INTRODUCTION - CHAOS, COMPLEXITY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY

Chaos and complexity science are part of an emerging new imagery in th e scientific and lay cultures, which helps us conceive of the social w orld as chaosmos-a combination of chaos and cosmos, disorder and order . Notions like nonlinearity, sensitivity to initial conditions, iterat ion, feedback loops, novelty, process, emergence and unpredictability, which for a long time were not part of mainstream science, have now c ome to the fore and furnish us with a new vocabulary in terms of which we may attempt to redescribe organizations, and the social world in g eneral. The Newtonian style, whose most significant feature has been t he pursuit of the decontextualized ideal, is gradually receding in fav our of the chaotic style-the ability to notice instability, disorder, novelty, emergence and self-organization. For organization theory, it is argued that such developments are of great importance for they make central to our study of organization(s) the notions of time, history, human finitude, freedom and circularity of behaviour. Moreover, the c haotic style, by privileging qualitative analysis, favours narrative d escriptions of organizational phenomena.