Organization theory as ideological battleground in the year 2000

Organization theorists have always been divided among departments of political science, public administration, business, and so on, but they have traditionally shared a common acceptance of the natural science model as the vehicle for building new knowledge. The growth of nontraditional approaches to organization theory has led to conflict between mainstream and dissenting theorists on two levels: First, is the choice of topics to be studied a value-neutral decision, or is it a subtle way of promoting a traditional ideological agenda? Second, is the scientific method itself a vehicle for subtly introducing a bias into organization theory scholarship? The gap between mainstream and nontraditional scholars is wide and becoming wider; sadly, the prospects are bleak for a synthesis of these two approaches.