ABSTRACT
This book contains numerous organisational theories, each with its own assumptions about the organisational world and with its own ways of thinking about complex problems. This condition of difference is typical of organisation studies in the twenty-fi rst century. In their own recent collection of contemporary organisation studies, for example, Nord, Lawrence, Hardy, and Clegg (2006) found a multiplicity of approaches to organisational theorising, which they categorised along a continuum from traditional scientifi c inquiry on the one end to social constructivist discourses on the other. This plethora of approaches, coupled with the infl uence of root metaphors and institutional thought worlds, implies that organisational knowledge, regardless of the approach taken to create that knowledge, is always socially constructed and contextually situated.
