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Linking Open Systems Thinking to the Entrepreneurial Paradox

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Abstract

Systems thinking, pioneered and developed further by the biologist and psychologist Gestalt, as early as the 1920s, considered interrelationships and inter-connectedness of concepts and the significance of context. Management science has since adopted and advocated systems thinking as an alternative to the traditional and mechanistic ways of managing change and people, which was linear and failed to offer insight on these complex dynamics. The evidence in this study shows the entrepreneur-manager interrelationship and firm changes happening in their natural context, and the organization adapting to the change while preserving strategic aspects of growth and performance over a period of time. The original conceptual framework using Lumpkin and Dess (1996) entrepreneurial orientation framework was modified after the analysis to include the dynamic interrelationships reflective of an open system, because I was more conceptually conducive to explore these relationships.

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Taylor, L. (2017). Linking Open Systems Thinking to the Entrepreneurial Paradox. In: The Entrepreneurial Paradox. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56949-3_10

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