The rhetoric of business and complexity

Management and organisation research has been too alacritous espousing non-linearity, a.k.a. complexity, and trying to adapt it to its purposes. Complexity has yet to become fully mainstream even in the natural sciences and, at any rate, a prerequisite for business people to become involved in discussions of emerging behaviour, statistical mechanics, chaos theories and the like, is that they first become acquainted with decision science, systems theory, linearity, probability and statistics. In addition, business complexity and colloquial complexity are not always the same (in fact, they seldom are) as non-linear complexity; epistemological issues do not necessarily have practical consequences; and not all theoretical impossibilities do translate into practical impotence.