Research Paper
Organizational Leadership
John Bratton
Part 1
Contextualising leadership
The nature of leadership
Chapter 1
3
Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain the nature of leadership and the apparent difference between leadership and management
Explain the essence of classical and contemporary trends in leadership theories
Discuss how the trends in leadership theories are connected to changes in global capitalism competing theories of organizational design
4
Introduction
Many of todays challenges are complex and the public look upon leaders for solutions or for someone to blame when crises present themselves.
With organizational change seems near-constant and necessitates leadership, this book critically examines the role of leaders in managing organizational change and people across different contexts in both private and public organizations and, in an area which is less frequently studied, in promoting innovation and pro-environmental change in the context of managerial rationales, constraints and opportunities.
5
Defining leadership
2000 years ago,
The first serious attempt to develop a theory of leadership can be found in Platos The Republic (Grint, 1997).
16th- century,
Machiavellis The Prince attached great importance to the role of leaders in shaping societal events.
Over the centuries,
Examples illustrating the central role of individual leaders is repetitively found in English history such as Winston Churchill in the Second World War.
6
Defining leadership
This continuous interest in leadership is the very common assumption that great leaders profoundly shape events in society. Plus, the growth of industrial capitalism give rise in the studies of organizational leadership.
20th century,
Leadership research is further driven by both the military and manufacturing demands of two world wars, the development of the capitalist global economy and the preoccupation of organizations and government with competitiveness.
7
Defining leadership
8
Competing Definitions of Organizational Leadership
Behaviour
Leadership may be defined as the behaviour of an individual while he [sic] is involved in directing group activities (Hemphill and Coons, 1957, p. 7).
Leadership acts by persons which influence other persons in a shared direction (Seeman, 1960, p. 53).
Power
Leadership is a particular type of power relationship characterized by a group members perception that another group member has the right to prescribe behaviour patterns for the former regarding his [sic] activity as a member of a particular group (Janda, 1960, p. 358).
Process
Leadership is the reciprocal process of mobilizing by persons with certain motives and values, various economic, political, and other resources, in a context of competition and conflict, in order to realize goals independently or mutually held by both leaders and followers (Burns, 1978, 425).
Leadership is a formal or informal contextually rooted and goal-influencing process that occurs between a leader and a follower, groups of followers, or institutions (Antonakis and Day, 2018, 5).
Traits / Attributes
Interaction Interaction between specific traits of one person and other traits of the many, in such a way that the course of action of the many is changed by the one (Bogardus, 1934, p. 3).
Defining leadership
For the purposes of this book, we use the following definition:
Organizational leadership is a process of influencing within an employment relationship involving ongoing human interaction with others wherein those others consent to achieve a goal.
9
Defining leadership
The definition captures the following information:
Organizational leadership is a dialectical process (act) embedded in a context of both cooperation and structural conflict, which may affect the style of leadership adopted. Process also implies that a leader affects and is affected by the psychological contract, a metaphor for a perceived set of expectations and understandings between employees and employers, an important concept in people management (Rousseau, 1995).
10
Defining leadership
Leadership is an influencing process occurring both directly and indirectly among others within formal employment relations.
The influence process may involve only a single leader, such as a CEO, or it may encompass numerous leaders in the organization.
It is ultimately concerned with achieving a particular goal, and goal achievement will be a measure of its effectiveness.
11
Leadership and management
Questions like what do managers do and what do leaders do helps us to understand their roles. A manager therefore can undertake a diverse range of roles within an organization. It is important to note here that more than one individual can perform a leadership role. That is, leadership can be shared or distributed in the organization. The opportunity to perform certain roles will depend on the managers position in the organizations hierarchy, the nature of the work undertaken and the level of education of her or his co-workers.
12
Leadership and management
Role of Managers
Central to achieving control and decision by mainstream management literature
Deal with uncertainties, resistance and conflicts by critical studies
Analysing and designing work systems that minimized skill requirements while maximizing management control over the workforce by Frederick W. Taylor (1911)
13
Leadership and management
Classic Fayolian Management Cycle (PDOC) by Henry Fayol
Three set of behaviours by Mintzberg (1989)
Interconnected Three Dimensional Model by Squires (2001)
It is also note that critical studies studies have challenged the universality of managerial behaviour, and have emphasized the importance of factoring into the analysis of management diversity: including gender, race, sexuality and consideration of cultural mores that prevail.
14
Leadership and management
Roles of Leaders
Although both managing and leading can potentially coexist in the same individual, mainstream leadership scholars since Zalezniks (1977) have argued that managers and leaders are in fact different and that leadership and management are different.
15
Leadership and management
Role of Managers Role of Leaders
Acting as the figurehead Establishing direction
Liaising with other managers Communicating direction
Developing subordinates Encouraging emotion
Planning Empowering others
Handling conflicts Influencing
Negotiating Challenging status quo
Monitoring information Motivating and inspiring others
Directing subordinates Modelling the direction
Allocating resources Building a team
Produces potential predictability Produces radical change
Based on Hales (1986), Kotter (2012) and Kouzes and Posner (2017).
16
Leadership and management
Leaders create a vision and the strategy to achieve vs Managers choose the means to implement the vision created by the leader.
Leaders operate at an emotional level, seeking to appeal to followers emotions vs Managers operate logically and value rationality.
Leaders encourage empowerment vs Managers encourage compliance.
Leadership is a value-laden activity vs Management is not.
17
Leadership and management
Leaders are change agents associated with episodic (Weick and Quinn, 1999) / revolutionary (Burke, 2014) / vuja de (never seen before) (Grint, 2006) vs Managers are associated with continuous or evolutionary change / dj vu (seen before). Kouzes and Posner (1997), also mentioned that exemplary leadership entails challenging the process.
Bernard Bass (1990) observed that not all managers lead and not all leaders manage, and an employee, without being a formal manager, may be a leader.
18
Mapping the changing study of leadership
Literatures about what leaders should do contains theories for leaders primarily normative, providing how to prescriptions for improving leadership effectiveness.
Literatures about what leaders actually do contains theories of leadership primarily analytical, directed at better understanding leadership processes, explaining why they vary in different circumstances and the platforms (ship) that leaders create to enable others to act as leaders
(Antonacopulou and Bento, 2011; Dinh et al. 2014; Ford, 2015)
19
Mapping the changing study of leadership
5 Major Categories of Leadership Research (Bryman, 1996)
Trait
Behaviour
Contingency
Charismatic/Transformative
Shared/Distributed
20
The trajectory of leadership theory is not linear, but, rather, follows endless swings between leader-centric and follower-centric models often based on new thinking about work design and organizational change. Thus, theories of leadership and disruptive organizational change are inseparably intertwined (Parry, 2011).
Leader-centred perspectives
Contingency and situational perspectives
Follower-centric perspectives
Mapping the changing study of leadership
21
Critical leadership studies (CLS)
It has always been the case of assuming functionalist approach to leading people as functionalism assumes that organizations are unitary wholes, characterized by compliance, consensus and order.
However, CLS critiques mainstream orthodoxies and the power relations through which leadership dynamics are frequently rationalized, often reproduced and sometimes resisted viewing organizations as arenas of domination, inequality, tension and conflict. The focus is on power, subordination and exploitation (Tadajewski et al. 2011) and to decolonise (Gopal, 2017) prevailing stories, to ask difficult questions of society and ourselves addressing the intersection of class, gender and race in work, organizational design and power structures that is the reality of organizational life.
Power, leadership and ideology
Gender and leadership
22
The employment relationship
Constructed within work organizations.
A mutually advantageous transaction in a free market, a partnership of employers and employees with shared interests, a negotiation over wage-effort between parties with competing interests, or an unequal power relation embedded in complex socio-economic inequalities (Budd and Bhave, 2013).
Ongoing actor relationships
Paradox of consequences
Balance of power between actors
Organized life is recognized as an arena of complex reciprocal human relations
23 Organizational Leadership
John Bratton
Part 1
Contextualising leadership
The nature of leadership
Chapter 1
3
Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain the nature of leadership and the apparent difference between leadership and management
Explain the essence of classical and contemporary trends in leadership theories
Discuss how the trends in leadership theories are connected to changes in global capitalism competing theories of organizational design
4
Introduction
Many of todays challenges are complex and the public look upon leaders for solutions or for someone to blame when crises present themselves.
With organizational change seems near-constant and necessitates leadership, this book critically examines the role of leaders in managing organizational change and people across different contexts in both private and public organizations and, in an area which is less frequently studied, in promoting innovation and pro-environmental change in the context of managerial rationales, constraints and opportunities.
5
Defining leadership
2000 years ago,
The first serious attempt to develop a theory of leadership can be found in Platos The Republic (Grint, 1997).
16th- century,
Machiavellis The Prince attached great importance to the role of leaders in shaping societal events.
Over the centuries,
Examples illustrating the central role of individual leaders is repetitively found in English history such as Winston Churchill in the Second World War.
6
Defining leadership
This continuous interest in leadership is the very common assumption that great leaders profoundly shape events in society. Plus, the growth of industrial capitalism give rise in the studies of organizational leadership.
20th century,
Leadership research is further driven by both the military and manufacturing demands of two world wars, the development of the capitalist global economy and the preoccupation of organizations and government with competitiveness.
7
Defining leadership
8
Competing Definitions of Organizational Leadership
Behaviour
Leadership may be defined as the behaviour of an individual while he [sic] is involved in directing group activities (Hemphill and Coons, 1957, p. 7).
Leadership acts by persons which influence other persons in a shared direction (Seeman, 1960, p. 53).
Power
Leadership is a particular type of power relationship characterized by a group members perception that another group member has the right to prescribe behaviour patterns for the former regarding his [sic] activity as a member of a particular group (Janda, 1960, p. 358).
Process
Leadership is the reciprocal process of mobilizing by persons with certain motives and values, various economic, political, and other resources, in a context of competition and conflict, in order to realize goals independently or mutually held by both leaders and followers (Burns, 1978, 425).
Leadership is a formal or informal contextually rooted and goal-influencing process that occurs between a leader and a follower, groups of followers, or institutions (Antonakis and Day, 2018, 5).
Traits / Attributes
Interaction Interaction between specific traits of one person and other traits of the many, in such a way that the course of action of the many is changed by the one (Bogardus, 1934, p. 3).
Defining leadership
For the purposes of this book, we use the following definition:
Organizational leadership is a process of influencing within an employment relationship involving ongoing human interaction with others wherein those others consent to achieve a goal.
9
Defining leadership
The definition captures the following information:
Organizational leadership is a dialectical process (act) embedded in a context of both cooperation and structural conflict, which may affect the style of leadership adopted. Process also implies that a leader affects and is affected by the psychological contract, a metaphor for a perceived set of expectations and understandings between employees and employers, an important concept in people management (Rousseau, 1995).
10
Defining leadership
Leadership is an influencing process occurring both directly and indirectly among others within formal employment relations.
The influence process may involve only a single leader, such as a CEO, or it may encompass numerous leaders in the organization.
It is ultimately concerned with achieving a particular goal, and goal achievement will be a measure of its effectiveness.
11
Leadership and management
Questions like what do managers do and what do leaders do helps us to understand their roles. A manager therefore can undertake a diverse range of roles within an organization. It is important to note here that more than one individual can perform a leadership role. That is, leadership can be shared or distributed in the organization. The opportunity to perform certain roles will depend on the managers position in the organizations hierarchy, the nature of the work undertaken and the level of education of her or his co-workers.
12
Leadership and management
Role of Managers
Central to achieving control and decision by mainstream management literature
Deal with uncertainties, resistance and conflicts by critical studies
Analysing and designing work systems that minimized skill requirements while maximizing management control over the workforce by Frederick W. Taylor (1911)
13
Leadership and management
Classic Fayolian Management Cycle (PDOC) by Henry Fayol
Three set of behaviours by Mintzberg (1989)
Interconnected Three Dimensional Model by Squires (2001)
It is also note that critical studies studies have challenged the universality of managerial behaviour, and have emphasized the importance of factoring into the analysis of management diversity: including gender, race, sexuality and consideration of cultural mores that prevail.
14
Leadership and management
Roles of Leaders
Although both managing and leading can potentially coexist in the same individual, mainstream leadership scholars since Zalezniks (1977) have argued that managers and leaders are in fact different and that leadership and management are different.
15
Leadership and management
Role of Managers Role of Leaders
Acting as the figurehead Establishing direction
Liaising with other managers Communicating direction
Developing subordinates Encouraging emotion
Planning Empowering others
Handling conflicts Influencing
Negotiating Challenging status quo
Monitoring information Motivating and inspiring others
Directing subordinates Modelling the direction
Allocating resources Building a team
Produces potential predictability Produces radical change
Based on Hales (1986), Kotter (2012) and Kouzes and Posner (2017).
16
Leadership and management
Leaders create a vision and the strategy to achieve vs Managers choose the means to implement the vision created by the leader.
Leaders operate at an emotional level, seeking to appeal to followers emotions vs Managers operate logically and value rationality.
Leaders encourage empowerment vs Managers encourage compliance.
Leadership is a value-laden activity vs Management is not.
17
Leadership and management
Leaders are change agents associated with episodic (Weick and Quinn, 1999) / revolutionary (Burke, 2014) / vuja de (never seen before) (Grint, 2006) vs Managers are associated with continuous or evolutionary change / dj vu (seen before). Kouzes and Posner (1997), also mentioned that exemplary leadership entails challenging the process.
Bernard Bass (1990) observed that not all managers lead and not all leaders manage, and an employee, without being a formal manager, may be a leader.
18
Mapping the changing study of leadership
Literatures about what leaders should do contains theories for leaders primarily normative, providing how to prescriptions for improving leadership effectiveness.
Literatures about what leaders actually do contains theories of leadership primarily analytical, directed at better understanding leadership processes, explaining why they vary in different circumstances and the platforms (ship) that leaders create to enable others to act as leaders
(Antonacopulou and Bento, 2011; Dinh et al. 2014; Ford, 2015)
19
Mapping the changing study of leadership
5 Major Categories of Leadership Research (Bryman, 1996)
Trait
Behaviour
Contingency
Charismatic/Transformative
Shared/Distributed
20
The trajectory of leadership theory is not linear, but, rather, follows endless swings between leader-centric and follower-centric models often based on new thinking about work design and organizational change. Thus, theories of leadership and disruptive organizational change are inseparably intertwined (Parry, 2011).
Leader-centred perspectives
Contingency and situational perspectives
Follower-centric perspectives
Mapping the changing study of leadership
21
Critical leadership studies (CLS)
It has always been the case of assuming functionalist approach to leading people as functionalism assumes that organizations are unitary wholes, characterized by compliance, consensus and order.
However, CLS critiques mainstream orthodoxies and the power relations through which leadership dynamics are frequently rationalized, often reproduced and sometimes resisted viewing organizations as arenas of domination, inequality, tension and conflict. The focus is on power, subordination and exploitation (Tadajewski et al. 2011) and to decolonise (Gopal, 2017) prevailing stories, to ask difficult questions of society and ourselves addressing the intersection of class, gender and race in work, organizational design and power structures that is the reality of organizational life.
Power, leadership and ideology
Gender and leadership
22
The employment relationship
Constructed within work organizations.
A mutually advantageous transaction in a free market, a partnership of employers and employees with shared interests, a negotiation over wage-effort between parties with competing interests, or an unequal power relation embedded in complex socio-economic inequalities (Budd and Bhave, 2013).
Ongoing actor relationships
Paradox of consequences
Balance of power between actors
Organized life is recognized as an arena of complex reciprocal human relations
23 SPECIAL ISSUE: COMPLEXITY & IS RESEARCH
COMPLEXITY AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH
IN THE EMERGING DIGITAL WORLD1
Hind Benbya
Technology and Innovation Management, Montpellier Business School, 2300 Avenue des Moulins,
Montpellier 34185 Cedex 4, FRANCE {[emailprotected]}
Ning Nan
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, 2053 Main Mall,
Vancouver V6T 1Z2 British Columbia, CANADA {[emailprotected]}
Hseyin Tanriverdi
McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712 U.S.A. {[emailprotected]}
Youngjin Yoo
Department of Design & Innovation, The Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western
Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7235 U.S.A. and
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7RL UNITED KINGDOM {[emailprotected]}
Complexity is all around us in this increasingly digital world. Global digital infrastructure, social media,
Internet of Things, robotic process automation, digital business platforms, algorithmic decision making, and
other digitally enabled networks and ecosystems fuel complexity by fostering hyper-connections and mutual
dependencies among human actors, technical artifacts, processes, organizations, and institutions. Complexity
affects human agencies and experiences in all dimensions. Individuals and organizations turn to digitally
enabled solutions to cope with the wicked problems arising out of digitalization. In the digital world, com-
plexity and digital solutions present new opportunities and challenges for information systems (IS) research.
The purpose of this special issue is to foster the development of new IS theories on the causes, dynamics, and
consequences of complexity in increasing digital sociotechnical systems. In this essay, we discuss the key
theories and methods of complexity science, and illustrate emerging new IS research challenges and oppor-
tunities in complex sociotechnical systems. We also provide an overview of the five articles included in the
special issue. These articles illustrate how IS researchers build on theories and methods from complexity
science to study wicked problems in the emerging digital world. They also illustrate how IS researchers lever-
age the uniqueness of the IS context to generate new insights to contribute back to complexity science.
1 Keywords: Complexity, sociotechnical systems, emergence, coevolution, chaos, scalable dynamics
digitalization
1Hind Benbya and Ning Nan served as associate editors for the special issue. Huseyin Tanriverdi and Youngjin Yoo served as senior editors. William McKelvey
was a SE for the special issue but was unable to participate in the writing of the introductory essay.
DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2020/13304 MIS Quarterly Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 1-17/March 2020 1
Benbya et al./Introduction: Complexity & IS Research
Introduction
When we conduct a search on Google, it returns hundreds, of
thousands, results instantaneously. The results not only
reflect the interests of the one who is doing the search, but
also the millions of internet users who created or clicked on
hyperlinks of websites. As more users search, link, and click
with similar keywords, the results will continue to change
according to user location and search time. A search for
Korean restaurants in Munich, Germany, for example, gives
different results from a search in Cleveland, OH, USA. Con-
ducting the same search a day or two later also produces
different results. A simple Google search result is an emer-
gent property, a complex web of interactions among users,
websites, topics, advertisers, and many other social or tech-
nical entities. In short, our daily experience of using mundane
digital tools is a dynamic emergent outcome of complex
sociotechnical systems.
As early as 2010, the world-wide production of transistors has
exceeded that of rice, and is much cheaper (Lucas et al. 2012).
Deviceslarge and smallpowered by microprocessors and
connected by the internet are filling every inhabited corner of
the earth. Some of these devices are not just passively
waiting for commands; equipped with a powerful artificial
intelligence engine, they often act on their own. We already
see autonomous vehicles on the streets interacting with traffic
signals that respond to changing traffic patterns, in the midst
of human-controlled vehicles and pedestrians. Sprinklers are
connected to the weather service on the internet to control the
amount of water on a lawn. The temperature of millions of
houses is controlled by Nest connected to the Google Home
Assist service. Connected speakers recommend different
music playlists based on the time, location, and, of course,
your preference. Social network services also enable every
user as a potential content creator on the internet. Once
created, user-generated content can be liked, shared, and
mashed with other content by other users, often creating
unpredictably complex forms of diffusions. Digital platform
ecosystems such as Uber and AirBnB connect millions of
users and providers globally. More than 80% of movies
watched on Netflix are recommended by algorithms.2
These examples illustrate truly astonishing advances from the
humble start of computers in organizations in the early 20th
century. After merely a few decades, what once seemed to be
glorified calculators have evolved into digital technologies
that permeate our lives and work. These digital technologies
in turn foster new sociotechnical systems such as wikis, social
media, and platform ecosystems that are fundamentally
changing the way people work and live.
Not every technological invention has such a transformational
impact. What set apart digital technologies? At the heart of
digital technologies is symbol-based computation. Bistrings
(0s and 1s) provide a standard form of symbols to encode
input, process, and output of a wide variety of tasks (Faulkner
and Runde 2019). They reduce the design specificity of hard-
ware for operationalizing the symbol-based computation.
Furthermore, simplicity of bitstrings eases the effort to shrink
the size, reduce the cost, and increase the processing power of
hardware. Symbol-based computation provides a generali-
zable and applicable mechanism to unite the operations of
matter and the abstract mental processes (Lovelace 1842). It
lays the foundation for digital technology to rapidly advance
beyond the function of a calculator. More importantly,
symbol-based computation sets in motion the emergence of
complex sociotechnical systems.
Emanating from symbol-based computation are a few
complexity-inducing characteristics of digital technologies.
Embedded: as described by the vision for symbol-based
computation (Lovelace 1842; Shannon 1993, Turning
1950), digital capabilities are increasingly embedded in
objects that previously have pure material composition
(Yoo et al. 2012). Digital capabilities can encode and
automate abstract cognitive processes for converting new
information into adaptive changes of objects. They also
enable objects to provide decision support to adaptive
cognitive processes of social actors.
Connected: objects embedded with digital capabilities
and users of such objects can be connected into webs of
sociotechnical relations (Sarker et al. 2019) because
symbol-based computation homogenizes data (Yoo
2010). When information is shared in the webs of socio-
technical relations, abstract cognitive processes encoded
in objects or possessed by social actors become mutually
dependent.
Editable: digital technologies are editable (Kallinikos et
al. 2013; Yoo 2012) due to symbol-based computation.
This editability allows increasingly diverse cognitive
processes to be introduced into the webs of socio-
technical relations. Recurrent adaptation of diverse,
connected, and mutually dependent objects and social
actors can amplify or diminish an initial change in a
sociotechnical system, producing outcomes that defy
simple extrapolation from the initial change (Arthur
2015; Holland 1995; Page 2010). Complexity, therefore,
becomes a salient attribute of sociotechnical systems.
2See https://mobilesyrup.com/2017/08/22/80-percent-netflix-shows-
discovered-recommendation/.
2 MIS Quarterly Vol. 44 No. 1/March 2020
Benbya et al./Introduction: Complexity & IS Research
Reprogrammable: through the separation of hardware
and software of symbol-based computation, digital tech-
nology is reprogrammable (Yoo et al. 2010). The same
hardware can perform different functions depending on
the software that runs on the device.
Communicable: digital technologies are communicable
by following a set of agreed-upon protocols (Lyytinen
and King, 2006; Yoo 2010). With the pervasive diffu-
sion of digital technologies, they now form a global
digital infrastructure (Tilson et al. 2010).
Identifiable: each and every device connected to the
digital infrastructure is uniquely identifiable through its
own unique address (Yoo 2010). The increasing digital
penetration leads to a higher degree of identifiability,
allowing for more granular manipulation levels of digital
objects.
Associable: digital objects are associable through shared
traits. The associability of distributed heterogeneous
devices and data allows one to identify emerging patterns
across different realms and geographies in a way that was
simply not possible in the past.
Digital technologies not only give rise to complex sociotech-
nical systems; they also distinguish sociotechnical systems
from other complex physical or social systems. While com-
plexity in physical or social system is predominantly driven
by either material operations or human agency, complexity in
sociotechnical systems arises from the continuing and
evolving entanglement of the social (human agency), the
symbolic (symbol-based computation in digital technologies),
and the material (physical artifacts that house or interact with
computing machines). The functions of digital technologies
and the roles of social actors are perpetually defined and
redefined by each other (Faulkner and Runde 2019; Zittrain
2006). This sociotechnical entanglement limits the generali-
zability of complexity insights obtained from nondigital
systems to complex digital systems. Furthermore, while
material operations or human agency either increase or
dampen complexity in physical or social systems, digital tech-
nologies can both mitigate and intensify complexity. This is
because individuals and organizations engaged with complex
sociotechnical systems often turn to digital technologies (e.g.,
data analytics) for solutions to complex problems. Yet, the
application of a solution can instigate a new round of digitally
enabled interactions that diminish the intended effect of the
solution. This dual effect of digital technologies on com-
plexity can produce dynamic interaction patterns and out-
comes that are qualitatively different from those in other
complex systems.
The distinct effects of digital technologies on complex socio-
technical systems present an important opportunity for infor-
mation systems (IS) researchers to extract novel insights
regarding the nature and relevance of digital technologies. IS
researchers can apply theories and methods from complexity
science to model observations that defy simple extrapolation
from initial changes in a sociotechnical system. In this essay,
we introduce key complexity theories such as emergence,
coevolution, chaos, and scalable dynamics as the most likely
foundation for IS researchers to rethink predictability, caus-
ality, boundary, and durability of observations in the digital
world. Subsequently, we explain how the centrality of
symbol-based computation in IS research paves the way for
IS-specific research themes to extend complexity science.
The articles in this special issue are briefly described to illus-
trate a few prominent themes such as IS development for
rapidly changing req
