Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - Call for Papers: Special issue on Applications of Complexity for resilient organizations, management and innovation systems

Background & objectives

Complexity is receiving increasing attention both from the scientific literature and practitioners in economics, finance and management as it is increasingly recognized as a fundamental aspect of nowadays economies, markets, and organizations. In particular, referring to the last period, characterized by the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its ineluctability, a complex approach, able to deal with uncertainty and resilience, can be very useful to support the decision-making processes of governments, policy makers, managers, companies, and organizations.

Finding new approaches and solutions to change mindset and rethink organizations, management and innovation systems to be resilient has become the new imperative in management research. In this regard, complexity principles demonstrated being particularly effective as a reference to understand and face the current competitive, economic, environmental and social dynamics affecting nowadays businesses. Complex systems composed of interdependent agents can be found everywhere on multiple scales, from the micro level, involving firms, work teams, and individuals to the macro level, including industries, markets, and countries. They are characterized by different dimensions of complexity, such as diversity and heterogeneity of agents, networks linking the agents, imperfect/ambiguity of available information and environmental dynamics.

The study of complexity in modern organizations requires dynamic and systemic approaches. They allows one to model complex system behaviors, reproducing the internal dynamics of the whole system from the bottom, focusing on its micro elements such as the agents, their attributes, actions and goals, and the network structure (and type of relationships) that connects them. In this regard, methodologies based on agent-based modeling, networks, system dynamics, evolutionary game theory, percolation theory are very suitable. In addition, the recent advent and spread of the availability of new technologies for massive data collection offers new opportunity to scholars. They permit to measure and evaluate complex system dynamics through data-driven methodologies. By providing automatic and more objective measurements of individual, team and firm behaviors, these tools can efficiently collect a large amount of data in real time - increasing the data richness, quality, and reliability.

The special issue aims at attracting high-quality contributions that make use of these approaches and address the issue of complexity in organizations, management and innovation systems. Papers that adopt innovative theoretical and empirical methodologies are particularly appreciated. We invite researches aimed at investigating the drivers of complexity in organizations, management systems, and value chains (and business ecosystems) in different business sectors. Papers analyzing the relationship between complexity and resilience are particularly welcome, to elucidate how organizations can foster their resilience in the current competitive scenario.

Possible research questions are outlined below.

Exemplary research questions:

• How can complexity theory help to advance research on organizations, management, and innovation?
• What are the drivers of complexity in organizations, management systems, and value chains?
• How can the relationship between complexity and resilience be investigated in organizations, management, and innovation systems?
• How can organizations foster their resilience in a competitive scenario?
• How can complexity theory help to improve firm performance?
• How complexity theory can support policy advice to foster resilience of organizations, value chains, networks, and innovation systems?
• How can complexity theory methodologies (e.g.: agent-based modelling & simulation, social networks analysis)  support research and policy making about resilience in organizations, value chains, networks, and innovation systems?

Guest Editors:

Silvano Cincotti, Università degli Studi di Genova – silvano.cincotti@unige.it (this opens in a new tab)

Ilaria Giannoccaro, Politecnico di Bari – ilaria.giannoccaro@poliba.it (this opens in a new tab)

Cristina Ponsiglione, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II” – ponsigli@unina.it (this opens in a new tab)

Linda Ponta, LIUC – Università Cattaneo – lponta@liuc.it (this opens in a new tab)

Andreas Pyka, University of Hohenheim - a.pyka@uni-hohenheim.de (this opens in a new tab)

Important dates:

Deadline for submission: 31 January 2023