The term, postmodern science, can be found in the hard sciences, beginning in the early 1960s with Matson (1964); Ferre (1976) expanded the concept as did Toulmin (1982a,b) and Prigogine and Stengers (1984), followed by Griffith (1988a,b), Sheldrake (1990), Oelschlaeger (1991), and Sassower (1995). Best and Kellner (1997) have an excellent review of this interdisciplinary development, and some implications for a POS. Cilliers (1998) also does an excellent job relating complexity theory to postmodern organization.

Some definitions: POS's are transdisciplinary. POS emerges from the paradigm shifts happening in the "hard" sciences. POS is more than the architectural theory, and more than just deconstruction, or the application of rhetorical studies. First, some contemporary postmodern science definitions:

This is the mainstream movement of postmodern science, and I think what is driving both MOS's and POS's the recognize their complementarily. POS's have many contesting, fragmented, positions, just as any new science. Most are quite conservative, wanting only to help MOS's to negotiate the postmodern turn that quantum physics, Einstein relativity, and information science has pronounced. It is all too easy for the science war folks to poke fun and disdain at POS's, to set out extreme case example to make it appear that MOS's is not changing and is not already inter-mingled with POS's. Each is a multiplicity of theories, methods, and persons. People are crisscrossing from one side to the other. And I think it is not POS bringing chaos, complexity and relativity to OS, I think the ground is moving beneath us all. To me, POS's are the interdisciplinary merger of science and social theory. It does not dualize theory and practice, it promotes such POS's as postmodern organization ecology, where quantitative and qualitative analyses intermingle without much conflict that I am aware of. POS is a critique of scientism, not science, technocracy, not technology. It is not that we do not theorize the "real" it is just we look at how representation, simulation, hyperreality, and spectacle become for social actors, more "real" than reality itself. Bohm (1988), Gfriffin (1988a,b), Prigoginie and Stengers (1984), Toulmin (1982a,b), and Best and Kellner (1997) are making positive application of postmodern science. The later have thoroughly documented not only the postmodern turn in science, but in organization theory and are stressing the relation of organizations as spectacles to ecology. In working, in particular, with Steven Best (1996), I am studying how ecology and organization science is coming together in fields such as accounting, law, and marketing. POS has "many faces, not all of which are hostile or destructive to scientific norms" (Best & Kellner, 1997: 241).

Logical positivism has imploded from within OS. I don't think POS's helped it along much. I propose interdisciplinary dialogue on theory, method, and social action. I am not saying every postmodernist and every modernist will do this. Most will. The contribution of social construction theory is different than that of postmodern theory. Many seem to confuse a Bishop Berkeley variant of social construction (the world is in my head, and when we dialogue forget the problems, that's too negative) to a Berger and Luckmann (1966) version which looks at the reification into what gets internalized as objective reality, but which shifts, cracks, and reforms, mutable like every bit of reality that is (Hatch, 1997 does an excellent review of this area). Stanley Fish gave this reply to the Sokal (1996) hoax of pretending to be postmodern:

Social construction revisions are to objectivity, embedding it in social, historical, economic, and linguistic contexts. This means look at the embedded nature of science.

For POS's, it means looking at the political economy, at the ways in which our science is a tool of government, military, corporate, and religious interests. I do not think either postmodernism, social construction, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonialism, or critical hermeneutics poses a threat to scientific method. Each calls into question the ways in which theory, method, and institution are constructed. I do not think that POS's means that MOS's will give up its identity (See Best & Kellner, 1997: 237-8). It is a focal point; it has an appeal to falsification, verification, evidence, deduction and induction, as well as experimental design. I do not know of even on POS who want to take that away. I know a few who do not care, but most want to do their own methods, and include some that I listed.

My Disney article (Boje, 1995) in its original submission, had several quantitative analyses of coded text, complete with graphs, contrasting Eisner and Disney story-styles. The reviewers decided to focus me on the qualitative. I like to do both. I do not know of a single social constructionist and only one postmodernist who denies there is a real world. I for one look at entropy, the limits to and decline of the planet's natural resources. I write about the things you say all postmodernist ignore, the "reality" of sweatshops and downsizing.

MOT assumes a "fixed, immutable, absolute truth, precisely the conception skillfully undermined by postmodern critique" (Best & Kellner, 1997: 236), but also by paradigm shifts in science. MOS's like POS's, and all interdisciplinary points between is subject to paradigm shifts, revisions to sacred texts, and I think with this Pfeffer, and most of OS would agree.