ABSTRACT
Something funny is going on. Paradigm shifts used to take a century or more to evolve and crowd their competitors off the stage. Now it appears that in various spheres of human activity, such as natural science, political science, management science and organizational theory, major shifts are occurring at such a rapid rate that the ascendancy of a paradigm in one area such as education is out of phase with the ascendancy of new paradigms in other areas such as political science and organization theory. So, for example, within the last few years we read about the inadequacy of traditional management theory to explain or to guide organizational actions at the same time that we find categories from this traditional management theory embedded in the policies for school reform.
