Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: 2nd September 2019
List Price: £10 /US$12.50
Format: Paperback
Extent: 60pp.
Size: 14 x 21.6 cm (8½x5½")
ISBN: 978-1-911193-61-6​
Tags: Systems Thinking, Power and Love, Organization Development, organization paradigms, understanding organizations, OSF, organic systems framework
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The Organic Systems Framework
 
A New Paradigm for Understanding and Intervening in Organizational Life

Barry Oshry

A proposal for the FIRST OD paradigm

The object of this booklet is twofold:
 
  1. to establish that despite the frequent references to paradigms and paradigm shifts in the management and organization literature, there are no scientific paradigms as Thomas Kuhn has described in his landmark essay.
  2. to make the case for the Organic Systems Framework (OSF) being a legitimate candidate for paradigm status, one from which research that extends, elaborates, tests, and applies the framework follows naturally.

About the book (part 1)

Barry Oshry makes a compelling case for his first contention, beginning as follows:

Despite the obligatory references to Thomas Kuhn’s work, there is probably no field that talks more about – yet knows less about – scientific paradigms and paradigm shifts (as Kuhn uses the terms) than the field of management, management theory, organization development, systems thinking and so forth.

In this field, paradigm is most often used to refer to some new way (generally the author’s) of looking at management, leadership or other aspects of organization life; and proposals for paradigm shifts – from hierarchy to self-directed, from patriarchy to matriarchy – seem to be based less in science than in theology or politics. My intention here is not to denigrate such contributions, which I believe are extremely valuable in stimulating thinking about organizational life… but to distinguish them from science.

In science, paradigms share two essential characteristics:
  1. the achievement of the creator of the paradigm “was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity” and
  2. the new paradigm “was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve”. 

“Normal science” is what is carried on within the paradigm. Kuhn defines it as, “Research firmly based upon one or more scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.” 

Is there such an acknowledged foundation in our field? I think not. On the subject, Kuhn says, “...it remains an open question what parts of social science have yet acquired such paradigms at all.” He goes on to say, “History suggests that the road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous.” 
About the book (part 2)
The author then sets about making the case for the OSF, starting as follows:
  1. Seeing human systems as organic wholes. OSF fits in and complements the field of general systems theory in which (as Capra says) “a system has come to mean an integrated whole whose essential properties arise from the relationships between its parts [and the processes of the whole], and ‘systems thinking,’ the understanding of a phenomenon within the context of a larger whole.” 
OSF meets this enlarged definition; it has a language for describing systems as wholes; and it is a framework that allows us to understand and influence the widest range of system phenomena: how, as system members, we experience ourselves, our relationships with others,  the systems we are a part of, other systems, and the relationships  among systems; and it allows us to take more informed actions based on these experiences.
 
  1. The structure and processes of the whole. In OSF, we describe the whole as a pattern of systemic relationships (what the whole is) and as a pattern of systemic processes (what the whole does).
 
These are explored at some length oin the rest of the book.

Readership

Setting out clearly and succinctly his theories of:
  • Power and Love
  • Tops, Middles and Bottoms
  • How whole systems individuate, integrate, differentiate and homogenize...

...Barry Oshry makes a compelling case for the Organic Systems Framework to be treated as the first organization/management paradigm.

This, then, is a book for academics, researchers and students of management, organization and leadership theory and practice.

Read more:

About the author

By the same author:

Encounters with the Other
​
Context Context Context

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