Complex Rhetoric and Simple Games

Complexity has become interesting to management scholars who value its challenge to reductionism, prediction and equilibria, as well at its ability to derive interesting emergent properties from simple relations. We step through these and other properties attributed to chaos and complexity to examine which of the properties are actually desirable and whether the approaches actually have that property. For example, we find reductionism generally desirable, but find that complexity may be overly reductionistic for the study of humans. As a matter of comparison, we show that most of the desirable properties attributed to complexity and chaos can be found, sometimes uniquely, in the theory of games.