The Organizational Revolution and the Human Sciences

Bibliographic Data

ID3267738
AuthorsHunter Heyck (0009-0000-2075-0018, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume105
Issue1
Pages1-31
Publication date2014-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/675549
PMID24855870
OpenAlexW2043184535
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited53

This essay argues that a new way of understanding science and nature emerged and flourished in the human sciences in America between roughly 1920 and 1970. This new outlook was characterized by the prefiguration of all subjects of study as systems defined by their structures, not their components. Further, the essay argues that the rise of this new outlook was closely linked to the Organizational Revolution in American society, which provided new sets of problems, new patrons, and new control technologies as “tools to think with” for researchers in this period. As examples of this new way of thinking and of the multidirectional traffic connecting control technologies, the Organizational Revolution, and the social sciences, the essay looks at Chester Barnard and his book The Functions of the Executive, at Warren Weaver and his essays on communication theory and on science and “organized complexity,” and at the works of J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor on human/computer symbiosis through computer-based communications

Control (management · Economics · Human science · Management · Period (music · Social science · Sociology · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy, Science, and History · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments