Business management seems to be a task whose complexity and difficulty just keeps growing. In this article, we present one of the major engines of this complexity - one that seems worthy of more attention than it has received until now - the simultaneous presence of two antagonic approaches to management that exert a strong normative pull over this activity. Using a dialectic model of theory building, an organization/strategy model resulting from the synthesis/confrontation between these approaches is proposed. This model appears to be both sufficiently close to managerial practice to be labeled as descriptive, and sufficiently distant to still hold some normative power.
synthesis; dialectic; organization theory