaotic phenomena and manage complex organizations accordingly.
A key feature of paradigmatic chaos is what Warren Bennis (1967) calls ‘‘temporary society,’’ Peter Drucker (1969) calls the ‘‘age of discontinuity,’’ and Charles Handy (1997, 1998) calls the ‘‘age of unreason and beyond certainty’’ in which we must be prepared to mange our public and private lives by bold imagination, by ‘‘thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable,’’ and with a ‘‘hungry spirit beyond capitalism’’ pursue our ‘‘quest for purpose in the modern world’’ (Handy, 1999).
Similarly, a fast growing monumental body of literature on globalization explains patterns of chaotic changes that seem to surprise nationstates, governments, policy-makers, and public administrators. For example, Huntington (1996) speaks of ‘‘clash of civilizations,’’ Fukuyama (1992) predicts ‘‘the end of history and of last man’’ due to the collapse of the Soviet Union leading him to conclude the end of any social system capable of challenging capitalism, and Rifkin (1996) speaks of the ‘‘end of work,’’ or biosphere and cyberpolitics (see Farazmand, 1999a for a detailed treatment of globalization and its implications for public administration).
Also, Kaufman (1985) reminds us of the importance of ‘‘time, chance, and organizations facing natural selection in a peril environment,’’ and Weick (1995) prescribes ‘‘organizational sense-making.’’
Similarly, Murphy (1996) suggests chaos theory as a model for managing crises, Rosser (2000) proposes a ‘‘general theory of economic discontinuities’’ based on the paired theories of catastrophe and chaos to manage economic crises, and Argyris (1982) offers ‘‘learning organizations’’ as a solution to solve unpredictable problems, and to meet the challenges and uncertainties of the increasingly complex environment.
These warning expressions indicate, both implicitly and explicitly, that current world crises, including many organizational problems, can no longer be solved or managed through traditional approaches and methods; they require new ways of thinking and solutions, nonlinear complex models of action, and chaotic models to deal with chaotic situations.
Combine small-scale chaotic events with large scale catastrophic situations or breakdowns, we find ourselves chaotic ‘‘hysteresis,’’ a concept originated by Abraham and Shaw (1987) and developed by economist Tonu Puu (1990, 1997).
Crises scramble plans and force organizations and management systems to wake up fast and act with blood rushing through their veins hundred times faster than ever before.
Crises management requires nonlinear thinking, flexible and fluctuating structures, and value systems that must transcend all barriers rapidly and instantaneously (Farazmand, 2001a). Crises come in various forms, intensity, complexity, and appearance.
Some crises are long-standing social problems seeking ‘‘opportunistic solutions’’ (Farazmand, 2001a) but solutions that can trigger bifurcative structures due to the temporal nature of the solutions to deep-rooted problems.
Other crises happen suddenly and unexpectedly, during a seemingly stable and predictable situation or environment, resulting in massive ruptures of chaotic uncertainties and bifurcations into unpredictable dynamical changes in a system full of surprises.
A clear example of this kind of crises and chaotic situations is spontaneous and mass revolutions, such as the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.
Its dynamic process produced surprises after surprises and kept all key players at bay (see Farazmand, 1989 for details). Nothing happens out of nowhere; that is there is a cause-and-effect relationship to most crises and phenomena.
However, it is also possible to see impossible things happen out of chance and accident during stable situations with potentials for causing chaos.
This is where chaos and crisis theories can help us understand and manage complex problems born out of highly complex and dynamic systems. Innovations in modern technology, development of large and complex systems, and our dependence on them, increase at the same time the intensity and chance of system breakdowns that leads to crises and chaotic situations.
Crisis-related risk is more pervasive in modern society than ever before.
Charles Perrow (1986) reminds us that crisis is associated with increased technology and modern society’s drive to change nature and to build more things ‘‘that crash, bum and explode’’ (Perrow, 1986, 9).
As the organizational environment becomes more complex, more pressuring, more hostile, and more dynamic, the probability of rupturing changes and unexpected breakdowns increases with high intensity.
Today, globalization of capital, technological change, global population explosion, immigration and mass poverty problems, and a multitude of other global problems are ready-made recipes for disasters and social and economic crises that can only be dealt with by non-conventional methods and policy solutions.
No one in the world could even speculate, let alone predict, the September 11, 2001 disaster in the United States, or the sudden collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991.
The purpose of this article, therefore, is to present an analysis of chaos and transformation theories as applied in social sciences, with implications for organization theory and public management.
Understanding chaos theory is important because of its significant implications for world systems design, organization design and administrative behavior, and public policy analysis and implementation (see, for example, Allen, 1982; Farazmand, 2001a).
Regrettably, little work has been published on chaos theory and its applications in public administration, and almost nothing has been written on chaos and transformation theories with implications for, or contributions to, public organization theory and public management.
Exceptions are Keil’s (1989) informative work on the implications of nonequilbrium theory for public administration, contribution through a symposium on chaos theory, and Farazmand’s (2001a, 2002b) treatment of chaos and transformation theories and their implications for organization theory and public management.
Few other works are found in generic organization theory and behavior with a focus on business management (see, for example, Argyris, 1982; Gemmill and Smith, 1985; Ross, 1999; Uri, 1995; Weick, 1995). Given the significance of the subject matter, these works represent a minimal effort toward understanding this rather highly complex issue.
This paper is an expanded treatment of my recent work.
It is hoped that other studies will follow this task to further illuminate the relevance and significance of chaos theory for public organization theory and behavior in the future.
Therefore, the rest of this article focuses on the following presentations:
Section 2 discusses the concept and background of chaos and transformation and evolutionary theories, treating the old and new notions of the concepts in an historical perspective.
It is argued that, contrary to recent claims, chaos and transformation theories are not new concepts and that they have been presented before by philosophers and scientists from the ancient time.
Section 3 analyzes chaos theory and its potential application, followed by a presentation in Section 4 of an analysis of transformation and evolutionary theory.
Section 5 discusses some implications of both chaos and transformation theories for global and systems designs in general.
Section 6 offers several significant implications of chaos and transformation theories for organization theory and public management.
Finally, in conclusion, some limits of chaos theory are explored with due warnings of its potential dangers or harms to social action and knowledge advancement in social sciences in general, and in organization theory and administrative behavior particular.
I argue that change and continuity, nonlinear and linear relationships, chaos and order, and systems breakdown and transformation are dynamics of dialectical process in the evolution of nature and living as open systems.
As a consequence, chaos and transformation theories may not entirely be new discoveries; they have been around for a very long time.
However, what is new about these theories is the new conceptualization supported by new discoveries that advance them in natural and social sciences.
Therefore, this article offers a novel contribution to the body of literature on organization theory by presenting a fairly thorough analysis of the chaos and transformation theories with implications for world systems design and organization theory and public management.
Yet, the article cautions against oversimplifications and overgeneralizations by explaining the limitations of the chaos theory and subsequent potential dangers that its application in public policy and administration may ensue.
Conclusion:
Chaos and transformation theories are emerging as important new developments in the progress toward advancement of knowledge in social science in general and in organization theory in particular.
The lack of systematic study and analysis of chaos and transformation theories in organization theory and public management is striking.
It is this neglect in scholarship that has the focus of this article presentation.
Through an analysis of the sources, theoretical underpinnings, and implications of chaos and transformation theories, the presentation in this article has demonstrated how important it is for us in social science in general, and in public organization theory and management, in particular, to study these new developments.
Following this line of research is even more important as we move deeper into the age globalization of capital in which we need more intelligent and more dynamic and learning organizations with more sharpened skills of capacity building in governance and management for governments and complex systems around the globe.
The article has outlined some of the limitations as well as contributions of the chaos theory and transformation theories, with the hope of other studies to follow the suit.
As a conclusion, a key argument of this presentation has been that chaos and transformation are not really new ideas, that they have been around for a long time, and that the notion of the so-called ‘‘new science’’ may have been exaggerated.
However, it is also admitted that, despite these problems and other limitations of chaos theory outlined in this paper, there are some new conceptualizations coupled with new discoveries that are new developments and make the notions of chaos and transformation worth studying because they have significant implications for social sciences, including organization theory and public management.
Therefore, by analyzing these new concepts and their implications, it is hoped that this article has made a modest contribution to organization theory and public management.
We learn through chaos and transformation theories that events can happen out of order and linear paths, and chaotic events or crises challenge modern organizations to the point of potential collapse if they don’t learn to adapt to the rapidly changing environment which surrounds them.
Learning to learn and willing to change the basic assumptions of self and organizational culture is a big step toward such adaptation and organizational leadership, with the next step being prepared with anticipatory assumptions and skills to cope with chaotic changes and transform them into organizational and managerial assets.
In short, my argument has been clear: Randomness, chaos, and nonlinear dynamics are important characteristic properties of living systems, of historical process of change and continuity, and of evolution, but certainly not the other way around; not the rule of evolution.
In world systems design, and in organization design, change, development, chaos and non-linear dynamics play a key role in the evolutionary processes of which humankind is a part, and of organizations that man has created to change his environment, but they do not play the absolute key role.
The key role is played by the self-evolving process of continuity accelerated or decelerated by human intervention in changing the nature, as well as chaotic and accidental events. Organizations play a key role in this historical process of change and continuity, and that’s why we need to study this emergent theory seriously.
In light of the major limitations outlined in this article, any attempts at oversimplification of the chaos theory and its applications to public policy and management would be both misguided and dangerous, and should be avoided.