This book applies ideas and methods from the complexity perspective to key concerns in the social sciences, exploring co-evolutionary processes that have not yet been addressed in the technical or popular literature on complexity. Authorities in a variety of fields – including...

Total Quality Management (TQM) looks like being one of the management fashions of the 1990s. In this respect the academic and prescriptive literature on TQM is reviewed. The factors which have encouraged organisations to introduce TQM are discussed and some of the implications for the management...

Reviews the available evidence on the use of human resource management consultants, and examines the findings from a study of their use in manufacturing in the North‐East of England. Also considers the following questions: What types of consultants are used and in what areas? How is the HRM...

This article considers cognitive distance and combined competence as predictors of concrete outcomes in co-operative Research and Development projects. The operationalisation is based upon a dedicated survey, answered by matched pairs of projects managers in partnering organisations, addressing...

Experimentation is a significant innovation process activity and its design isfundamental to the learning and knowledge build-up process. Front-loadedexperimentation is known as a strategy seeking to improve innovation processperformance; by exploiting early information to spot and solve problems...

The cumulative output of these papers emphasise that modelling organisationalevolution and change from a complex systems perspective makes a significantcontribution to organisational studies and brings new insight and understandings bothto theory and practice. It is also true that the studies...

The present Systematic Review explores the existing academic literature on theinstruments to measure collective competences of organisations. The purpose is toidentify those that could be further used in a PhD work on the competences oforganisations involved in co-operative R&D projects. This...

A complex adaptive systems approach has been permeating organizational studies andthe field of supply network management helping to describe and explain supplynetwork dynamics and emergent inter-firm structures. This has improved ourtheoretical knowledge of the nature of supply networks...

In the aerospace industry competitive advantage is searched through productinnovation. This paper sets out to explore the effects that relationshipdevelopment in the commercial aerospace supply chains have on innovation andcompetitive advantage. A perspective of supply chains as complex...