?Not Too Good to be True?: A Proposal to Further Benefit from Emergence in Management Research

Emergence is inherent to organizational life and design. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, emergence has been appraised as a con-ceptual avenue that surpassed the limitations of traditional thinking and epistemology. In this essay, I suggest that, despite its relevance and popularity among management scholars, emergence has remained underused. I rely on Kuhn's view (1962) to better understand the rea-sons for this paradox and propose some practical avenues to improve our understanding and use of the concept. This essay has three objectives: (1) to demonstrate that emergence is relevant to better understanding organizations; (2) to explain why emergence remains underused in management and organization theory (MOT); and (3) to propose practical guidelines to further rely on the concept of emergence.