Networking and dialogue amongst stakeholders as opportunity for business and territorial governance. Results from three applied research

Change and complexity management aspires to manage the change of complex contexts, or better, how complex systems approach changes (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Dent, 1999; Smith and Graetz, 2006). The academic literature has focused on explaining what is studied by the science of complexity and when a system can be defined as ‘complex’. According to Dimitrov (2003) science of complexity belongs to non-linear science, since it has the scope to study the whole of dynamics occurring in a system. A complex system is defined by Smith (Smith, 2003: 3) “one with multiple interacting elements whose collective behavior cannot be simply inferred from the behavior of its elements” and that has to be considered “as a whole but it does not exist in each individual element” (Ahmed et al., 2006:414). Therefore, to conduct research on complexity it is necessary to study the energies, substances and forms characterising the whole system, and “connecting everything that exists in a whirling web of dynamic interrelationships and interactions” . According to Uden et al. (2001), complexity tells us that “everything is connected to everything else”. In a system -such as an organization or a network- any element influences and is influenced by other elements within the system (Taleb, 2007). This influence and interdependence among the elements of the system enable organisations or networks to successfully achieve objectives or to face complex situations. With these premises, assuming that “interaction is all that there is” (Law, 1992), we can consider complexity as a matter of relations and interactions. In this sense the scope of complexity management can be seen also as the management of relations and interactions. In line with this definition, a complex system is also characterized by non-linearity, flexibility, heterogeneity and it works in a non-hierarchical environment, with a holistic approach, a self-organizing attitude and a networked shape (Mc Millan and Hwang, 2002). In this broad context, in this dissertation Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987) has been identified as the general framework supporting the untangling and the understanding of the relation and interaction of complex systems, networks, which empirical research in the field of social sciences has widely investigated.