#ISSS2016 Boulder

2793 How do organizations become order-created and extinct through emergence and immergence in their evolutionary dynamic states? How macrosimplicity emerges from microcomplexity and how sophisticated behavior emerges from the interaction of relatively simplistic parts？ Organization scholars have debated those questions for decades, but only recently have they been to gain insight into combining the linear and non-linear dynamics that lead to organizational bottom-up emergence and top- down immergence by explorative and exploitative learning, through the use of the complexity science. Two intriguing features of complex systems have been discussed in this paper: simple behavior at the high level emerging from convoluted underpinnings, and sophisticated behavior at the low level immerging from simple underpinnings. Complexity theory has sometimes concerned itself with the one sort of bottom-up emergence, sometimes with the other top- down immergence, and sometimes it seems to aim for both at the same time, seeking to explain behaviors that are both surprisingly stable and surprisingly sophisticated. Studied for organization science research, this paper summarizes these literatures, including the first comprehensive review of macro-simplicity and micro-complexity, cybernetic modernism, chaotic postmodernism and organizing postmodernity’s chaos in each of the 20 complexity science disciplines. In doing so, the paper makes a bold proposal for a discipline of organizational bottom-up emergence and top- down immergence by explorative and exploitative learning, and proposes an integrative model of four-phase adaptive evolution in organizations. The paper begins with a detailed premise of organizational theories, models and phenomena of order-creation and extinction, and then rigorously maps the processes of order-creation and extinction discovered by that complexity science to identify a four-phase adaptive evolution model in organizations. By way of conclusion, the author expects the four-phase adaptive evolution model could be applied to enact bottom-up emergence and top- down immergence by explorative and exploitative learning within and across organizations. Key words: bottom-up emergence, top- down immergence, exploration, exploitation, four-phase adaptive evolution