Bill McKelvey

Biography

UCLA Anderson School of Management
110 Westwood Plaza, Box 951481
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481

Bill McKelvey is currently Professor of Strategic Organizing and Complexity Science at UCLA Anderson. Early articles focus on organization and socio-technical systems design. His book, Organizational Systematics (1982), remains the definitive treatment of organizational taxonomy and evolutionary theory.

He chaired the Building Committee that produced the $110,000,000 Anderson Complex at UCLA—opened in 1994. As Director of the Center for Rescuing Strategy & Organization Science (SOS), he initiated activities leading to the founding of UCLA’s Center Human Complex Systems and Computational Social Science. He organized various agent-modeling speaker programs and conferences at UCLA. He co-edited Variations in Organization Science (with Joel Baum, 1999), a Special Issue of the complexity journal, Emergence (with Steve Maguire, 1999), a Special Issue of the Journal of Information Technology applying complexity science to IT, IS, and Knowledge Management concerns (co-edited with Jasmine Merali, 2006), and now the SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management (coeditors are Peter Allen & Steve Maguire, 2010). Also editing 5 books (~2000 pages) on Complexity Science for Routledge''s Major Works Series (also due in 2010). Has published over 50 complexity-related articles & chapters. A Cambridge University Press book is in process, titled Complexity Dynamics in Organizations: Applications of Order-Creation Science.

He has advised some 170 student consulting projects in firms. He has produced more dissertation award-winning doctoral students than any other B-school professor in the US. His doctoral course, “Management Applications of Complexity Science and Agent-based Models,” reviews the Santa Fe Institute inspired literature aimed at using mutually influencing agent interactions and computational models to explain the dynamics of socio-economic systems. It builds from recent developments in epistemology, natural science, Econophysics, and agent-based computational modeling to construct a bottom-up, model-centered social science. Newest MBA course offered is: “Complexity Leadership: The Secret of Jack Welch’s Success.”

Education

Ph.D. Management, 1967, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S.M. Management, 1962, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.A. Physics and Economics 1960, Monmouth College