The epistemological vision of organizations as complex adaptive systems

Abstract

An epistemological vision allows one to address reality and generate knowledge by analyzing the changing organizational structure elements framed in complex systems. The changing environments arising from globalization and the irruption of technologies have resulted in new approaches that transcend disciplinary limits when using other disciplines to explain reality. In this sense, the transdisciplinary approach is considered an emerging epistemology since it is seen from the new visions and adoptions in the daily work of organizations, and the idea is to break with the positivist functionalist orthodoxy to reach and solve the problem posed. The purpose of this research, considered documentary and based on the interpretative paradigm, is to analyze organizations as complex adaptive systems. On the other hand, given the rupture of paradigms in the middle of the last century, several options were presented, all under the complexity approach, with new ways of thinking also emerging. As a result of this new approach, a research space was created, located in the United States, called the Santa Fe Institute, in which the typification of changing environments arose, being BANI (for its acronym in English), the acronym used by this institute when typifying the environments: turbulent, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity, on the other hand, the concept of complex adaptive systems arose coined by Holland (1994) and Gell-Man (1992).