“Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.”

—  Herbert A. Simon , book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 100.

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Herbert A. Simon 58
American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and p… 1916–2001

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“Organizations and institutions provide the general stimuli and attention-directors that channelize the behaviors of the members of the group, and that provide those members with the intermediate objectives that stimulate action.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 100.

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“Power distance is defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.”

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“Looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behavior have never yet sufficed to permit any really stable, chronic relationship to establish itself.”

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“Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“This is a comparative study of six organizations operating in the same industrial environment. The subsystems (sales, research, and production) in each organization were differentiated from each other in terms of subsystem formal structures, the member's goal orientation, member's time orientations and member's interpersonal orientations. This differentiation was related to the requirements of the particular subenvironment with which each subsystem dealt. A relationship was found between the extent to which the states of differentiation and integration in each organization met the requirements of the environment and the relative economic performance of the organizations.”

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“But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member.”

Robert Trivers (1943) American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist

As quoted in Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today (2008), p. 170
Context: People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out-of-the-way, when it struck me."
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“The act of segmenting the organization into departments would influence the behavior of organizational members in several ways. The members of each unit would become specialists in dealing with the particular tasks. Both because of their prior education and experience and because of the nature of their task, they would develop specialized working styles and mental processes.”

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“By social structure is meant that organized set of social relationships in which members of the society or group are variously implicated.”

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Source: Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), p. 162 (1957 edition)

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Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

“What is liberal education,” p. 7
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