The Five Management Paradigms

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how organisational science can be usefully conceived in terms of five key paradigms, based upon different sets of meta theoretical assumptions about the nature of social science and the nature of society. In particular, it discusses how R. Whittington (2001) devised a schema that aimed to map organisations through the classical, evolutionary, processual, systemic and critical management style paradigms, providing management theories in their institutional and historical contexts. The five concepts - classical, evolutionary, processual, systemic and critical are critically discussed and applied to theory.

From the Paper:

"The classical paradigm holds the view that there are a number of guiding principles that create an organisation and the jobs within it. It assumes that the application of rules and authority creates order and predictability. It ignores the very human qualities that make up the people employed in the organisation and does not allow for the application of individuality in the exercise of work responsibility (Morgan, 1997). Essentially, it is a bureaucratic, top-down hierarchical approach to management that has its associations with the military."

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