Entropic Citizenship Behavior and Sustainability in Urban Organizations: Towards a Theoretical Model

Abstract

Entropy is a concept derived from Physics that has been used to describe natural and social systems’ structure and behavior. Applications of the concept in the social sciences so far have been largely limited to the disciplines of economics and sociology. In the current paper, the concept of entropy is applied to organizational citizenship behavior with implications for urban organizational sustainability. A heuristic is presented for analysing personal and organizational citizenship configurations and distributions within a given workforce that can lead to corporate entropy; and for allowing prescriptive remedial steps to be taken to manage the process, should entropy from this source threaten its sustainability and survival.

Keywords

• entropy
• organizational systems
• organizational entropy
• organizational citizenship entropy
• sustainability