ECONOMİCS AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCES THROUGH THE LENSES OF CHAOSAND QUANTUM THEORIES

Year 2001, Volume: 2 Issue: 1, - , 01.03.2001

Murat Ali Dulupçu Murat Okçu

Abstract

Social sciences have been structured by a “mechanistic worldview” inherited from Newton and his opus magnum “Principia.” This worldview has also a profound impact on economics and management sciences. That is to say, organizations and economies have been defined in terms of their strict relationships with cause and effect nature of socioeconomic and managerial phenomena. Predictability –or, determinism- has created a unique understanding for economics and management sciences where binary categories were used to define obects like inflation-deflation in economics, or supervisor-subordinate in management, what may be named as “bivalent science.” But, two major developments –quantum theory and chaos theory-challenge the basic concepts of mechanistic, bivalent science and its reflections on economics and management sciences. Paper aims to trace recent developments in two related fiellds economics and management sciences affected by the “paradigm shift” in physical sciances in terms of ontological, methodological and metaphorical aspects.

Keywords

Quantum Theory, Chaos Theory, Newtonian Worldview, Determinism, Butterfly Effect, Pop-management, Mechanistic Worldview.