Challenging interdisciplinarity in the administrative science: the case of Entropy

Abstract

The stimulus of science and education to interdisciplinary efforts dates back decades. It seems that the movement has gained momentum and, in this dynamic, it is increasingly likely to be exposed to a discourse that has the advantages of interdisciplinarity and says nothing about its risks. Putting interdisciplinarity at stake was among the motivations for this qualitative and descriptive essay, which dealt with empirical data having a bibliographic and documentary nature, supplemented by interviews. The strategic objective was investigating people’s understanding within administrative science on the magnitude entropy, observed in the General Systems Theory (GST), which is seen as an interdisciplinary proposition with a current impact, sixty years after its introduction. It was concluded that Administration faces problems when working with this magnitude, because, while knowledge generated through the instrumental application of statistical interpretation of entropy realized itself as concrete, interpretations on entropy having a thermodynamic nature are likely to dispute, and they were ignored within the period, with negative and substantial implications, since entropy does not explain organizational disorder, such as embodied by Administration. This, though not proven, must be linked to the inability to deal with key concepts and laws imported from other disciplines, which, extrapolating, should be enough to make relative the combination of knowledge between knowledge fields: there are risks that interdisciplinarity produce and reproduce mistakes.