“In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.”

—  Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-22.as cited in: John Van Maanen (1998) Qualitative Studies of Organizations. p.xx
1950s

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 "In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance wit…" by Kenneth E. Boulding?
Kenneth E. Boulding photo
Kenneth E. Boulding 163
British-American economist 1910–1993

Related quotes

Mahmud Tarzi photo

“Although age has its normal limits, it may be extended by two things-the study of history and by travel. Reading history broadens one's perception of the creation of the world, while travel extends one's field of vision.”

Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933) Afghan writer

Preface
A Book of Travel to Three Continents (Translated from Dahri) (1914)

“Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another's eyes”

Robyn Davidson (1950) Australian writer

Source: Desert Places

“Numerous geographers writing in recent years concerning the nature and scope of their subject have described the relation of their field to other fields of science in terms of a concept said to stem from Immanuel Kant and from Alexander von Humboldt. Whatever may be the original source of the concept, its importance in the current geographic thought stems from the writing of Alfred Hettner, the German master of the methodology of geography.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Hartshorne (1958) "The concept of geography as a science of space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner" in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol 48 (2). p. 97

“Of the many references to Newton in 18th-century electrical writings only a small number were to the Principia, the greater part by far were to the Opticks. This was true not alone of the electrical writings but also in other fields of experimental enquiry…. [The Opticks] would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it…. in the Opticks Newton did not adopt the motto… —Hypotheses non fingo; I frame no hypotheses—but, so to speak, let himself go, allowing his imagination full reign and by far exceeding the bounds of experimental evidence.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

I. Bernard Cohen, Preface to Opticks by Sir Isaac Newton (1952)

Lin Yutang photo

“A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 332

Sylvia Plath photo

“I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Robbert Dijkgraaf photo

“I would be willing to bet that whatever formulations of quantum field theory we have now are preliminary ...”

Robbert Dijkgraaf (1960) Dutch mathematical physicist and string theorist

[The Universe Speaks in Numbers: Robbert Dijkgraaf and Edward Witten in Conversation, 30 May 2019, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjthuCDzAnY] (quote at 7:18 of 21:39)

Liu Wen (model) photo

“I was studying tourism at college and wanted to travel the world as a tour guide – that was my dream! But actually sometimes modeling feels quite similar, because I travel so much – probably even more than tour guiding.”

Liu Wen (model) (1988) Chinese model

Source: "Liu Wen Talks Style, Diversity And What It Means To Be China’s First Supermodel" in Marie Claire https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/fashion-news/liu-wen-interview-china-s-first-supermodel-talks-style-diversity-and-her-mango-campaign-15375 (3 March 2016)

John S. Bell photo

“Surely, after 62 years, we should have an exact formulation of some serious part of quantum mechanics? By 'exact' I do not of course mean 'exactly true'. I mean only that the theory should be fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist… until workable approximations are needed in applications. By 'serious' I mean that some substantial fragment of physics should be covered. Nonrelativistic 'particle' quantum mechanics, perhaps with the inclusion of the electromagnetic field and a cut-off interaction, is serious enough.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Richard Dawkins photo

“Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Related topics