Title: When organisations and ecosystems interact: toward a law of requisite fractality in firms

Authors: Bill McKelvey; Benyamin B. Lichtenstein; Pierpaolo Andriani

Addresses: Euromed Management School, Rue Antoine Bourdelle, Domaine de Luminy BP 921, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France. ' Management/Marketing Department, University of Massachusetts, 100 Morrissey Blvd., M5/214, Boston, MA 02125, USA. ' Euromed Management School, Rue Antoine Bourdelle, Domaine de Luminy BP 921, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France

Abstract: Complexity science has evolved greatly in the past 30 years, starting from its European roots in Prigogine's dissipative structures model of phase transitions, continuing through the Santa Fe School's focus on self-organised adaptation as explained through computational simulations, and now to it's most recent focus on power laws and their basis in scale-free causes. After briefly reviewing these three approaches to complex systems, we attempt to integrate them into a broad-based model of organisational design and performance. Our model develops the law of 'requisite fractality' - an updated version of Ashby's original law for organisations in dynamic environments. Implications for organisations and managers are discussed.

Keywords: complexity science; dissipative structures; self-organisation; adaptation; power laws; scale-free causes; organisation design; organisational performance; requisite fractality; Ashby's law; dynamic environments; implications; phase transitions; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCLM.2012.050398

International Journal of Complexity in Leadership and Management, 2012 Vol.2 No.1/2, pp.104 - 136

Published online: 27 Aug 2014 *