In this chapter Jeffrey Goldstein argues that the application of complexity theory to management is not a fad because, unlike most management fads, complexity theory is based on mathematics, continues to evolve as a field of study, and is coevolving with organizational studies.
At the height of the Chinese Communist Revolution, when one of the leaders was asked by a Western journalist whether he thought the French Revolution had been a success, he answered, “It’s too soon to tell!” Today, as we are witnessing the application of complexity theory to the study of organizations, we need seriously to ask whether these applications will have more staying power than the numerous fads besieging organizational research in recent years. In fact, we already have an affirmative answer in the fact that, despite the present flurry of activity, the use of complexity ideas in organizational studies is not very new. Nascent complexity ideas from the earlier systems sciences of cybernetics, general systems theory, and systems dynamics have been influencing organizational studies for over half a century with such notions as feedback, self-organization, and closure. In 1988 I published my first article using the complexity idea of self-organization to rethink the facilitation