For the past few decades functionalism have dominated the epistemological arena in organizational science. However, the positivist-inspired movement of functionalism have proved inadequate for explaining the radical transformations of organizations. During the last decade dialectical theory has been starting to be heard. This paper identifies the dialectic as the unifying principle of a broad and diffuse tradition of thought. Beginning with a excavation of the philosophical foundations of dialectical theory in the thought of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, this paper goes through the various twists and the turns of the dialectic in the major twentieth-century movements of neomarxism, phenomenology, and critical theory. Also, this paper presents the implications of the dialectical approach in organization science. The discipline of organization theory has been imprisoned by its functionalism, therefore, stimulating an awareness through which it can begin to set itself free has become imperative. Dialectical theory, be cause it is essentially a process perspective, focuses on the dimension currently missing in much organizational thought, It opens analysis to the processes through which actors carve out and stabilize a sphere to the processes through which actors carve out and stabilize a sphere of rationality and those through which such rationalized spheres dissolve.