Tracing back the signs of complexity thinking in management: Mary Parker Follett re-visited

Abstract

The modernist stream of thought had immensely influenced the theories of organizational management in the early twentieth century. Equilibriumoriented and universally valid reductionist approaches viewed organizations as machines that could be broken down into pieces, hence, behavior of the whole could be understood from the knowledge of its parts. Mary Parker Follett, owing to her valuable contribution ahead of her time, emerges as a prominent figure in the history of management thought and organizational studies. Most of what is written and discussed today in the field of organization studies and management such as power, authority, group dynamics, leadership, coordination and governance have been derived from Mary Parker Follett’s corpus. She had built the bridge between complexity thinking and management almost four decades before the introduction of nonlinear dynamics to scientific research. Although the actual terminology of nonlinear dynamics was not employed in her postulations Mary Parker Follett’s works provide profound insights for the field of management under the prevailing global circumstances where the impact of repeated attempts to design the ‘whole’ seems to have been neutralized since it is barely enough to predict the outcomes of the upward-causality from the knowledge of the parts. A thorough analysis of her writings reveals that she had accurately anticipated the problems associated with the contemporary organizational settings as well as incorporating nonlinear dynamics into management thinking. This conceptual paper intends to draw inspiration from Mary Parker Follett’s works with special emphasis on the links between her conceptions and complexity thinking in the field of management.