Marketing and management: a complex adaptive system view

This present work aims to analyse the choice of strategic management activities taking into account a systemic and complexity perspective, applied by analogy to the business. The approach represents the firm as a complex adaptive system, where management must develop different behaviours in order to achieve survival/dynamic order through the creation and/or maintenance of relationships with numerous and heterogeneous stakeholders that the management considered to be relevant in a turbulent environment. As an expression of the relational dynamics between the direct and indirect stakeholders, the firm exchanges energy and information with the reference contexts in order to survive. As part of these exchanges and adaptations both the firm and the stakeholders disperse energy, causing a dissipative phenomenon defined, by analogy with the second law of thermodynamics and the complexity theory, as entropy. Therefore, the objectives of this work are to ask: can the complexity theory to fill the needs of theories by the side of marketers and scholars helping them to deal the dynamism of organisations/brand in turbulent environments? Does learning about organisations and networks as adaptive systems help scholars and managers in their processes as decision-makers? Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.