Many of the most pressing challenges we face in society seem intractable at least in part due to their complexity. The climate crisis, for instance, is the product of environmental and social systems – already complex in themselves (Dryzek, 2013) – interpenetrating across such a diversity of spatial and temporal scales as to effectively evade human comprehension and agential engagement (Morton, 2013). Yet complexity also carries with it emancipatory promise. Against understandings of the status quo as a unified, stable and self-reinforcing system, complexity-embracing perspectives draw attention to the vulnerability of existing systems of domination (Wright, 2010) as well as the emancipatory possibilities of alternative practices, both actual and potential (Elder-Vass, 2022; Gibson-Graham, 2006). Intentionally steering towards emancipatory possibilities, however, requires that we apprehend, at least to some degree, the forms of complexity that give rise to such potentialities. 

The causal complexity perspective seeks to address the shortcomings of the dominant approach to explanation – the Newtonian linear model – which can be unhelpfully simplistic in a variety of domains, including those of the social sciences (Abbott, 2001; Meyer, Gaba and Colwell, 2005; Zara and Delacour, 2023). By ignoring the ways in which specific effects can depend on the conjunction of various causal conditions, including interactions across levels of analysis, and how particular causes can give rise to feedback loops, discontinuities and non-proportional effects (Delacour and Zara, 2025; Misangyi et al., 2017; Ragin, 2008), this dominant paradigm offers parsimonious causal accounts optimized for certain purposes and, for that reason, ineffective for others (Durand and Vaara, 2009; Furnari et al., 2021). 

Despite the promise of the causal complexity perspective, however, the authors of “Embracing causal complexity” argue that this approach remains underutilized in organization studies due to outstanding operationalization difficulties and poor understanding of the central concepts of causes and causality (Delacour and Zara, 2025). Configurational theory scholarship has done much to incorporate causal complexity into empirical analyses, most notably through the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA - Fiss, 2007; Furnari et al., 2021; Misangyi et al., 2017; Ragin, 2008; Schneider and Wagemann, 2012). Nevertheless, the authors argue that the value of such approaches is limited because they lack a clear ontology of causes and causation (Delacour and Zara, 2025). 

The authors thus turn to Aristotle’s multivocal conceptualization of causes and causalities as the basis for their proposed three-step analytical framework. Step 1 involves identifying the four per se causes – material, formal, efficient and final – of the phenomenon under investigation. The presented illustrative analysis of a typical firm broadly corresponds to prior efforts to apply the Aristotelian framework in management scholarship (e.g., Strong, 2000). Step 2 goes further, however, using Aristotle’s categories of instruments, secondary causes and accidents to characterize the context of the phenomenon under analysis. Finally Step 3 makes use of Aristotle’s thinking regarding the different forms of causation at play in the relationships between the foregoing types of causes. According to the authors, this ontological grounding usefully advances the causal complexity perspective by accounting for why the dynamics within causal configurations are non-aggregative and tend towards non-linearity and non-proportionality. 

I recommend this paper primarily because I share the authors’ belief in the need for organizational scholarship to pursue greater understanding of not just the fact of causal complexity but most importantly its underlying mechanisms. While any such apprehension will surely be partial and approximate at best, even dim improvements enhance our agential capacity to imagine and intentionally deploy the causes of new effects (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022; Mahoney and Goertz, 2006; Schoppek, 2021). Furthermore, the grounding in Aristotelian metaphysics in particular is auspicious for those of us interested in the reality of unrealized potentialities (Bhaskar, 2008, 2016; Elder-Vass, 2022; Shanahan, Jaumier, Daudigeos and Ouahab, 2024). 

Given the ontological importance of human agency and intentionality in Aristotle’s framework (Jacobs and O’Connor, 2013), I do find curious the paper’s reluctance to use such features to more clearly demarcate, for instance, instruments from secondary causes and accidents. I also struggle to see, from the specific illustrations presented in the paper, a clear demonstration that the conceptual complexity added by the proposed framework gets us something of corresponding value in terms of explanatory power. However, I’m inclined to read the paper’s circumspect explanatory ambition as merely an artefact of the authors’ choice to prioritize simplicity and clarity to effectively illustrate the Aristotelian framework in its own right (p. 14). Most notably, the illustrations are generally constrained to a single level of analysis, taking “the firm” as its single, generic object. 

I would be interested to see organization studies research building on this groundwork by exploring what the proposed Aristotelian approach might offer when applied to multiple objects of study in interaction. The example of the consultant who inadvertently reinforces the CEO’s existing inclination by deploying ineffective persuasive techniques (p. 21), for instance, hints at the potential for deeper theorization. Even limiting ourselves to a single level of analysis, might more novel insights be revealed by overlaying the existing framing, where the CEO is understood as the efficient cause, with a secondary framing that takes the consultant as the efficient cause of a separate but intersecting project? And what theorization might be made possible by overlaying such framings at multiple levels of analysis? 

While references to Aristotelian thought are not particularly unusual in organization studies, Aristotle’s metaphysics has been relatively neglected within our discipline. If we accept that the pursuit of emancipatory responses to complex societal challenges requires a correspondingly complex and therefore interdisciplinary understanding of causes and causation (Ferraro, Etzion and Gehman, 2015; Geels, 2022), adopting the proposed framework could be valuable not just as a particular way of conceptualizing causal complexity, but also as a means of tapping into a productive vein of contemporary philosophical work in the Aristotelian tradition (Jacobs and O’Connor, 2013; Jansen and Sandstad, 2021; Novotný and Novák, 2014; Simpson, Koons and Teh, 2017; Tahko, 2011). The present paper is thus recommended by Peer Community in Organization Studies as an invitation to organization scholars to explore what such metaphysical approaches might reveal not just in analysis of what is, but more pressingly in exploration of what we might intentionally cause to be.  

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