Section introduction: Pluralism in management science

What if human organizations were complicated rather than complex? The simple answer to this question is that the possibility of an all-embracing Theory of Management would almost certainly exist. Why is this? What is the difference between complicated and complex that leads to theoretical monism from the former and theoretical pluralism from the latter?

A very common (but not particularly useful) description of a complex system is that such systems comprise a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts. By this definition the modern computer would be a complex system. A modern computer is crammed full of transistors which all respond nonlinearly to their input(s). Despite this ‘complexity’ the average PC does not show signs of emergence or self-organization; it simply follows the instructions given to it by its programmer. Even the language in which it is programmed is rather uninteresting. Although there are many programming languages, they can all be translated into each other with relative ease, i.e., computer languages are commensurable with each other. There also exists a universal language into which all such languages can be translated without loss - we call it ‘logic’. More often though, if a programmer wants to use a language very close to the universal language of computing, assembler is used as this at least contains concepts that are more readily used in writing programs. This is then translated into machine code (which is based on Boolean logic) - writing directly in Boolean logic would be nigh on impossible for any human programmer. The computer cannot choose the way it interprets the program, it cannot rewrite the program (unless it is programmed to in a prescribed manner), and it cannot get fed up with running programmes and go to the pub. So, what is it about the modern computer that prevents it from being a complex system, but rather a complicated system?