ABSTRACT
The review of the economic events of the last three years in Chapter 1 made it undeniably obvious that a key aspect of organizational reality is uncertainty. This means that executives of organizations do not know what the outcomes of their chosen actions will be and that in fact, they are not in control of the evolution of their organizations, although they are forming plans and making choices and can know what they are actually doing. This reality of uncertainty is strongly linked to other obvious aspects of organizational reality, namely, the interdependence of people in their own and other organizations so that what happens arises in the interplay of their actions, which is why they cannot choose outcomes although they can choose their next action. However, as Chapter 2 shows, in linking management to the natural sciences as a way of legitimizing the professional status of managers in society, organization and management science was developed on the basis of the natural sciences of certainty. Furthermore, in so doing, management thinking imported key concepts of the masterful, rational autonomous individual who could choose not only the goals of action and the outcomes but could also select the rules, provide the motivation and design the system that would deliver predetermined organizational outcomes. In all these respects, therefore, organization and management science has been based on theoretical foundations quite contrary to the experience of organizational reality. It seems to me that this must then lead to an inadequate and confused understanding of what people in organizations are doing and how they have managed to produce the crises of the last three years and at the same time continuing technological achievements and prosperity for some, just as in the years before this they managed to produce growth and innovation, also accompanied by crises. However, there are what might be called the sciences of uncertainty, fi rst in Darwin’s theory of evolution developed in the mid-nineteenth century and then in the sciences of complexity which appeared after the middle of the twentieth century. This chapter will explore some key concepts in these sciences of uncertainty to see if they can provide a theoretical basis more in keeping with organizational reality than the classic sciences of certainty. Then Chapter 4 will take up how writers on organization and management are linking the sciences of uncertainty to their theorizing. The next section provides a brief review of the theory of evolution and the section after that will do the same for the sciences of complexity.
