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This paper introduces a conceptual lens for leading social change in slums and informal settlements. In line with this aim, the purpose of this case study is to describe the public problem-solving approach of a social change organization situated in an informal settlement through the lens of adaptive leadership, complexity theory and social change leadership (SCL).

This paper follows an engaged reflection tradition. First, the author-practitioners describe an informal settlement case hereafter called ISC in southeast Iran where many people have historically remained undocumented and uneducated. Using complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive leadership and SCL as the conceptual lens, the paper analyzes ISC as a complex adaptive context in which the community and the government are in tension in solving problems, particularly illiteracy. The instrumental case study draws from participant observation and document analysis to describe and examine the endeavors of a community office operating within ISC. Through this reflective analysis, the authors illustrate how a social change organization can effectively tackle public issues like illiteracy within informal settlements.

This paper applies complexity leadership theory to a social context. The study illustrates how social change organizations can support the transformation of informal spaces into adaptive spaces to enact social change.

This paper reflects on engagement activity near the insecure borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By extending an organizational-level theory to the public sphere, this paper contributes theoretically to the complexity theory literature. Moreover, it provides a practical insight for community development and slum upgrading projects.

This study aims to investigate the multiple influence paths or underlying mechanisms of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) on adaptive innovation from the perspectives of organizational learning and resource management, drawing on complex adaptive system theory.

With a questionnaire survey of 317 senior and middle managers from different firms in China, structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized conceptual model, and bootstrapping method was employed to examine the multiple mediating effects.

Results indicate that EL has a significant and positive effect on adaptive innovation. This relationship is partially mediated through exploitative learning, exploratory learning, resource bricolage and boundary-spanning integration, respectively. The impact of EL on adaptive innovation is also sequentially transmitted through exploitative learning and resource bricolage or exploratory learning and boundary-spanning integration.

Adaptive innovation has become a firm competition strategy to cope with dynamic changes in current uncertain environment where EL can play its effectiveness to engage firms in such innovation activities. However, the question of why and how EL drives adaptive innovation has yet to be discussed. This study highlights the innovation effectiveness of EL and the triggering process of adaptive innovation, and contributes to several countermeasures for firms to implement leadership and innovation practices responding to uncertain environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a significant impact on several aspects of public relations practice. By adopting the theoretical framework of adaptive leadership, this research is designed to explore how an organization’s top leadership can support related adaptive action in strategic communication. Particularly, we hope to explore whether the application of adaptive leadership could facilitate a higher level of communication transparency as well as deliver a sense of caring and empathy in COVID-19 communication.

An international online survey was designed and conducted for this study. The first sample consists of 776 full-time communication professionals in the United States of America with 435 women (56.1%) and 341 men (43.9%). The second sample consists of 268 full-time communication professionals in Canada, with 110 women (41.0%) and 158 men (59.0%). The two samples were merged into the final sample of 1,044 for the data analysis.

Results confirmed that the perceived impact of the COVID-19 pandemic increased communication professionals’ challenges in building trust. It also drives adaptive changes in their coping actions in strategic communication. More importantly, the top leadership within the organization played a key role in this adaptive leadership environment by demonstrating commitment to transparency in COVID-19 communication and delivering a sense of empathy during the pandemic.

This study contributes to our understanding of strategic communication in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic, by focusing on the adaptive nature of communication leadership. More importantly, our study confirms the important roles of two leadership attributes (i.e. the sense of empathy and the commitment to communication transparency) in supporting adaptive leadership, which eventually influences trust building.

The present research attempts to show the contribution of emotional intelligence and servant leadership climate to individual adaptive performance. The authors intend to explain the relations between the emotional intelligence of employees as well as of manager and the employee's adaptive performance. Moreover, this research assesses the significance of the mediating role of “servant leadership” climate in the relationship between the emotional intelligence of the manager and the employee's adaptive performance.

This research uses the quantitative research method and is included in explanatory research. Data collection used several informants for each organization. Data were collected using a sample of 57 managers and 204 team members spread over 24 companies belonging to different sectors of activity.

Employees' emotional intelligence directly influences individual adaptive performance. There is a direct influence of manager's emotional intelligence on individual adaptive performance. Then, there is an indirect influence of emotional intelligence on individual adaptive performance through the mediation of servant leadership climate.

The novelty of this research is in its effort to observe the multilevel mediation of servant leadership climate with other variables developed in the research model. No previous studies have found a relationship between employee and manager's emotional intelligence and individual adaptive performance.

This paper brings together the literature on theories of complexity adaptive systems (CAS), develops an analytical framework, applies this framework to the development of tourism destinations and critically reflects on the use of this perspective.

This paper elaborates on a CAS perspective on destination development, to further develop complexity thinking in tourism studies. This approach enables to identify policy avenues geared towards improving destination governance and contributing to sustainable tourism development.

Theories of CAS offer an analytical lens to better understand destination development, drawing explicit attention to (1) the levels of the individual, (emergent) structures, the structure-agency interface and the system level, (2) the steps related to the process of adaptation that is critical for systems to survive and thrive in times of change and (3) the undervalued importance of considering the factor of time.

Applying CAS theories help to address a range of (policy) avenues to improve destination governance, contributing to a shift in focus from reactively fixing problems to proactively addressing the structural issue of adaptive capacity building. It shows that managing tourism destination as complex systems involves a set of conditions that are critical as well as difficult to meet in tourism practice.

Component positioning is an important part of aircraft assembly, aiming at the problem that it is difficult to accurately fall into the corresponding ball socket for the ball head connected with aircraft component. This study aims to propose a ball head adaptive positioning method based on impedance control.

First, a target impedance model for ball head positioning is constructed, and a reference positioning trajectory is generated online based on the contact force between the ball head and the ball socket. Second, the target impedance parameters were optimized based on the artificial fish swarm algorithm. Third, to improve the robustness of the impedance controller in unknown environments, a controller is designed based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC) theory and an adaptive impedance control model is built in the Simulink environment. Finally, a series of ball head positioning experiments are carried out.

During the positioning of the ball head, the contact force between the ball head and the ball socket is maintained at a low level. After the positioning, the horizontal contact force between the ball head and the socket is less than 2 N. When the position of the contact environment has the same change during ball head positioning, the contact force between the ball head and the ball socket under standard impedance control will increase to 44 N, while the contact force of the ball head and the ball socket under adaptive impedance control will only increase to 19 N.

In this paper, impedance control is used to decouple the force-position relationship of the ball head during positioning, which makes the entire process of ball head positioning complete under low stress conditions. At the same time, by constructing an adaptive impedance controller based on MRAC, the robustness of the positioning system under changes in the contact environment position is greatly improved.

This study aims to investigate the response by a multi-campus private higher education provider to a major crisis. This study examined what elements of complex adaptive systems (CAS) were activated and/or developed within the organization during the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, through a retrospective analysis of organizational responses.

A retrospective qualitative approach has been used. The theory of CAS has been used as the theoretical lens to explore the organizational context, responses and behaviours during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 senior leaders across the major functions of the organization spread over multiple campuses.

Findings point to coverage of the main CAS characteristics in the organizational responses to the pandemic, however, in varying degrees. There was strong evidence for the application of guiding principles, for self-organizing, for micro-diversity coupled with independent actors and new generative relationships, all brought about by the chaos the pandemic generated. This study concludes that the global pandemic presented this organization with the impetus for rapid and agile responses to what ultimately has become a constructive crisis, paving the way for key elements of CAS theory to be enacted. This study recommend embedding the conscious creation of an adaptive space within ongoing strategic organizational transformation initiatives.

There is scant literature on CAS as applied to crises from organizations in the higher education sector and notably from outside of the health/medical fields. As a result, this study offers a novel and original approach to applying CAS theory during a major crisis. In addition to the findings above, this study also found an emergent characteristic, that of agility, which could be further tested as a potential theoretical addition to CAS theory.

This study examines how customer-linking capabilities, the flexibility of back-end management systems, strategic agility and the perceived absorptive capacity of e-commerce influence the organizational performance of online sellers.

A performance model based on the adaptive structuration theory was employed to test the hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM) on a dataset of 325 samples with acceptable responses.

The results reveal that the customer-linking capability and flexibility of back-end management systems, strategic agility and assimilation of e-commerce activity significantly influence organizational performance in a virtual environment.

The agility of online sellers is becoming increasingly important, and from the perspective of adaptive structuration theory, back-end management systems have been built to manage buyer orders for online sellers.

This bibliometric mapping study aimed to provide comprehensive insights into the global research landscape of cybernetics. Utilizing the biblioshiny function in R Studio, we conducted an analysis spanning 1958 to 2023, sourcing data from Scopus. This research focuses on key terms such as cybernetics, cybernetics systems, complex adaptive systems, viable system models (VSM), agent-based modeling, feedback loops and complexity systems.

The analysis leveraged R Studio’s biblioshiny function to perform bibliometric mapping. Keyword searches were conducted within titles, abstracts and keywords, targeting terms central to cybernetics. The timespan, 1958–2023, provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of cybernetics-related literature. The data were extracted from Scopus to ensure a robust and widely recognized source.

The results revealed a rich and interconnected global research network in cybernetics. The word cloud analysis highlights prominent terms such as “agent-based modeling,” “complex adaptive systems,” “feedback loop,” “viable system model” and “cybernetics.” Notably, the journal Kybernetes has emerged as a focal point, with significant citations, solidifying its position as a key source within the cybernetics research domain. The bibliometric map provides visual clarity regarding the relationships between various concepts and their evolution over time.

This study contributes original insights by employing advanced bibliometric techniques in R Studio to map the cybernetics research landscape. The comprehensive analysis sheds light on the evolution of key concepts and the global collaborative networks shaping cybernetics research. The identification of influential sources, such as Kybernetes, adds value to researchers seeking to navigate and contribute to the dynamic field of cybernetics. Furthermore, this study highlights that cybernetics not only provides a useful framework for understanding and managing major economic shocks but also offers perspectives for understanding phenomena in various fields such as economics, medicine, environmental sciences and climate change.

Business environments and global transportation system have become more complex than ever due to complexity drivers of industries which create uncertainty and unpredictability to organizations. Like other industries, the maritime business faces different and difficult problems which threaten organizational survival. The ability to cope with those uncertainties, threats and problems shows the resilience ability of organizations that help to survive and prosper. The organizational resilience concept arises as a requirement to deal with problems and uncertainties of business environments which are swiftly changing. This study aims to suggest an organizational framework to show how maritime business organizations as the sea leg of global transportation system can develop resilient organizations via complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach if adequate design features of CAS could be defined and included in organizational properties.

A total of 15 CAS features were identified as the enablers of organizational resilience throughout the literature. An interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach has been conducted to determine the mutual relation between the CAS features which constitute an organizational framework. These CAS features have been categorized by conducting MICMAC analysis.

This study proposes a framework that identifies CAS features as the enabler of resilient maritime business organizations. The CAS approach offers new managerial toolkit to realize current organizational situations and allows managers to understand that it is difficult to control their system in this dynamic environment where special management practices are required especially in volatile times rather than ordinary times. Also, organizations could not compete as a sole organization but as a web/system of organizations. CAS is more resilient than other systems because resilience is the emergent occurrence of the system formed from nonlinear, dynamic interactions with self-organized agents.

The research has some limitations, like organizational resilience studies are in the infant stage and further research into this area should be extended. This study uses the CAS approach to develop organizational resilience. Further studies could use different lenses and contemporary subjects in management field which should also be useful while developing resilience in organizations. This study uses ISM and MICMAC analysis where further studies could use quantitative design and methods like formal concept analysis or the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory to determine the relational weighs of CAS features while developing resilient organizations. Future studies may also focus on different maritime stakeholders like IMO or ILO, maritime agencies, freight forwarders or insurance underwriters regarding developing and enhancing resilience of the maritime system.

World trade and transportation systems are getting more uncertain and lean on complex relations where maritime transportation is a “vital backbone” of such operations. But becoming more complex structures leads to vulnerable systems and organizations. Most risk management applications are based on predicting the known risks where many of them are not enough to fight with unknowns. Coping with today's problems are difficult for organizations in any industry. But for maritime business stakeholders who work in such a global web of relations, it is much more challenging. So, stakeholders of the system like forwarders, ports or ship chandlers may easily apply those features to develop resilient organizations too. Legal authorities of the system and rule-makers like local Chambers of Shipping, IMO or Classification societies can benefit from this framework and provide supportive settings to develop system-wide resilient organizations.

By understanding environmental uncertainty and complexity better than others, organizations become resilient and cope with significant difficulties which make them more competitive as a substantial strategic advantage. Resilient management offers to break down points at the system and shows them ways to restore quickly while transporting goods while traditional risk assessments are not enough.

The originality of the study lies in two folds; first of all the key and most used features of CAS is linked to developing resilient maritime organizations and by maritime expert opinions, this study tries to determine which of these CAS features are the most effective to trigger other features to develop organizational resilience in the maritime business. And secondly, the concept of organizational resilience and the CAS approach are not analyzed in depth in the context of maritime business.