Chaos, Complexity, and Resilience: Business and Society in Pandemic Context

Business or social organisation has many intertwined aspects, which constantly interact with each other, raising the complexity of its dynamics. Additional aspects make systems more complex. Modelling a complex system is difficult due to dependencies, spontaneity, and adaptive behaviour. However, such complex adaptive systems self-reorganise and become sustainable. Chaos is a close related concept, indicating that a delta change in the initial conditions can bring out randomness, even with deterministic laws. Thus, with same underlying deterministic principles but with minor initial variation can bring out drastic change in outcomes. Interestingly however, rational human beings intuitively try to avoid chaos and complexity to take decisions. The need for predictability, simple rules or heuristics, and generalisability govern decision-making. Though the chaos and complexity theories are interrelated and multi-disciplinary in nature, we see much less application in business or social organisations.

The onset of Covid-19 pandemic has presented a unique social context for chaos and complexity. The healthcare, family systems, business organisation, and social organisations are exposed to unprecedented level of chaos and complexity. It is also manifested in international relations, research, and supply chain among myriad others. The complex adaptive behaviours vis-à-vis the activities to bounce back from adversities could be observed from the perspectives of individual, family, business, and other social institutions. As both theories indicate, the status may not be exactly reversible. The pandemic context raises several interesting questions worth investigation. For example, how the additional social distancing, isolation, and sanitising practices have influenced our behaviour in general? To what extent these changes are fundamental or persistent. Is the planning for business any different now? How the pandemic plan or response is going to get integrated? Given that the prediction of World Health Organisation (WHO) on increase in pandemic attacks, what should be done? These changes due to pandemic are changes in paradigm or a just point in the continuum. This conference seeks to understand and extend the behaviour of business and social organisations in the light of chaos and complexity.

Venue: The conference, is proposed to be held in virtual mode as the global pandemic has proved to be unpredictable for movement of speakers and participant scholars during the second wave and with a prognosis of third wave coming.