scholarly journals Agentic Misfit: An Empirical Demonstration of Non-Matching Human Agency amid Complexity

2020 ◽  
pp. 017084062094455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Poulis ◽  
Efthimios Poulis ◽  
Paul Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Organizational Decline ◽  
Requisite Variety ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Law Of Requisite Variety ◽  
The Law ◽  
Novel Concept ◽  
Empirical Demonstration ◽  
Do So

Alignment of organizations with external imperatives is seen as a sine qua non of proper organizing and strategizing by many fit and complexity scholars. Any deviation from this management mantra engenders organizational decline and, ultimately, mortality. We put this axiomatic principle under empirical scrutiny and use the law of requisite variety as our organizing principle to do so. The law is an iconic cornerstone of this matching contingency logic and it has served to legitimize a wide range of fit decisions in, e.g., leadership, organizational learning and corporate governance. Inspired by organizational vignettes inhabiting antithetical complexity regimes, we introduce a novel concept, which we label ‘agentic misfit’. In this way, we deconstruct deterministic assumptions related to environmental fittingness, we challenge teleological orientations in the fit literature, and we flesh out the viability of non-matching human agency amid complexity.

scholarly journals Systems Thinking in Design: Service Design and self-Services

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Darzentas ◽  
Jenny Siobhane Darzentas
Keyword(s):  
Systems Thinking ◽  
Real World ◽  
Service Design ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Application Domain ◽  
Requisite Variety ◽  
Law Of Requisite Variety ◽  
The Law

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to use a practical real-world example to demonstrate the power of a systems thinking perspective in design, and more specifically in the design of services. It makes use of the paradigm of e-accessibility, in the application domain of publicly available self-services. Secondly, the benefits of this perspective will be discussed, through some theoretical tenets of systems thinking, such as the use of emerging properties, the law of requisite variety and notions of second order cybernetics, in terms of the richness that they offer to the conceptualisation and praxis of design in general, and service design in particular. Finally, we speculate on the implications of systems thinking to question the nature of the interdisciplinarity and even transdisciplinarity of design.

Requisite Variety: A Concept to Analyze the Effects of Cultural Context for Technology Transfer

1989 ◽  
Vol 33 (12) ◽  
pp. 765-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Demel ◽  
Najmedin Meshkati
Keyword(s):  
Technology Transfer ◽  
Human Factors ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Power Distance ◽  
Uncertainty Avoidance ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Requisite Variety ◽  
Law Of Requisite Variety ◽  
The Law

The Law of Requisite Variety states that “the system must possess as much regulatory variety as can be expected from the environment” (Ashby, 1957). This law may have some implications for culture. Specifically, the four cultural dimensions by which national cultures differ (as proposed by Hofstede, 1980a): Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism-Collectivism, and Masculinity-Femininity influence Requisite Variety depending on the country to which the technology is transferred. Therefore, it is proposed in this study that Requisite Variety can be used as a concept to systematically investigate the influence of culture for technology transfer. This approach constitutes the incorporation of Human Factors considerations in technology transfer, as stated by Meshkati (1986 and 1989b) and Wisner (1985).

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