[Refereed Article] Organization Studies, 1997, vol. 18, n° 1, pp. 119-143, with Raymond-Alain Thietart.
We believe that organizational actors, through their actions, create their own context. Once enacted, the context tends to develop a dynamic of its own, which escapes the control of the organization. As a consequence, it shapes the future of the organization. To illustrate our point, we study a crisis that we believe is a case in point of a non-desirable situation which might in fact be created and perpetuated by the same organizational actors who try to solve it. In this paper, results show that the observed crisis is deterministically chaotic, i. e. it exhibits an apparent random behavior which was created through tightly coupled actions and dynamic interactions.