“It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the realities of authoritarian control in organizations and the true status of the subordinate”

—  Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 119

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the reali…" by Charles Perrow?
Charles Perrow photo
Charles Perrow71
American sociologist 1925–2019

Related quotes

James Woods photo

“When reality fails you change reality to support your beliefs and ignore the nagging voices in your head that tells you otherwise for they are trying to distract you from the one true God.”

James Woods (1947) American film, stage and television actor

The Daily Mail, 20 October 2013

“Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within…”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
Source: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers (2013) p. 177

“A conceptual graph is a finite connected bipartite graph which consists of concepts and conceptual relations. Every conceptual relation has one or more arcs, each of which is linked to a concept. We define a multilevel conceptual graph to be a conceptual graph in which some of the concepts and conceptual relations arc sensitive.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Source: Conceptual Structures, 1984, p. 73 cited in: National Computer Security Conference Proceedings, 1992. DIANE Publishing Company. p. 320

“A lack of clarity is food for failure.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 131

“The common impression regards this scale or chain merely as a "type" of organization, characteristic only of the vaster institutions of government, army, church and industry. This impression is erroneous. It is likewise misleading, for it seems to imply that the scalar chain in organization lacks universality. These great organizations differ from others only in that the chain is longer. The truth is that wherever we find an organization even of two people, related as superior and subordinate, we have the scalar principled.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 14-15

“CONSIDERABLE attention has recently been devoted to understanding behavior in large organizational systems. Although some of this work has been based on research, it has more typically been general theorizing with little support from research data. Our interest in examining complex organizations is to study more systematically and empirically their internal functioning in relation to the demands of the external environment on the organization and the ability of the organization to cope effectively with these demands, contributing to a theory of the functioning of large organizations based on empirical research.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations," 1967, p. 2

“Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

“The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 1957, p. 29

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“The ultimate stakes in politics are the qualities of the direct relations among people…. This fine texture of routinized human relations is the primary social reality. Even the boldest transformative efforts often take it for granted or, having acknowledged its importance, fail to alter it.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 397

“We realize, however, that all scientific laws merely represent abstractions and idealizations expressing certain aspects of reality. Every science means a schematized picture of reality, in the sense that a certain conceptual construct is unequivocally related to certain features of order in reality;”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 83

Related topics