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Within a gated community, management of common property presents great challenges. Therefore, the diagnostic social ecological system (SES) framework proposed by Elinor Ostrom providing a holistic understanding of complex collective action problems in terms of management of commons is used to investigate key institutional-social-ecological factors influencing collective action in the context of gated communities.

In this paper, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was used to systematically screen and review the relevant literature from 2000 to 2022, where 28 papers were selected for further analysis.

The study systematically identifies and categorises a series of variables related to self-organizing management in the gated community, and consequently a SES-based gated community management framework is developed. Based on the conceptual framework, the paper discusses logical interrelationships of institutional-social-ecological factors and their impacts on collective action performance of gated communities.

Apart from requiring empirical validation, the conceptual SES-based gated community management framework is certainly subject to continuous improvement in terms of refinement and addition of other potential determinants of gated community collective action.

Not only the review paper provides updates on the latest gated-community collective action research, it also contributes theoretically by conceptualizing the SES framework and its institutional–social–ecological design principles in gated community management. Studying these factors should also be of practical significance because the findings ultimately offer policy insights and management strategies that help policy-makers, property developers and local communities to govern such neighbourhood common resources efficiently and sustainably.

In order to deepen the understanding of self-organization, the purpose of the paper is to raise and analyze the state of the art in the area of innovation networks, particularly the characteristics of self-organizing, relying on the theory of complex systems to overcome any shortcomings.

The databases selected for the search were Web of Science and Scopus; the keywords searched in the titles of articles were innovation networks, complex systems, self-organization and self-organizing; the timeline of the search covers the period between 2000 and 2014 due to the presence of important studies in the field of networks starting in the early 2000s; only studies published in English were used; the articles selected were examined by first reading the titles, then the abstracts, and finally the texts in full.

The way the main constructs from the analytical perspective of innovation networks intersect with complex systems explains how self-organization is presented and how it can be allowed to occur within a view of expected benefits for the purposes of these networks.

The originality of the research lies in the questioning of the classical form of organizational management in innovation networks, essentially based on the concentration of hierarchical power.

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the shared understandings of safety held by workers on large UK construction sites using a complexity lens, and so provide empirical support for the inclusion of situational self-organising within construction site safety management systems (SMS).

A social constructionist epistemology supports the discourse analysis of talk (semi-structured interview and conversational), text (SMS and documentation) and visual (safety related signage) data collection from five large (+£20 m) UK construction sites.

Construction workers readily understand safety to be an emergent phenomenon with the complex system that is the construction site. Contemporary safety management approaches struggle with this complexity, yet there is the potential to mobilise situational self-organising on sites to improve safety in practice.

Epistemological foundations mean no claim is made to generalisability as perceived by traditional positivistic parameters. The data are limited to large (+£20 m) UK construction sites; however, underlying construction management systems are common to the industry as a whole and can find fit with practitioner experiences and other empirical academic work from both the UK and other countries.

Situational self-organising of safety management within the construction workforce is proposed as a key contribution to a relevant, dynamic and effective SMS.

Data are analysed from a social constructionist perspective and considered through a complexity lens. This approach unpacks these data in an original way to seek synergy with existing adaptive safety approaches, specifically situational self-organising and make recommendations for practice.

The purpose of this paper is to combine disaster risk reduction (DRR) and communication management literature to investigate the challenges and opportunities encountered when stakeholders spontaneously self-organise communication efforts during a disaster. The 2017 Knysna Fire Disaster in South Africa is used as the context.

The qualitative, exploratory research was supported by data obtained through thematic analysis of qualitative in-depth interviews and the Facebook page created by the community. Information from the disaster debrief was also included.

The findings suggest that disaster information needs to be sent every 30 s to a minute to coordinate rescue and relief efforts. The challenges for disaster management teams to manage this mammoth task and the role that the self-organising community played in assisting the communication process was found not to be recognised in disaster management policies or systems. This adversely affected the work of the disaster management team and stakeholder relationship.

This study focussed on one disaster. Future studies could possibly compare various disaster examples to provide even greater insight into the self-organising communicative behaviour of those affected by disasters.

The research gives one of the first clear indications of the scope of disaster communication needed during a disaster. It also highlights the community’s ability to contribute to communication management during a disaster, and which is not catered for in the practice, guidelines or management systems used for disaster management.

The development of information technologies has fueled the emergence of online self-organizing teams that involve members with diverse backgrounds to work on a shared goal voluntarily. However, the differences in members' attributes give rise to diversity. Therefore, the authors’ research is to figure out how diversity affects team performance in the context of online self-organizing teams and how this effect changes over team tenure.

The authors use a dynamic approach to the diversity-team performance relationship and collect a publicly longitudinal dataset on 3,970 collaborative items from 2,550 online self-organizing teams spanning nine years in an open innovation community of an online game.

The empirical results show that culture separation is negatively related to team performance, and this negative relationship weakens as team tenure increases. While skill variety and contribution disparity are positively related to team performance, and these positive relationships strengthen as team tenure increases.

The study provides a research framework to examine the relationship between diversity and team performance and explore how this relationship varies over team tenure in the context of online self-organizing teams. The results not only demonstrate the double-edged role of diversity in affecting the success of online self-organizing teams but also advance the understanding on the temporal effect of diversity on team performance.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often do not have slack resources with which to develop internally a broad spectrum of capabilities and to observe in depth the firm's environment. Therefore, they need to carefully develop abilities to absorb knowledge from outside the firm's boundaries so as to have access to cutting-edge knowledge in spite of limited resources. One strategy is to establish knowledge management (KM) projects for this purpose. In this paper, we describe how KM projects and subsequently emerging KM routines in SMEs facilitate the enhancement of the firm's absorptive capacity (AC; i.e., the ability to recognize, capture, and assimilate external knowledge). Our results indicate the importance of recognizing potential knowledge providers prior to any absorption of knowledge from external sources. Furthermore, we emphasize the relevance of routines for absorbing knowledge and we distinguish between KM routines that are deliberately developed for absorbing knowledge and KM projects where knowledge absorption happens unconsciously. Finally, we point out that different stages of an AC process follow different logics (exploration vs. exploitation) and, thus, a skilful management of the AC cycle is necessary to leverage externally absorbed knowledge.

From a contingency perspective and by using the principles of self‐organization described by Morgan (1986), this essay relates the amount of variety in transactions and transformations to the requisite of self‐organization. Self‐organization is defined in terms of the local autonomy to make decisions on both the transactions to be realized and the way transformation processes are organized to achieve these transactions. Appropriate Human resource management (HRM) systems and policies can help to achieve the level of self‐organization aimed at. When the amount of variety in transactions is relatively low, an organization can easily standardize and control work processes. In this case, there is no need to develop self‐organization. The focus of HRM will be on standardization, behavioral control systems and the social needs of workers. In the case of a moderate level of variety in transactions, management may obtain responsiveness by creating self‐organizing teams which have the local autonomy to deal with variety in customer demand. HRM instruments can help these teams by supporting integrated management, the multifunctionality of workers, team development, and the introduction of a skill‐based assessment and reward system. When the amount of variety becomes high, it is more effective to assign responsibilities to individuals and to apply HRM practices aimed at the problemsolving capacity of workers and the commitment of workers to the organization.

This paper seeks to investigate the influence of the external environment on the choice of strategic management activities, from a chaos and complexity perspective, since a business environment is a complex adaptive system.

The study in this paper was of an exploratory nature, using the qualitative techniques of case study, depth interviews and document analysis to collect data from two companies each in the IT and packaging industries, namely, more successful/less successful companies.

The paper finds that first, it was proposed that more successful companies in turbulent environments would use radical, fast and disruptive strategies. Furthermore, strategy making should be a democratic, bottom‐up process and should be organic, self‐organising, adaptive and emergent. The results confirmed these propositions. Second, it was proposed that more successful companies in stable environments would use more traditional management and strategies and more formal strategy planning activities. The findings did not confirm this proposition, probably due to the fact that in reality a truly stable environment does not exist in South Africa.

This paper is of benefit to managers and strategists by emphasising a new way to consider the future management and strategies of their companies. Since businesses and markets are complex adaptive systems, using complexity theory to increase understanding of how to cope in complex and turbulent environments is necessary, but has not been widely researched.

We studied the barriers to the development of self‐organization in three teams by means of questionnaires and observations. We found that the level of self‐organization pertaining to “routine work” is rather high. With respect to “machine‐related tasks”, the opportunities provided by the maintenance support group, and the complexity of some of these tasks are the main barriers to delegating more of these tasks. “Shift‐related tasks” are delegated to the team, but actually are done by the group coordinator only. “Communication tasks” have not been delegated to the teams, although the need to do so is high. Barriers lay in the shift system and in the skills of the workers. With respect to “sophisticated tasks” and the “tasks directed to the environment”, we conclude that the requisite of delegating them to the team is low. A moderate level of participation, however, seems appropriate here.

The aim of this paper is to examine empirically the relevance of the theory of deferred action for knowledge management systems (KMS) design in practice.

The study adopts a case study approach to examine knowledge work and knowledge management in virtual teamwork in a large UK telecommunications company to understand the occurrence of emergent knowledge and how it is managed by virtual team leaders. The section in the company studied is described as a “knowledge intensive organization” dealing with the company's e‐commerce activities.

The analysis confirms the complex adaptive system hypothesis – a complex system adapts to its environment through self‐organization. The data reveal the behaviour of the virtual team to be self‐organizing and adaptive to its environment. It confirms the knowledge tacitness hypothesis and social embeddedness of knowledge hypothesis as important determinants of knowledge sharing. Specifically, the data reveal the main issues concerning knowledge sharing practices of virtual team workers and the crucial team leader's role in the effectiveness of the teams' capability to develop social links to externalise and share tacit knowledge to accomplish tasks.

In this paper, the authors contribute “emergent knowledge” as a third category of organizational knowledge in addition to the existing tacit and explicit knowledge that needs to be considered when designing KMS. It also derives socio‐technical systems design principles based on the theory of deferred action, and a tentative development process with metrics is then proposed for KMS design that caters for emergent, tacit, and explicit knowledge.

Existing models such as the SECI model do not acknowledge emergent knowledge or its conversion into explicit knowledge. The theory of deferred action is invoked to derive design principles, termed deferred systems design principles, to depict how explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, and emergent knowledge can be represented to design knowledge management systems for “emergent organizations”.

The study contributes to the limited research and lack of consideration of emergent knowledge as an integral part of organizational knowledge, especially in an era of emergent organizations.