A new paradigm for learning in organizations

✍ Scribed by Neal E. Chalojsky

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 425 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1044-8004
• DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.3920070309

✦ Synopsis

the author of Leadership and the New Science (19921, has noted how "each of us lives and works in organizations designed from 17th century images of the universe. The universe of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon was a seductive place filled with clockwork images promising us prediction and reliability, teaching us to view everything, including ourselves, as machines" (Wheatley, 1993, p. 2). The worldview and value system that lie at the basis of this image of the universe were formulated in their essential outlines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Capra, 1982). Before 1500, the dominant worldview in most civilizations was based on a science paradigm that was very different from the paradigm for contemporary science. The medieval paradigm was based on both reason and faith, and its main goal was to understand the meaning and significance of things rather than to predict and control them. This outlook changed radically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The idea of an organic, living, and spiritual universe was replaced by the idea of the world as a machine, a view brought about by the revolutionary changes in physics and astronomy at that time. This mechanistic science was based on a Note: I would like to thank Sharon Confessore, assistant professor at George Washington University, for her thoughtful review, and the many GWU graduate students who gave me feedback on earlier versions.

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