Guest editorial: Complexity and environment

Introduction to Special Issue on Complexity and Environment Welcome to the E:CO special issue on Complexity and Environment. The genesis of this collection of papers was the Fourth Annual Organization Studies Conference, "Embracing Complexity," during July 2008 in Pissouri, Cyprus. The call for papers for the seminar was grounded in Gregory Bateson's complex understanding of environment, change and evolution. Appropriately the "classic" article chosen for this special number was written by Bateson (1963). Bateson believed that the social / environmental degradation of justice, milieu and culture, is co-derived from cultural ideas of humans and that restoration is best accomplished by concentrating on these cultural ideas. The environment that we can see is the one that our ideas can produce; the human is always implicated in what we claim to 'know'. Bateson was a theoretician of communication - thus, he saw the environment that we study as a communicative artifact. Thanks to how we communicate with ourselves and surroundings we see understand and manipulate those surroundings in particular ways and not in other ways. Bateson's epistemic mutuality does not prioritize the knower or the known and thereby is a rich source for developing complexity insights. Luhmann's "Social Systems" (1995) has provided us with a useful complexity (autopoesis) inspired introduction to the concept oi environment. From a systems theoretic perspective, an environment must exist for a system to exist, for by definition environment is everything outside the boundary of a system. Environment is the dual of system; expanding the boundary of a system will decrease what is considered environment, and decreasing the boundary of a system will expand what is considered environment. Any system will differentiate itself from its environment in a number of ways, including behaviorally and temporally. According to Luhmann, an environment contains many other complex systems itself, thus any environment is always more complex than any system embedded in it. In a social system, this causes tension in the system. For control, a controller must be more complex than the system being controlled (Ashby, 1958). Thus if the environment of a social system is more complex than the social system itself, this implies that an environment is beyond the control of a social system. Environments must be grappled with: influenced and adapted to, but not controlled. As no social system is closed, it must interact with its environment. The social system in turn treats its environment and its complexity as a contingency. If the social system seeks resources from its environment, resource dependencies emerge, whereby the social system and its environment coevolve. If the social system seeks information from its environment, information uncertainty emerges, whereby the social system seeks to either reduce uncertainty or mitigate its negative consequences (Luhmann, 1995). Thompson's "Organizations in Action" (1967) views the organization in relation to its environment from the perspective of input-core-output. The environment provides input into the organization (e.g., raw material, requirements information, demand) and the organization creates outputs (e.g., product, service, information, waste) that go back into the environment. For Thompson, uncertainty associated with both resources and information is key. Thompson suggested that organizations purposefully buffer their core activities from uncertainty by (e.g.) adhering to master schedules or vertically integrating to secure resources. If buffering is not possible, organizations use smoothing, forecasting, and rationing to attempt to mitigate losses from uncertainty. Lawrence and Lorsch's "Organization and Environment" (1967) took the notion of contingency one step further by suggesting that the manner in which one organized should be contingent upon the nature of the environment. …