Expertise and organizational developments: technological revolutions projected as bipolar 'evolutionary vector' and 'entropy distribution' continuum

摘要

Despite, or perhaps because of, an immense expansion of pluralistic expert knowledge about organizational development, we lack an integrated and generic frame of orientation. Hence, the decline of once pioneering companies and the chaotic collapse of nation states defied prediction, including the spectacular cases of the East-European economies. Serious socio-economic upheavals are hardly preventable so long as they remain unforeseeable. This lack of analytical understanding presents a disturbing paradox for an era that is hyped as the information age, with unprecedented knowledge accumulation and inventive capacity. The paper considers how unpredicted massive failure or unsustainable development in ecological, economic, technological and other areas typically becomes a source of social stress, conflict and disorder that threatens civilized life.