ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, while working in Germany, I became aware of the spreading influence of two waves of management theory flowing, 7 years apart, from reformulations in the natural sciences. These management theories originated in the United States and following their impact in that country, they later spread to organizations in Europe. The first of these waves took the form of various strands of thinking based on cybernetics and systems dynamics, perhaps the most influential example being Peter Senge’s framework set out in The Fifth Discipline (1990). Senge drew directly on systems dynamics, whereas earlier systems thinkers, who developed the version of cultural theory now taken for granted in management thinking, had relied primarily on cybernetics and general systems theory. The particular version of cultural theory referred to was first developed in general by Talcott Parsons (1951) in his theory of social systems and in particular with regard to management theory by Edgar Schein (1992) and Charles Hampden-Turner (1994). In this chapter, I will be focusing attention on Senge’s thought, leaving the impact of cultural theory for discussion in Chapter 4. The second wave of influence from the natural sciences on management theory, referred to above, was that of chaos and complexity theory. This also reached European organizations somewhat after its initial impact in the United States and I will be discussing it in the next chapter. Looking back, I remember now how two questions, one posed by a manager at the start of the 1990s and the other raised at the end of that decade, brought home to me the influence of these two waves of thinking on management practice at the grass roots level.
