Book review: Paradigm Shifts in Management Theory

Paradigm Shifts in Management Theory arrives at a critical juncture in management studies, where scholars and practitioners alike confront the inadequacies of traditional models in grappling with the complexities of organizational life.This volume ambitiously positions itself as both a theoretical reappraisal and a practical guide to navigating what Thomas Kuhn famously termed "paradigm shifts" in science (p. 1).The book's ambition lies not merely in recounting management history but in critically interrogating how epistemological assumptions, methodological commitments and disciplinary boundaries shape what we accept as valid knowledge.By synthesizing diverse schools of thought while reflecting on their limitations, the authors provide a text that is simultaneously scholarly and accessible.At its core, the book advances the argument that management science is inherently multiparadigmatic, resisting attempts to be confined to a single dominant model.The opening chapters trace the roots of management as a discipline -drawing upon sociology, psychology and economics -and situate it in relation to power, decision-making and rationality (pp.7-9).Here, the authors engage Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic violence" and Herbert Simon's "bounded rationality," showing how management processes are enmeshed in social structures, cognitive constraints and cultural values.This framing highlights the epistemological richness of management theory, but also its inherent vulnerability to competing interpretations.The authors are careful not to reduce management to a mechanistic pursuit of efficiency; instead, they foreground its status as a science of action, contested by divergent traditions.The middle sections present the book's most substantive contribution: a systematic exploration of dominant and alternative paradigms.The discussion of functionalistneopositivist-systems epistemology (NFS) demonstrates how quantitative models, verificationism and system equilibrium once dominated the field, promising predictive power and generalizability (pp.21-23).Yet this "common sense" paradigm is subjected to critique for its mechanistic assumptions, tendency toward hyper-rationality and blindness to conflict and inequality.By contrast, the interpretive-symbolic paradigm is presented as a corrective, emphasizing meaning-making, social construction and the cognitive role of language (pp.22-24).Critical Management Studies (CMS) further challenges the status quo by foregrounding power, domination and symbolic violence (pp.23-24), while postmodernist perspectives -drawing on Derrida, Foucault and Baudrillard -destabilize universal claims to truth, albeit at the cost of coherence (pp.25-26).These chapters succeed in mapping the intellectual pluralism of management theory, though at times the breadth of coverage dilutes the depth of analysis for each paradigm.