Abstract
Modern organizations are increasingly seen as open complex adapitve systems, with fundamental natural nonlinear structures, subject to internal and external forces which may be sources of chaos. The related existing literature focuses mainly on verbal theories where chaos is used as a metaphor. Even if borrowing knowledge brings implicit risks, the usefulness of interdisciplinary knowledge is acknowledged. In this perspective, we show that the chaos metaphor grounded on mathematical models and psychological aspects of human behavior provides helpful insights to describing the complexity of small work groups, that go beyond the metaphor itself.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, (Schelling, 1960, p. 57) considers situations for which focal points “for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do” are provided.
- 2.
The careful reader can observe that the k i parameter we introduce here is not exactly the same of the one used in Dal Forno and Merlone (2010a).
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Forno, A.D., Merlone, U. (2013). Chaotic Dynamics in Organization Theory. In: Bischi, G., Chiarella, C., Sushko, I. (eds) Global Analysis of Dynamic Models in Economics and Finance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29503-4_8
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