ABSTRACT
I concluded the last chapter by pointing to how the application of the complexity sciences to organizations has yielded some challenging insights but that it has mostly collapsed into a re-presentation of the dominant discourse in a new jargon or loosely used to justify ideologies of some kind of holism or mysticism. I suggested that it was striking how interdependent, ordinary people in all their confl ictual and cooperative relationships were absent from the explanations and exhortations. The theories, explanations and research are split off from the actual experience of everyday organizational reality. I am interested in exploring how we might develop alternative ways of thinking that try to avoid the split between explanation and experience and I believe that this attempt is aided by refl ecting on the history of how we have come to think in these split terms and how we might adopt more paradoxical modes of thought. I am convinced that it is when we refl ect on the historical evolution of ways of thinking that we become aware of the taken-for-granted assumptions upon which they are built and what entailments they have, most of which have slipped from our view.
