ABSTRACT
This book is drawing attention to the inadequacy of the current dominant discourse on organizations and their management and the lack of congruence between the underlying thinking in this discourse and the reality of organizational life. The dominant discourse explicitly and implicitly claims that management is scientifi c, more or less, and that there is an organization science focused on the objective study of organizations in order to identify the causal laws governing them. This thinking makes a usually implicit assumption about effi cient causality and predictability. If management and organization are sciences, then they are the sciences of certainty. Closely allied with the assumptions of science are the ideologies of control and improvement which are refl ected in takenfor-granted views of the roles of managers and leaders as the controllers of organizational evolution. It can be argued that the linking of organization and management to science, particularly engineering, had essentially to do with the quite explicit search for the legitimacy of management roles. The link to science was a powerful move in the professionalization of management, which was expressed in the institutions of researchbased business schools, professional management education, professional associations of managers and the rise of a profession of expert advisors to managers in the form of management consultants.
