The notion of emergent phenomena has itself emerged as a key concept in organizational strat- egy. Much of the credit for this must go to Mintzberg (1994) but ironically his analysis of the concept itself has been perhaps rather more limited
The basics of marketing strategy 71
31For a generally constructive and useful set of commen-
taries on the Vargo and Lusch approach see the special issue of Marketing Theory (Aitken et al., 2006).
32And in this sense another long-running debate in
marketing (Wensley, 1990).
33And also perhaps a more critical look at the overall and
very central issue of branding. For instance, whilst some commentators see the new service logic as consistent with many aspects of a traditional view on branding (Brodie et al., 2006), others would argue that the developing nature of active customers communities imply the need to rethink the whole nature of branding (Ahonen and Moore, 2005).
34The argument is, of course, rather more complicated
than this and relates to the previous debate between Child (1972) and Aldrich (1979) on the more general issue of strategic choice, as well as to some degree the wide field of Actor-network theory (Latour, 2005).
than it could have been. Indeed in his more recent work, he has tended to define the nature of emer- gent phenomena in a rather idiosyncratic manner:
‘Much as planners can study and interpret patterns in the organization’s own behavior to identify its emergent strategies, so too can they study and interpret patterns in the external environment to identify possible opportunities and threats (includ- ing as already noted, the patterns of competitors actions in order to identify their strategies)’
(1994, p. 375)
This implies that emergent phenomena are such that they can ex post be related to intentions or actions through time of the individual actors.35
However, a more common use of the term emer- gence incorporates some notion of interpretation at different levels of aggregation.36After all, for
instance, as a number of authors have previously commented, markets themselves are emergent phenomena. It was originally Adam Smith’s insight that each actor in a market following there own interest could under certain conditions cre- ate an overall situation of welfare maximization: in this sense the invisible hand was much more effective than any attempts at local or even global optimization.
Others have paid much greater attention to this the nature of emergent properties, but we also need to recognize a further distinction between what have been termed emergent and enacted environments. In a number of relevant areas, such as information systems, there is no overall agree- ment on the nature of the differences (see Mingers, 1995) but in the absolute an emergent environment is one in which there are a set of rules but they are generally undetermining of the outcome states or at least the only way in which an outcome state can be predicted is by a process of simulation whereas an enacted environment is one in which the nature of the environment is itself defined by the cogni- tive patterns of the constituents.
This distinction is particularly important when we consider the possible of ‘markets-as-net- works’ as a perspective to understand the nature of competitive market phenomena. If we under- stand the nature of the phenomena we are trying to understand as essentially emergent, then there
remains considerable value in attempting to model the relevant structure of rules or relationships that characterize the environment.37 If on the other
hand, we are more inclined to an enactive view of the relationship between organizations and their environment, we need to consider the degree to which the structure of the network is not more than a surface phenomena resulting itself from other deeper processes: in this analysis we need to consider the phenomena that Giddens (1979) iden- tifies in terms of ‘structuration’. In this process agents and organizations are simultaneously both creators of structures but also have their action constrained by these structures.
However, even if we are willing to give a rela- tively privileged ontological status to the detailed network structure in a particular context,38 we
may still face insurmountable problems in develop- ing high-level regularities from a more detailed analysis. As Cohen and Stewart assert:
‘We’ve argued that emergence is the rule rather than the exception, and that there are at least two distinct ways for high-level rules to emerge from low-level rules – simplexity and complicity.39Can
we write down the equations for emergence? The short answer is no . . . Essentially what is needed is a mathematical justification for the belief that simple high-level rules not only can, but usually do, emerge from complex interactions of low-level rules. By ‘emerge’ we mean that a detailed deriva- tion of the high-level rules from the low-level ones would be so complicated that it could never be writ- ten down in full let alone understood’
(1995, p. 436)
It seems that whilst Cohen and Stewart warn con- vincingly about the dangers of drowning in the
72 The Marketing Book
35In many ways, issues of intention and anticipation are
both central to any analysis of strategic behaviour but also complex and multi-faceted (see Wensley, 2003).
36For a broader discussion of emergence see Johnson
(2002).
37Actually even this statement incorporates another critical
assumption. As Mingers notes in commenting on assump- tions about the nature of social systems and the degree to which they can be seen as self-producing (autopoietic), even those who develop such an analysis define the nature of the organizations and their environment in unexpected ways:
‘Luhmann . . . in conceptualizing societies as autopoietic . . . (sees them) as constituted not by people but by communica- tions. Societies and their component subsystems are networks of communicative events, each communication being triggered by a previous one and leading in turn to another . . . People are not part of society but part of its environment’ (p. 211).
38A position that others such as Margaret Archer would
indeed challenge (Archer, 1995).
39Cohen and Stewart use specific meanings for both ‘sim-
plexity’ and ‘complicity’ which roughly describe phenomena where in the former case similar low-level rules create high level similar structures whereas in the later case ‘totally dif- ferent rules converge to produce similar features and so exhibit the same large-scale structural patterns’ (p. 414). As they emphasize, in the case of complicity one of the critical effects is the way in which ‘this kind of system … enlarges the
detail of low-level rules they give only limited useful advice as to the practical nature of the alter- natives. There continues to be a spate of interest in mathematically approaches under the general title of ‘Complexity’. In the context of the econom- ics of forms of market organization, perhaps the most obvious is that due to Kaufmann (1995):40
‘Organizations around the globe were becoming less hierarchical, flatter, more decentralized, and were doing so in the hopes of increased flexibility and overall competitive advantage. Was there much coherent theory about how to decentralize, I wondered. For I was just in the process of finding surprising new phenomena, that hinted at the pos- sibility of a deeper understanding of how and why flatter, more decentralized organizations – business, political or otherwise – might actually be more flex- ible and carry an overall competitive advantage’
(pp. 245–246)
Kaufmann goes on to discuss the logic of what he calls a ‘patch’ structure in which at various levels the form of organization involves a series of rela- tively autonomous sub-units which under certain conditions are more effective at achieving a system wide performance maxima compared with the more extreme options which he terms rather con- troversially, the fully integrated ‘Stalinist’ system, or the fully autonomous ‘Italian leftist’ system!41
However, despite the fact that some of these general notions have been seen in the mainstream of strategic management thought for some consid- erable time (see Stacey, 1995), we should remain cautious. Horgan (1997) suggests that we should be cautious of the likely advances to be made in the field that he has dubbed ‘chaoplexity’:
‘So far, chaoplexologists have created some potent metaphors, the butterfly effect, fractals, artificial life, the edge of chaos, self-organized criticality. But they had not told us anything about the world that is both concrete and truly surprising, either in a negative, or in a positive sense. They have slightly extended the borders of our knowledge in certain areas, and they have more sharply delin- eated the boundaries of knowledge elsewhere’
(p. 226)