Complex project organizing and the adaptive system perspective. Revisiting frameworks of performance in-between performance studies and the post-human neomaterialist ontological categories

The paper is part of a larger doctoral project aimed at grasping the effectiveness of culture-based Urban Regeneration Projects (URP) having in the city of Turin (Italy) its empirical field. It focuses on an activity of theoretical coding addressing the performance framework inside the organization of complex systems. The research process is developed in a multidisciplinary context in which the functions proposed by the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) approach applied to organizational studies will be confronted, in a discursive dynamic, with different codifications emerging from performance studies and neomaterialist post-humanist philosophy. Even if not claiming integrated solutions between the different approaches, the discourse leads to the realization that any project based on capacity development requires performance analysis models that are not based on rational approaches. From the analysis of the data and empirical literature, it emerges that the CAS approach applied to the organization of complex systems, in discussion with performance studies and neo materialist post-humanist philosophy, can capture: 1) unpredictable aspects that characterized the dynamics of capacity development, and 2) project indirect effects in terms of improvement of pedagogical practices and quality of education.