ABSTRACT
Much of the literature that deals with organization and management theory exists as collections of largely disconnected perspectives and theories about various aspects of the broader subject. Research and inquiry into the subject often begins with widely different assumptions about the nature of human behavior and the way it is or should be organized. Contributing to the divide, empirical research has generated a lot of discontinuous and often inconsistent results that have never been reconciled. To a large extent, this is the result of opportunistic foraging in existing databases (the most available form of empirical research) and an exaggerated search for novelty in the findings (a common requirement for publication). Related to this observation, Donaldson (1995) has already described the proliferation of paradigms in organization theory over the recent past. The purpose of this chapter is not to explore the extent of this situation, but to discuss how organization theory might be improved and extended in areas where discontinuous or inconsistent theories that seek to address the same subject already exist.
