- The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon, 1973

"My beliefs about God are clearly social constructions. My faith is that the reality of God lies beyond those constructions"

Dr. Dennis Hiebert

"Research can be driven by a quest for fundamental understanding with no prospect for use (Bohr's quadrant), for individual, group, or societal use without regard for fundamental knowledge (Edison's quadrant), or fundamental knowledge inspired by use (Pasteur's quadrant). (Research may also be done with neither use nor fundamental knowledge in mind, e.g., lab training.) In the post-war era, he argues, Pasteur's quadrant - knowledge for use - has been the source of the most significant scientific advances."

Davis & Marquis (2005) quoting Stokes (1997)

"If not one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk
to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all"

William James (1890/1950)

"How can social actors change institutions if their actions, intentions, and rationality are conditioned by the very institution they wish to transform?"

Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann, 1989

"An extremely large class of human emotions results from real, anticipated, imagined, or recollected outcomes of social relationships."

Kemper, 1978

"Gandhi's leadership, regardless of its objective success or failure, had important subjective consequences, repairing wounds in self-esteem inflicted by generations of imperial subjection, restoring courage and potency, recruiting and mobilizing new constituencies and leaders, helping India to acquire national coherence."

Sussane H Rudolph & Lloyd I Rudoloh, "Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma," 1983

"We must put ourselves in the position of the subject who tries to find his way in this world, and we must remember, first of all, that the environment by which he is influenced and to which he adapts himself is his world, not the objective world of science — is nature and society as he sees them. The individual subject reacts only to his experience, and his experience is not everything that an absolutely objective observer might find in the portion of the world within the individual's reach, but only what the individual himself finds."

W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, 1918-20/1927:1846-7

"When I hear you give your reasons,the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours."

Watson to Sherlock Holmes on his art of observation, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle

'Educators, it is frequently said, should firmly teach our children the "difference between right and wrong". Those of a suspicious turn of mind will ask exactly whose conceptions of right and wrong are to be planted in the minds of young, suspecting that this piece of apparent common sense is really a slogan to justify indoctrinating the young with conservative or "traditional" values.'

Piers Benn, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Leeds

"It has been less than a decade since I heard the chairman of one of the leading departments of philosophy in America claim that rigorous philosophy has been an exclusively Western phenomenon. That his statement passed unchallenged shows how far thought has moved in a brief ten years. A man who made such a claim today might not be hooted off the platform, but it would be widely felt that his education needed to be updated."

Huston Smith, Professor of Philosophy, MIT

"It is impossible for the behavior of a single,isolated individual to reach any high degree of rationality. The number of alternatives he must explore is so great, the information he would need to evaluate them so vast that even an approximation to objective rationality is hard to conceive. Individual choice takes place in an environment of 'givens' - premises that are accepted by the subject as bases for his choice; and behavior is adaptive only within the limits set by these 'givens'."

Administrative behavior, Simon HA, 1945

"I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."

Meditations 2, Oeuvres de Descartes, Adam, Charles, and Paul Tannery, (eds.) 1904. Paris: J. Vrin. (Vol 7,Page 25)

"Language excels in unconscious insight the acumen of most talented thinker,and we contend that whoever, having the right talent, should do nothing but examine the words and phrases which deal with the human soul,would know more about it than all the sages who omitted to do so, and would know perhaps a thousand times more than has ever been discovered by observation, apparatus, and experimentation upon man."

Ludwig Kages,The Science of Character, p.74

"Argument is argument.You cannot help paying regard to their arguments, if they are good. If it were testimony you might disregard it...Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force though shot by a child."

Samuel Johnson, Life, 1784

"Rational calculation of costs and benefits comes to dominate a society as profit-oriented markets extend to virtually all spheres of life. Increased levels of impersonality, formality, technical specialization, and cost calculations all become essential features of social relations as bureaucratization prevails in economic and other arenas of social organization. As these processes continue, they generate a hyperrationailty - a concern with efficiency, speed, and profit- that ironically, can generate less efficiency, speed, and profit. For example, 'fast food' restaurants are often not very fast because they attract too many customers at peak times and force them to line up and wait."

Turner, J.H. (2004). Human institutions: A theory of societal evolution. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.

The value of the benefit and hence the debt is in proportion to and varies with - among other things - the intensity of the recipient's need at the time the benefit was bestowed ("a friend in need..."), the resources of the donor ("he gave although he could ill afford it..."), the motives imputed to the donor ("without thought of gain..."), and the nature of constraints which are perceived to exist or to be absent ("he gave of his own free will...") .

Gouldner A W. The norm of reciprocity: a preliminary statement. Amer. Sociol. Rev.
25:161-78, 1960. [Washington University, St. Louis, MO]

"So what does it take to transform an organization's technical, political and cultural systems? The transformational leader must possess a deep understanding, whether it be intuitive or learned, of organizations and their place both in society at large and in the lives of individuals. The ability to build a new institution requires the kind of political dialogue our founding fathers had when Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and others debated issues of justice, equity, separation of powers, checks and balances, and freedom. This language may sound foreign to corporate settings but when major organization revitalization is being undertaken, all of these concepts merit some level of examination."

Tichy, N. M., & Ulrich, D. O. (1984). The leadership challenge: A call for the transformational leader. Sloan Management Review, 26(1), 59–68.

"To some men the manner of giving orders seems a very simple affair...Yet, on the other hand, the shrewd common sense of many a business executive has shown him that the issuing of orders is surrounded by many difficulties...More over psychology and our own observation, shows us not only that you cannot get people do things most satisfactorily by ordering them or exhorting them; but also that even reasoning with them, even convincing them intellectually, may not be enough. Even the 'consent of the governed' will not do all the work it is supposed to do, an important consideration for those who are advocating employee representation. For all our past life, our early training, our later experience,all our emotions, beliefs, prejudices, every desire that we have, have formed certain habits of mind that the psychologists call habit-patterns, action-patterns, motor-sets. Therefore it will do little good merely to get intellectual agreement; unless you change the habit-patterns of people, you have not really changed people."

Follett, M. P. (1926). The giving of orders. Classics of public administration, 66–74.

"Every group and organization is an open system that exists in multiple environments. Changes in the environment will produce stresses and strains inside the group,forcing new learning and adaptation. At the same time, new members coming into the group will bring in new beliefs and assumptions that will influence currently held assumptions. To some degree, then, there is constant pressure on any given culture to evolve and grow. But just as individuals do not easily give up the elements of their identity or their defense mechanisms, so groups do not easily give up some of their basic underlying assumptions merely because external events or new members disconfirm them."

Schein, E. H. (1990). Organizational culture. American psychologist, 45(2), 109.