Social Issues in Management for the 21st Century:
Stepping Outside 20th Century Paradigm

Sandra A. Waddock

The Wallace E. Carroll School of Management
Boston College

Chestnut Hill, MA 02167

Introductory Thoughts

The first thought that crossed my mind three years ago when I was elected program chair was "Oh no! Now I'll have to give the division chair's address. Maybe by then we'll have canceled it." As you can see from my presence at the podium, this wish was not to be granted. I spent the next two years agonizing about what the topic should be. What could I say that would be meaningful and express something of significance?

Although I had long ago decided on a general focus for this talk, the inspiration for the way it eventually shaped up came on a plane as I flew back from Central Europe last summer. A group of US faculty had just completed a workshop in which we had challenged management faculty from 14 Central and Eastern European nations not to simply adopt American or Western European models of management education, but rather to build their own, to think through the management paradigm as it applied to their unique situation.

We challenged them to focus their ideas on economies in transition rather than the already-industrialized economy of the US. We challenged them to begin a long-term process of rethinking management--and how managers are educated--so that they do not simply repeat our mistakes in their own countries. In that workshop I was struck by the difficulties we all face in stepping beyond our mental models, in moving beyond our current paradigm to new ways of thinking.

Then, on the plane, I began reading Hazel Henderson's then new book How to Build a Win-Win World. Combined with a great deal of other reading I had been doing in chaos theory, the new physics, biology, astronomy, and related sciences, and my own belief that our work is fundamentally about building a better society, ideas began to flow. Suddenly, I was writing notes all over the flyleaf of the book, notes that became the basis of the first (now many times revised) draft of this talk.

The mix of messages that I want to convey to you today seemed to blossom. Over the past year my work in a major new collaborative initiative at Boston College, called the Center for Child, Family, and Community Partnerships, has continued and expanded. In tasting the special flavor of actually doing collaborative work with colleagues from different disciplines and professions, I have come to believe that it is critically important that we all try to expand our mental models, our assumptions, the paradigms in which we work in ways that I will explain shortly. Moving beyond our current frames, we can move toward new thinking, researching, speaking, and writing, and ultimately making a difference in our world.

One of the attractive features of SIM, for me, has always been its eclecticism, which allows us all such wonderful broad scope in which to apply our knowledge and skills. This very eclecticism combined with the scope of problems we address has sometimes left us subject to attacks of lack of rigor or marginality and have moved us toward a positivist model of empiricism and thought. Yet I think we risk irrelevance, inaction, and insignificance if we venture too far into the now dominant scientific paradigm. The really important issues facing us as the 21st century approaches are too cumbersome, too time-consuming, too controversial, or too difficult to fit into the accepted paradigms of quantitative and empirical study that gain us rapid and multiple publications in scholarly journals.

Twenty-first century issues will not be neatly broken down into component parts by broadly accepted empirical methods and fractionalization of technologies, industries, or disciplines. They will demand to be understood as wholes because actions in one part of the system affect the rest, and I mean all the wholes, self, other, organization, cultures, society. We can only understand these wholes to some extent by looking at the wholes and not just the parts. We can only understand the complexity of social systems when we understand that they rest in ambiguities and paradoxes, when we discard the either/or thinking that characterizes positivist science. We can only deal with really big issues--what later I will term "matters of public importance to people in community"--when we know that our construction and interpretation of them will make a difference. When we are willing to take the risks associated with such an activist stance. But I jump ahead.

Thinking thusly, I came to a conclusion about the message I want to convey. It is this: becauseour work matters, we need a new paradigm that shifts the way we understand what we do and the problems on which we focus. In what follows, I am going to argue several things:

1) That we need to select our work with care because it does and will have impacts: it matters.

2) That social scientists like us need to free ourselves of an outdated atomistic, Newtonian, break-problems-into-their-smallest-components mindset. And

3) That we need to adopt a new scientific paradigm that is fraught with chaos and uncertainty, that is holistic and systems oriented, and that engages us deeply in action.

4) That because we do make a difference we must recognize that our work is not and cannot be value free.

If we proactively engage our world and its problems from a much more difficult though arguably potentially more productive systems-perspective--an ecological or relational perpsective--in order to make a difference, frequently this stance will mean engaging ourselves in the change process while simultaneously studying it.

Looking Inward

I want to start this journey by questioning what we are now about and what we need to be about by considering the name of the division, "social issues in management." What does this name tell us? Obviously, our definitions will vary, but here's mine.

Social, from the Latin socialis, already tells us that what we are about is relationships (of course, we knew that; we have always known that SIM's best attribute was the wine and cheese party). More seriously, the dictionary definition that comes closest to what I suspect we mean by social issues is "of or pertaining to human society," and "of or pertaining to the life and relations of human beings living in a community." Social, then, fundamentally is about relationship and community. I will interpret this definition to mean that social connotes the positive construction of communities.
And issues? The term "issues," from the Latin exire, to go out, tells us that what we are about (among many possible definitions) is "matters of public importance," and, in another connotation, about the product, effect, result or consequence of some thing or some action. Ah, then, social issues equals impacting or affecting--or going out to--matters of public importance in relationship and community!

There's more, social issues in management also involves management. Manage derives from the Latin mano or hand. Managing thus involves the act of handling, bringing about, succeeding in accomplishing. This positive sense of managing is fundamentally about action, bringing something into being or doing.

Management can also mean in its more negative connotations, to dominate or influence others, or to wield as in a weapon or a tool. Thus, in the positive interpretation, SIM is about handling social issues. In the more negative frames SIM might be about the study of the domination of some groups by other, more powerful groups in the life and important affairs of communities. We sometimes frame things this way inadvertently, as in the term stakeholder management, where the implicit message is that stakeholders are there to be managed rather being equal partners in a social enterprise.

Putting these three (positive) definitions together it is clear that the founders of our field may have had in mind something of the holistic and activist agenda I am advocating:

Social Issues in Management

"To bring about or handle matters of public importance with consequences for the life and relations of human beings living in community."

In sum, SIM is about the impact that important public matters have on the affairs of people living in communities of various sorts, shapes, and sizes. SIM fundamentally is about community, about constructing the relationships that are important to human beings and are the essence of society and of life, civil society. Since we cannot study things without changing them, we are inherently about making a difference in these communities.

Beyond the 20th Century Scientific Paradigm

Back to science. The scientific paradigm of the 20th century involved a basic fundamentalism, an atomistic perception of the world, and what one observer (Overton, forthcoming) has called the Cartesian split, a logic of either/or. By this paradigm, objects of study, problems or issues, can--and should--be broken down into their smallest component parts to be understood. The thinking has been that with this fragmentation, we will finally find the basic unit of analysis and eventually be able to put the pieces back into an integrated whole.

This atomistic perspective, resting as it does on linear mathematics, attempts to reduce complexity and uncertainty to immutable and universal principles where predictability is known. There is supposed to be a "there" there. This classic Newtonian science tells us that researchers are and can be objective observers operating in a world where their work does not affect the outcomes of what is studied. And as objective observers, in an ideal sense, we are supposed to be value neutral.

Not only is the Newtonian paradigm is increasingly dated, but also in the translation of this paradigm from physical to social science, we have, I believe, been misled. Many of us already recognize that the scientific model represents a well defined and accepted value system, albeit one that has become so embedded in our thinking that we are hard-pressed to see beyond its boundaries (Capra, 1983, 1996; Overton, forthcoming; Senge, 1990; c.f., Eisler, 1988). Similarly, embedded in existing social paradigms, western thinking has come to accept the dominance, power, and status of males over females, of rights and privilege over responsibilities and community, of hierarchy and competition over partnership and collaboration, of rich over poor, of white over color, and of money and economics over almost everything else. Yet, as Capra (1995) points out, the emergence of life on this planet is now understood by biologists and physical scientists to have resulted far more from cooperation and mutuality--from relationship--than from competition "red in tooth and claw" as the philosophers would have had it.

Importantly, physical scientists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, chaos theorists, astronomers, and others now tell us that there is no such thing as objectivity: the act of observing quite literally creates the "reality" observed (Kauffman, 1995; Capra, 1995). In a very real sense, the act of observing brings into being what is observed. And what is observed is, in its essence, energy. Because life and matter are comprised wholly of energy (and there is no fundamental unit of matter), there is no 'there, there." Energy in the form of light has the paradoxical quality of being both wave and particle. The energy of life comprises relationships in what physicist Fritjof Capra (1995) calls the "web of life." This energy of life and the life it comprises is thus inherently embued with paradox.

That the web of life consists of essentially paradoxical qualities (e.g., that light is both particle and wave) simultaneously present, means that ambiguity and uncertainty are at the core of life, social and physical (not to mention emotional, intellectual, or spiritual). Paradoxes manifest in processes that are fundamentally chaotic. The mathematical understanding of chaos gives us patterns and relationships, not matter and certainty. Chaos suggests relationship and interdependence, a complexity fraught with tension, not linear predictability. Chaos theory tells us that small changes matter, small initiatives, properly leveraged, can make a difference.

As social scientists, we also need to live in the tensions created by the paradoxes inherent in what we study. A colleague of mine terms these the tension of the opposites (Leaver, personal communication). Social systems, for example, require for their success "stability and change, order and freedom, tradition and innovation" (Capra, 1995, p. 303), hierarchy and democracy, competition and cooperation. As social scientists, we too will have to come to embrace the risks posed by simultaneous danger and opportunity, of opposites existing in paradox, and of attempting to understand the parts while simultaneously paying attention to the whole. To tap the opportunities we face, we will have to live in what management researchers Collins and Porras (1995) call the "genius of the and" instead of the "tyranny of the or" (see also, Austrom & Lad, 1989).

A 21st Century Paradigm for SIM

In short, we need to move beyond the 18th, 19th, and 20th century Cartesian-Newtonian scientific paradigm that presently binds us to begin thinking in new ways. We need a new paradigm. But this new paradigm is not the traditional SIM paradigm for which we have been endlessly searching, which, if we could but find it, would arrange matters neatly and manageably. Rather, it is a radically new paradigm that accepts wholes, mutual causality, chaos, complexity, and systems views of the world. It is a paradigm fundamentally about relationships. This new paradigm takes us more deeply into the mess, beyond that which we can manage easily. Further, it is a paradigm that accepts that we scholars are embedded inextricably in the mess, interdependently with others we study.

We need to continue to be--and arguably become more active as--what Ed Freeman in his division chair's address called "crits," critics who can take a position that attempts to study the system as a whole, an outsider-looking-in perspective. It is difficult to be "crits" if our perspectives are limited by the now-dated strict "scientific" method, focused in "matter" in the material sense, and largely reined in by domestic boundaries and points of view, by the need to focus only on readily and quantitatively measurable things. It is difficult to be "crits" if we are so deliberate in our effort to be "value neutral" that where we stand and what we stand for is muddied in academic jargon and incomprehensible except to other scholars. Yet can we afford not to be "crits" if we believe that our words and actions as scholar/teachers do matter? To be sure, the pressures of the real world of academia--for tenure, promotion, internal recognition--seem to demand that we stay within the dominant scientific paradigm of objectivity and value neutrality, but is this even feasible any longer when scientists have themselves moved beyond classical science?

SIM's first 25 years, which were reflected upon so well by Steve Wartick last year and John Mahon the year before, have been a time of field definition and development, a time in which we met many challenges. We have reason to celebrate these developments, which have allowed the field to reach a degree of maturity in its focus and scholarship that early scholars could only have dreamed about. This growth has moved us toward the status of actually being a field, with SIM and a separate association and a flagship journal. Indeed, some of our scholars are now publishing in the highest ranked academic journals. As Steve noted, acceptance has meant that other disciplines sometime "steal" our topics.

Indeed, so far have we come that it has been several years since anyone has searched in one of these speeches for the SIM paradigm. I don't think that this gap means we have necessarily found the sought-after paradigm. Instead it may mean that we are becoming comfortable standing in the ambiguity of no overarching SIM paradigm, standing on the outside looking at the many problems that the breadth and eclecticism of what we study allows, without having to have one approach. So let's allow others to steal our traditional topics because it means their importance has been recognized by others. We have exciting new challenges ahead.

The emerging scientific paradigm recognizes that the observed and the observer cannot readily be disentangled, that we always affect what we observe, arguably more dramatically in social sciences than has already been acknowledged by physicists. The emerging paradigm, which is far from complete or completely accepted, inherently acknowledges that the world does not work in neat linear cause and effect patterns that are readily recognized. It recognizes that there are circularities, iterations, uncertainties, ambiguities that will never become certain because they exist in the fundamental chaos that inheres in self-organizing systems in the natural--and social--world, far from rather than close to equilibrium (Kauffman, 1995; Capra, 1996).

What I am calling the 21st century paradigm suggests that businesses and other institutions in society are natural parts of a larger system and that there are systems within systems that need to be begun to be understood systemically rather than in the atomized, fragmented, and linear fashion characteristic of Newtonian science and hard-core, positivist empiricism. Fundamentally, the new paradigm is relational, ecological, if you will. Let me somewhat extensively quote theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra (1995), for he says it far better than I could: