Self-Organization in Management Science

Today’s real-time economy is characterized by three phenomena: hyper-linking, hyper-competition and hyper-turbulence (Tapscott 1999; Siegele 2002). As a result, management, which is responsible for designing social systems (Remer 2003), is confronted with high complexity and dynamics. However, conventional management seems not to be capable enough to cope with highly complex and dynamic situations (Hülsmann and Berry 2004) due to limited ability of human beings to obtain and analyze information (Simon 1957). The concept of self-organization might contribute to social systems’ competence and thus to managing complexity and dynamics (Hülsmann and Wycisk 2005). The concept of self-organization has its roots in various natural sciences and has been studied by quite a few natural scientists (Foerster 1960, Prigogine 1971, Haken 1983, Maturana and Varela 1982). The original idea that self-organization could enable spontaneous formation of order (Prigogine and Glansdorff 1971; Maturana and Varela 1987) inspires interests of researchers from management science. Probst claims that the idea of self-organization enriches management theories by giving new interpretations to key aspects of the conventional management approaches such as planning, organizing and motivating (Probst 1984). However, in management science, research on self-organization is dispersed, with different angles of observation and a variety of terms used as synonymies.