In recent years the complexity sciences have captured the attention of management and organizational theorists as a mental model more suited to the realities of today's organizational challenges than the industrial models of the past. As interested readers delve more deeply into organizational complexity it becomes apparent that we are at very early stages of really understanding our human organizations. This interesting work seeks to make the case that the way theorists are currently using

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... lexity theory has the potential to render it another management fad with more new jargon to be digested. They believe that as long as complexity theory is understood and discussed within a narrow framework of systems theory, it will not survive nor provide the rich dialogue and learning that is possible. In this text, the first in a series titled Complexity and Emergence in Organizations, the authors put forward the notion that theorists and practitioners must understand organizations as complex responsive processes of relating to each other, drawing on complexity principles such as emergence and self-organization as sources of analogy, and interpreting them using relationship psychology and particularly the work of Hegel, Mead and Elias. Complexity theory, they say, is a way to better understand the continual emergence of new and novel ways of everyday relating and communicating in organizational life. Arranged into 9 tightly packed chapters and 3 appendices, this text is highly theoretical, repetitive at times and not easy reading for people not deeply schooled in the theories of relationships, relationship psychology and sociology. However, the proposed perspective and its theoretical underpinnings have merit; they have been carefully thought through and supported by the authors and as a result lead the reader