The ‘essences’ of the fifth discipline: Or where does senge stand to view the world?

This paper tries to establish the ‘theories in use’ that lie behind the injunctions for a systems practice embodied in the Fifth Discipline. The basic assumptions of the paradigm are split into four: about epistemology, about the nature of human motivations, about traditional organizational practice, and finally about the necessary preconditions for a new form of organizational practice, namely ‘learning organization’. The paper concludes that the implicit ‘theory in use’ contains assumptions that are capable of developing in contradictory ways and that the choice of boundaries sharpens attention to intra-boundary events at the expense of perception of the relationships between the chosen system and its broader social and political context. Despite its claims the Fifth Discipline is essentially an extension of ‘scientific management’ and is primarily a justification for a new form of managerial hegemony.