The First Theorem of Organizational Instability

For a long time, management studies—across different theoretical traditions and practical approaches—have shared an implicit assumption: that organizations can be managed in a long-term stable manner, and that management failure is primarily the result of insufficient capability, executional deviation, or flawed institutional design. However, this assumption itself has rarely been subjected to systematic scrutiny at the level of existence. This paper proposes and defends a negative structural conclusion—the First Theorem of Organizational Instability. By analyzing the irreducible structural conditions of modern organizations—including multi-level decision hierarchies, information asymmetry and temporal delay, asynchronous incentive structures, and the persistent non-stationarity of the external environment—this paper demonstrates that, when these conditions jointly hold, a management equilibrium that can be maintained over the medium to long term without continuous structural repair does not exist. This conclusion is neither an empirical generalization nor a probabilistic claim. Rather, it constitutes a structural non-existence result. It does not deny the local effectiveness of management interventions or the possibility of temporary stability. Instead, it rejects the theoretical objective of understanding management as a pathway toward a long-term, stable state of control. Consequently, managerial instability should no longer be interpreted as a practical deviation or managerial failure, but rather as the necessary temporal unfolding of the structural conditions inherent in modern organizations. The contribution of this paper lies in elevating the core question of management studies from “how management can be improved” to “whether the goal of management itself exists in structural terms.” In doing so, it marks a structural shift in management theory—from a stability-oriented paradigm to a non-equilibrium understanding—and provides a necessary theoretical foundation for subsequent research on organizational persistence, non-equilibrium governance, and the endurance of uncertainty.