| Abstract: | Reviews the book, Managing the unknowable: Strategic boundaries between order and chaos in organizations by Ralph D. Stacey (1992). This book should have a prominent label on the cover Warning, reading this book can be hazardous to all the sacred beliefs that you have about organizations as systems; organizational development, effectiveness and growth; and learning and innovation in organizations. While Stacey draws upon the work of other more mainstream systems theorists such as Senge (1990, reviewed in CPJ, Fall 1993), Miller (1990), and Hamel and Prahalad (1989), he extends General Systems Theory (GST) (von Bertalanffy, 1950; Berrien, K. 1968) in new exciting and icon-breaking directions. Senge's extension of system's thinking is mostly evolutionary, granted, elegantly evolutionary, but not a radical break from the sort of systems theory that forms the backbone of organizational development and most of organization consultation theory. This is not to say that Stacey's aim is to attack or invalidate more traditional system's theory. The theories of Einstein and Quantum Physics, were not introduced to attack or diminish the brilliance and usefulness of Newtonian theories of physics. These theories, after all, proved quite useful and valid in many conditions conditions that approximated closed energy systems. When these closed energy models proved inadequate or too error-prone to be useful, newer theories were developed that either extended or superseded the older, now less useful, theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
