Many authors have stressed the existence of continuous processes of convergence and divergence, stability and instability, evolution and revolution in every organization. This article argues that these processes are embedded in organizational characteristics and in the way organizations are managed. Organizations are presented as nonlinear dynamic systems subject to forces of stability and forces of instability which push them toward chaos. When in a chaotic domain, organizations are likely to exhibit the qualitative properties of chaotic systems. Several of these properties—sensitivity to initial conditions, discreteness of change, attraction to specific configurations, structural invariance at different scales and irreversibility—are used to establish six propositions. First, because of the coupling of counteracting forces, organizations are potentially chaotic. Second, the path from organizational stability to chaos follows a discrete process of change. Third, when the organization is in the chaotic domain, small changes can have big consequences that cannot be predicted in the long term. Fourth, from chaos, new stabilities emerge—the strange attractors—which are assimilated to organizational configurations. Fifth, similar patterns should be found at different scales. Finally, during one single organizational life span or between two different organizations similar actions should never lead to the same result.

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We propose a theory to manage the uneasy relation between strategic choice, chance, and determinism (or inevitability). To do so, we locate arguments in intellectual history that have a clear bearing on this relation. We introduce and defend four conjectures that outline the relationship between each of them and their comparative significance. The paper thus aims at achieving three objectives: (a) to articulate a philosophically sustainable theory of strategic choice that corroborates experience (without being induced by it); (b) to synthesize what remains one of the most sustained debates in strategy, namely the nature, role, and relation of choice, chance and determinism; and (c) to contribute to developing a foundation for multilevel research. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this article we conjecture that organizational actors, through their actions, create their own context. Once initiated, the context tends to develop a dynamic of its own, which escapes the control of the organizational actors. In consequence, the context becomes the determining factor of the actors' initiatives. Voluntarism has created its own determinism which will eventually shape the organizational actors' futures. To illustrate our view, we study a crisis which we believe may exemplify a situation induced and perpetuated by the same organizational actors who tried to handle it. To support this thesis, we attempt to show that the observed crisis is chaotic. Our results reveal that deterministic chaos cannot be rejected as an explanation of the dynamics of the situation. The crisis exhibits an apparently random behaviour which, we believe, is deterministically created through tightly coupled actions and dynamic interactions among actors. Once in the chaotic state, actors cannot control the process they have contributed to create. The context becomes all powerful and determining.