Desmond W. Ng

The Social Structure of Organizational Change and Performance

Social systems—organizations, institutions, and markets— have been characterized by social scientists as complex entities. From the Scottish philosopher Hume to Adam Smith and Austrian economist Hayek, markets were viewed as complex systems with spontaneously emergent or market-ordering properties. Although developed under the domains of natural and physical sciences, Poincaré and later Prigogine were principal to the development of what is called the emerging field of complexity science (Rosenhead, 2001). Although there is no general consensus on the definition of complexity, a complex system is often described as a system containing numerous interacting subcomponents whose interactions yield complex behaviors of chaos, order, and edge of chaos (Jantsch, 1980; Kauffman, 1995). With the increasing complexity of organizations and markets, management scientists have drawn on the properties and principles of complexity science to better explain social systems as complex adaptive systems (Marion, 1999; Stacey, 1995).

Entrepreneurial overconfidence and ambiguity aversion: dealing with the devil you know, than the devil you don't know

Various empirical studies find that entrepreneurs are systematically overconfident in their ventures probabilistic chances of success. Yet, entrepreneurs often face an ambiguous future that precludes them from making such probabilistic judgements. A theoretical framework based on ambiguity aversion is developed to explain an entrepreneurs overconfidence under complex and novel conditions of ambiguity. Unlike optimistic explanations, this ambiguity-averse form of overconfidence offers a non-probabilistic approach to entrepreneurial judgements of uncertainty.

Complexity, novelty, and ethical judgement by entrepreneurs

How do individual characteristics and the business environment affect the ethical judgement of entrepreneurs? We build on literatures in stakeholder and cognitive theory to examine the effects of situational complexity and novelty on an entrepreneurs ethical judgement. Our conceptual framework shows how confirmation biases and inward biases affect the ethical judgement of entrepreneurs. We test our theory using cross country data from the World Values Survey. We find that the ethical judgement of self-employed individuals is lower than that of non-entrepreneurs and that differences are moderated by the complexity and novelty of their decision setting. We also find that the ethical judgement of entrepreneurs with low levels of entrepreneurial initiative is the lowest, especially in moderately complex and novel decision settings. We argue that these findings have important implications for stakeholder approaches to entrepreneurial ethics.

The entrepreneurship of nested systems: a socially complex approach

A classic debate faced by management scholars is whether organisational life is determined by intractable environmental constraints or is it actively created by strategic managerial choice? Such polarising perspectives however fail to account for co-evolutionary processes in which individual choice and their environment jointly shape organisational life processes. Specifically, recent developments in institutional research have called for a greater attention to bridging micro and macro level processes to explaining ordering and disordering tendencies of institutions. In drawing on complexity science, Austrian economics, social network and related institutional research, a conceptual model is developed to explain such tendencies in a nested institutional system. Such an approach offers three contributions/implications to complexity science and institutional research.

The discovery and coordination of resource complements in a dispersed knowledge society

Although knowledge based theories of the firm and capabilities perspectives provide important understanding to the organisation and development of a firms knowledge, the insights of Austrian economics present a third but neglected approach to knowledge based perspectives. Austrian economics subscribe that the key knowledge problem is how to adapt to unanticipated change when knowledge experiences are dispersed in the market. Through the discovery of resource complements, a conceptual model is developed to explain adaptation in terms of the coordination of diverse knowledge experiences. This conceptual model is drawn from the entrepreneurial behaviours of Austrian economics and strategic network perspectives. This conceptual model is also used to explain the coordination of resource complements by exploiting inter-temporal knowledge experiences. Knowledge based strategies are, thus, developed with this model. Implications of this model to knowledge-based theories are also discussed.

Preferences About Marketing Organic Grain In Alberta

The organic industry in Canada is growing and Alberta organic grain producers have expressed a concern that the marketing system for organic grains in Alberta is poorly organized. This poorly organized system may hinder producers from optimizing market potential. This paper assesses different organizational structures that might assist Alberta organic grain producers in optimizing market potential. The choice of organizational structures that could potentially be used to market organic grain in Alberta is based on the types organizational structures that currently exist in the market, producer motivations, and the obstacles that exist in the market. In performing the assessment; existing organic organizational structures are identified, producer motivations are defined, underlying market forces are revealed, and organizational critical success factors are specified. In the conclusions an assessment is made as to which organizational structure is presently the most suitable option to assist organic grain producers in Alberta. The judgment of appropriate marketing structure may well change as the organic market matures, which it shows promise of rapidly doing.