“At this point water-tight compartments of university specialization and theories founded on the selected isolation of facts easily break down. Specialized thinking is rarely a sufficient foundation for concrete decisions involving action. The social scientist cannot often form sound administrative judgments solely on the basis of elements which he has picked out simply because they relate directly to his particular specialty. The present emphasis on artificial subdivisions of knowledge and on specialized thinking and teaching in universities, technical schools, and colleges and the relative neglect of administrative problems involving action have a dangerously narrowing effect on graduates of these institutions. While we may and frequently do arouse the intellectual interest of students in a considerable variety of subjects intimately related to the civilization of which they are a part, we pay almost no attention to the web of cross ties among these subjects.”

—  Wallace Brett Donham

Source: "Training for Leadership in a Democracy", 1936, p. 65-70, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 663

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Wallace Brett Donham11
American academic 1877–1954

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“In the social sciences there has been a serious gap, except where administration is involved, between the theorist and the man who must act. As a result our social science theory continues to be detached from reality. There is great need for a new social science, namely, the Science of Administration, where social theory and action must meet. Administration as conceived in this paper is, therefore, a social science with its own techniques, its own abstractions clustering around the concept of action through human organizations, and its own problems of theory. It is vitally concerned in integrating other sciences, physical, biological, psychological, and social, at the point where action is involved. Its social importance is great. Indeed if our civilization breaks down, it will be mainly a breakdown of administration, both private and public.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "The Theory and Practice of Administration", 1936, p. 409; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 662-3

“As a result our graduates leave us without having formed the habit of seeking wide generalizations related to diverse variables in the social situations which surround them. Because they lack both habits and methods which lead them to seek generalizations, they become, after they leave us, Specialists themselves and make decisions without the guides to action within their special fields which wider viewpoints might give. To develop them as we must, the artificial dividing lines between social sciences must in large measure be broken down. Specialized training must be both counteracted and supplemented by training which brings in the widest social implications. Otherwise men will not be trained to meet the problems faced by public and private administrators.
The only way these things can be attempted in our universities without resulting in a vast amount of sheer unrealistic sentimentality is, I believe, by paying more attention to the great intellectual field of administration.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Training for Leadership in a Democracy", 1936, p. 65-70, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 663

Talcott Parsons photo

“Theory in the social sciences should have three major functions. First, it should aid in the codification of our existing concrete knowledge. It can do so by providing generalized hypotheses for the systematic reformulation of existing facts and insights, by extending the range of implication of particular hypotheses, and by unifying discrete observations under general concepts. Through codification, general theory in the social sciences will help to promote the process of cumulative growth of our knowledge. In making us more aware of the interconnections among items of existing knowledge which are now available in a scattered, fragmentary form, it will help us fix our attention on the points where further work must be done.
Second, general theory in the social sciences should be a guide to research. By codification it enables us to locate and define more precisely the boundaries of our knowledge and of our ignorance. Codification facilitates the selection of problems, although it is not, of course, the only useful technique for the selection of problems for fruitful research. Further than this, general theory should provide hypotheses to be applied and tested by the investigation of these problems…
Third, general theory as a point of departure for specialized work in the social sciences will facilitate the control of the biases of observation and interpretation which are at present fostered by the departmentalization of education and research in the social sciences.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: Toward a general theory of action (1951), p. 3

Brooks Adams photo

“It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

207-8 , as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 10
The Theory of Social Revolutions,

“The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 59.

“Throughout the social sciences today, the dominant form of modeling is based upon the rational-choice paradigm. Game theory, in particular, is typically based upon the assumption of rational choice. In my view, the reason for the dominance of the rational-choice approach is not that scholars think it is realistic. Nor is game theory used solely because it offers good advice to a decision maker, because its unrealistic assumptions undermine much of its value as a basis for advice.”

Robert Axelrod book The Complexity of Cooperation

Introduction
The Complexity of Cooperation (1997)

“Communal franchise is wrong in principle and harmful in practice; the time has come in Fiji for all races to get out of the thin water-tight compartments and start thinking in terms of residents of Fiji.”

A.D. Patel (1905–1969) Fijian politician

Statement in defense of common roll (1929).

“If Korzybski cannot be said to have established an empirical science, what then has he done? He has pointed a way toward the establishment of such a science. He was a precursor of an intellectual revolution which is just now beginning and which promises to match that of the Renaissance. If Korzybski is seen in this role, then the question of his originality or erudition is not important. He might have something of a dilettante in him. He might have pretended to have more specialized knowledge than he actually had. Great portions of his outlook might be found in the works of more modest and more meticulous workers, That is not important. He was a man of vision and an apostle. Such men are all too rare in our age of specialization.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Source: 1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950, p. 6 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962;95)

José Ortega Y Gasset photo

“The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"

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“Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge. The notion of the specialized mind is… as modern as the specialized man, 'the scientist', a word which is only a hundred years old.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

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