The Routledge Companion to Improvisation in Organizations

17 Improvisation as a design for organizational emergence

Lukas Zenk, Ralf Wetzel, and Markus F. Peschl

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171768-22

Introduction

This chapter starts with the observation that classic management theory, in its mainstream threads, understands organizations as machine-like, deterministic social systems that can be steered deliberately. While social-science-based studies in organization theory have increasingly pointed to the self-referential, self-organizational, and emergent nature of organizations, such descriptions and approaches have barely made it to the mainstream discussions. In parallel, although the existence of emergent processes and phenomena in organizations is now widely acknowledged, most organizations continue ...