Remembering Max Boisot: Recollections of a Gifted Intellect at Work

This chapter offers some reflections on Max Boisot and his extraordinary intellect drawn from our 15 years of exchanging and crafting ideas together. I first comment on the process of working with Max, and then suggest some of the remarkable qualities of thought that I believe distinguished Max's keen intellect as I came to experience it through our collaborations. I note in particular the breadth of perspectives that Max inevitably brought to any discussion, his ability to draw multiple theoretical perspectives together in composing novel representations of economic and organizational phenomena, and his ability to rigorously categorize and usefully interrelate the many theories and concepts with which he was conversant. These qualities are illustrated through some further comments on the process of writing our 2010 paper on economic organizing. I conclude by suggesting how these qualities of thought are also reflected in Max's individual work and especially in his crowning achievement, the Information-Space Model.