Understanding Environmental Turbulence: A Dynamic Model

During the last years a debate has raged within the field of Strategic Management between a rational view (IO, Positioning School, Strategic Planning, Cybernetics) and a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) view (Emergent strategies,complexity theory, chaos theory) of the field. This paper attempts to shed some light around an issue which must be clarified for the better development of such debate. Being the CAS view a response to the new realities of environmental turbulence, it was discussed which are the behavioral sources of such turbulence in order to clarify if such phenomena is a qualitatively new reality of business environments, or simply a contingent but circumstantial feature affecting many industries. For this purpose, the authors introduced and applied a theoretical model that conceives the strategy of the firm, as a dialectic process in a situation of conflict.