“People as adaptive organisms adjust their behavior and beliefs to the social context and to the reality of their own past and present behavior and situation.”

— Gerald R. Salancik

Source: A social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design. 1978, p. 226

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Gerald R. Salancik 10

American organizational theorist 1943–1996

Mike Rother (1958) American business academic

“This tendency to anthropomorphize flows naturally from the context in which consciousness evolved. Consciousness is a social tool for understanding the behavior of others by modelling it on one's own feelings.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

“In brief, one can view organizing essentially as either an economic, behavioral, adaptive, mathematical, or decisional entity. In the aggregate most of these theories are concerned with structure, behavior, and strategy under conditions of change and complexity brought about by technology, environment, and human behavior.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

Source: Principles of Management, 1960, p. 314 (6th ed. 1971)

“Past and future are but two aspects of behavior, the past being the persistent modifications in the behaving organism, and the future the controlling direction or pattern imposed upon the unfolding behavior according to those persistent modifications.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Lawrence Kelso Frank (1948) Society as the Patient: Essays on Culture & Personality. p. 351; as cited in: Betsy Caton Goss (1991) Accounting quality and dispersion of financial analysts. p. 15

“Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into “traits,” explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating “for” the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Our Natural Place", p. 243
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“Language… is a range of possibilities, and an open end set of options in behavior that are available to the individual in his existence as social man. The context of culture is the environment of any particular selection that is made within them… The context of culture defines the potential, the range of possibilities that are open. The actual choice among these possibilities takes place within a given context of situation.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Explorations in the functions of language, 1973, p. 49 cited in: William O. Beeman (1986) Language, Status, and Power in Iran. p. 65.