This article notes the growing attractiveness of concepts ‘‘borrowed’’ from chaos theory in organizational studies. Many of these interpretations display sentiments broadly congruent with a ‘‘postmodern’’ approach to organization. Indeed chaos theory itself is presented as part of a similar postmodern shift within natural science. However, these sentiments have been subject to stinging criticis...

Even though the question as to whether optimal organizational structures exist has been asked repeatedly, organization theory has not been able to answer it in general form. Over time, several useful heuristic principles to direct the structuring of organizations have emerged. Moreover, powerful models, inspired by general systems theory and cybernetics, have been elaborated, which establish th...

In any but the smallest human organizations, no one person has all of the information relevant to the organization’s activities, nor can he directly control all of those activities. This is so even in organizations that are described as highly ‘centralized’. It follows that individual members of the organization I shall call them agents have some freedom to choose their own actions. If, in addi...

Quantum theory of self-organization based on the idea that quantum jump serves as the basic step of self-organization, is represented. The notion of self and the identification of self as the fundamental statistical ensemble gives totally new meaning for the concept of selforganization as a generation of hierarchies of selves. Zero modes of the configuration space geometry, whose existence deri...

This essay borrows the construct of “heedful interrelating” from Weick and Roberts’s (1993) study of aircraft carrier flight decks, and uses the construct to analyze the social processes that structure contemporary scholarship in organization theory. We argue that organization theory often operates as a lowheed discipline, in which scholars take minimal heed of the contributions of their fellow...