Moving Beyond Metaphor

The proposal that the metaphors associated with complexity theory can inform the business world is made by severalwriters (Wheatley, 1992; Stacey, 1996; McMaster, 1996, Merry, 1995), but is open to critique that the metaphors arenot grounded in the field of study, but in other domains that may or may not be analogous. In previous articles, the authors (Fuller, 1998, 1999; Fuller and Moran, 1999) have illustrated the apparent analogies between complex adaptive systems and the world of small firms. However, because there is no grounding of these analogies in that domain, there isno evidence that complexity theory has validity in describing or explaining empirical observation. For example, a new firm starting up may be associated with the metaphor of emergence, but whether theories of emergence as developed in thermodynamic systems have any analogous properties with a business start-up is problematic.This article investigates how complexity theory can inform an understanding of small firms, which we posit as an example of socioeconomic systems, in a more rigorous and scientific way than metaphor. Our approach to this is to investigate the possibility of a methodology that is plausible in its relationship to small firms, and developed from the conceptionsand literature of complexity.