Quotes about structure
page 14

John Rogers Searle photo
Hans Reichenbach photo

“This article [entitled A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations], was one of three independent statements in 1967 of what came to be called "contingency theory." It held that the structure of an organization depends upon (is ‘contingent’ upon) the kind of task performed, rather than upon some universal principles that apply to all organizations. The notion was in the wind at the time.
I think we were all convinced we had a breakthrough, and in some respects we did — there was no one best way of organizing; bureaucracy was efficient for some tasks and inefficient for others; top managers tried to organize departments (research, production) in the same way when they should have different structures; organizational comparisons of goals, output, morale, growth, etc., should control for types of technologies; and so on. While my formulation grew out of fieldwork, my subsequent research offered only modest support for it. I learned that managers had other ends to maximize than efficient production and they sometimes sacrificed efficiency for political and personal ends.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Charles Perrow, in "This Week’s Citation Classic." in: CC, Nr. 14. April 6, 1981 (online at garfield.library.upenn.edu)
Comment:
The other two 1967 publications were Paul R. Lawrence & Jay W. Lorsch. Organization and environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, and James D. Thompson. Organizations in action. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
1980s and later

Geoffrey Hodgson photo
Ilham Aliyev photo

“We have had significant achievements in political, economic and social spheres. A transparent public relations system has been created in our country, and the activity of democratic institutions, human rights and freedoms have been ensured. Legislation that meets international requirements, effective operation of specialized institutional structures, and ensuring transparency in public administration are the successes of our anti-corruption policy.”

Ilham Aliyev (1961) 4th President of Azerbaijan from 2003

President Ilham Aliyev's opening letter to participants of the Third Meeting of the Heads of Anti-Corruption Organizations and Ombudsmen of the Economic Cooperation Organization Member States (6 June 2017) http://www.today.az/print/news/politics/161995.html
Anti-corruption policy

Louis Brownlow photo
Adrienne Rich photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“The deep structure that expresses the meaning is common to all languages, so it is claimed, being a simple reflection of the forms of thought.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Deep and surface structure"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

“When I painted Frank O'Hara, [in 1962] Frank was standing there. First I painted the whole structure of his face; then I wiped out the face, and when the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

as quoted in 'Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets' https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/elaine-de-kooning-frank-ohara-and-the-new-york-school/ - 2015
1972 - 1989

Talcott Parsons photo
Michael Crichton photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“[T]he indispensable instrument of a visionary politics is collective mobilization, which brings people together in ways not foreordained by the established structure or the prevailing dogmas of society.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 12

Laurie Penny photo
Yanis Varoufakis photo

“(The Eurozone) resembles a fine riverboat that was launched on a still ocean in 2000. And then the first storm that hit it, in 2008, started creating serious structural problems for it. We started leaking water. And of course, the people in the third class, as in the Titanic, start feeling the drowning effects first.”

Yanis Varoufakis (1961) Greek-Australian political economist and author, Greek finance minister

Source: Channel 4 News, " Yanis Varoufakis interview: 'Greece can start breathing again, growing' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPfv3zv1OnE." 26 Jan. 2015: On comparing the eurozone to the Titanic; Quoted in: Jonathan Chew. " These 7 Yanis Varoufakis Quotes Show Why We’ll Miss Him http://time.com/3946586/greece-varoufakis-quotes/," Fortune, 6 July 2015.

Theodore Kaczynski photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Jacques Lacan photo

“The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law- but the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

Mark Rothko photo
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Abd al-Karim Qasim photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“Cartesian linguistics was not concerned simply with descriptive grammar, in this sense, but rather with “grammaire générale,” that is, with the universal principles of language structure.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Description and explanation in linguistics"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

Henry Ford photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Włodzimierz Ptak photo

“I don't like to stay long outside of Kraków. I was always happy to go back there, just like a cat. Well, that's my mental structure.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Bętkowska, Teresa (August–September 2010). Mistrz niszowej dyscypliny http://www2.almamater.uj.edu.pl/126/17.pdf (PDF). Alma Mater (in Polish). Kraków: Jagiellonian University (126–127): pp. 41–46.

Georges Cuvier photo

“The natural food of man, judging from his structure, appears to consist of the fruits, roots, and other succulent parts of vegetables.”

Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) French naturalist, zoologist and paleontologist (1769–1832)

The Animal Kingdom https://books.google.it/books?id=gKBgAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA0, trans. H. McMurtrie, London: Orr and Smith, 1834, p. 37.

Chris Quigg photo
Clay Shirky photo

“Gutenberg’s press flooded the market. In the early 1500s John Tetzel, the head pardoner for German territories, would sweep into a town with a collection of already printed indulgences, hawking them with a phrase usually translated as “When a coin a coffer rings / A soul for heaven springs.” The nakedly commercial aspects of indulgences, among other things, enraged Martin Luther, who in 1517 launched an attack on the Church in the form of his famous Ninety-five Theses. He first nailed the theses to a church door in Wittenberg, but copies were soon printed up and disseminated widely. Luther’s critique, along with the spread of Bibles translated into local languages, drove the Protestant Reformation, plunging the Church (and Europe) into crisis. The tool that looked like it would strengthen the social structure of the age instead upended it. From the vantage point of 1450, the new technology seemed to do nothing more than offer the existing society a faster and cheaper way to do what it was already doing. By 1550 it had become apparent that the volume of indulgences had debauched their value, creating “indulgence inflation”—further evidence that abundance can be harder for a society to deal with than scarcity. Similarly, the spread of Bibles wasn’t a case of more of the same, but rather of more is different—the number of Bibles produced increased the range of Bibles produced, with cheap Bibles translated into local languages undermining the interpretative monopoly of the clergy, since churchgoers could now hear what the Bible said in their own language, and literate citizens could read it for themselves, with no priest anywhere near. By the middle of the century, Luther’s Protestant Reformation had taken hold, and the Church’s role as the pan-European economic, cultural, intellectual, and religious force was ending.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Cognitive Surplus : Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010)

John Ralston Saul photo
Francis Crick photo

“Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

What Mad Pursuit (1988)

Theodore Wilbur Anderson photo
Andreas Vesalius photo
Eduardo Torroja photo
Jacques Lacan photo

“Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

“ Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

See Gombrich in reference 348
On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics

Peter F. Drucker photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Paul Krugman photo
Roger Ebert photo
Joseph Campbell photo

“Apparent leadership problems are often problems of organizational structure.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 10

David Crystal photo
Albert Einstein photo

“It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

As quoted in Introduction to Philosophy (1935) by George Thomas White Patrick and Frank Miller Chapman, p. 44
Variant translations:
I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)

“Most poetry involves rhythmically structured or patterned language, avoiding what might be called 'a singing line.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

The Details interview with Jay Ruzesky (Winter 2008)

John C. Baez photo

“Besides their possible role in physics, the octonions are important because they tie together some algebraic structures that otherwise appear as isolated and inexplicable exceptions.”

John C. Baez (1961) American mathematician and mathematical physicist

The octonions, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 39, 145–205, 2002 http://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-01-00934-X, (p. 147)

“Markets are social organizations, structured and regulated by more or less well-defined social rule systems.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. 125.

Erich Fromm photo

“Follett was always preoccupied with the dynamic view of organization, with the thing in process, so to speak. Authority, Power, Leadership, the Giving of Orders, Conflict, Conciliation — all her keywords are active words. There is a static or structural approach to the problem of organization which has its value; but those who are most convinced of the importance of such structural analysis would be the first to admit that it is only a step on the journey, an instrument of thought; it is not and cannot be complete in itself; it is only the anatomy of the subject. As in medicine, the study of anatomy may be an essential discipline, but it is in the physiology and psychology of the individual patient that that discipline finds its working justification.
Thus the four principles which she finally arrived at to express her view of organization were all active principles. In her own words, they are:
"1. Co-ordination by direct contact of the responsible people concerned.
2. Co-ordination in the early stages.
3. Co-ordination as a reciprocal relating of all the features in a situation.
4. Co-ordination as a continuing process."”

Henry C. Metcalf (1867–1942) American business theorist

Since these principles are carefully explained and illustrated by Miss Follett herself in the final paper in this volume, we must content ourselves here with merely this concise statement of them.
Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xxvi

Slim Burna photo

“It all has to do with my feelings, my mood or state of mind. Most times my experiences, things I desire, it could be good depends on how the listener’s level of perception is structured.”

Slim Burna (1988) Nigerian singer and record producer

On what inspires his lyrics
During an interview with Africa Upcoming http://www.africaupcoming.com/exclusive-interview-meet-gabriel-soprinye-halliday-idaomienyenimim-a-k-a-slim-burna/ (September 12, 2013)

Ilya Prigogine photo

“Entropy is the price of structure”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Source: Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (1984), p. 283-284.

Gerhard Richter photo
Kent Beck photo
Buckminster Fuller photo

“Nature never “fails.” Nature complies with its own laws. Nature is the law. When Man lacks understanding of Nature’s laws and a Man-contrived structure buckles unexpectedly, it does not fail. It only demonstrates that Man did not understand Nature’s laws and behaviors. Nothing failed. Man’s knowledge or estimating was inadequate.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

In "How Little I Know", in Saturday Review (12 Nov 1966), 152. Excerpted in Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 31.
"The Comprehensive Man", Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), 75-76.
1960s

Grady Booch photo
Hans von Seeckt photo

“Only in firm co-operation with a Great Russia will Germany have the chance of regaining her position as a world power…Britain and France fear the combination of the two land powers and try to prevent it with all their means—hence we have to seek it with all our strength…Whether we like or dislike the new Russia and her internal structure is quite immaterial. Our policy would have had to be the same towards a Tsarist Russia or towards a state under Kolchak or Denikin. Now we have to come to terms with Soviet Russia—we have no alternative…In Poland France seeks to gain the eastern field of attack against Germany and, together with Britain, has driven the stake which we cannot endure into our flesh, quite close to the heart of our existent a a state. Now France trembles for her Poland which a strengthened Russia threatens with destruction, and now Germany is to save her mortal enemy! Her mortal enemy, for we have none worse at this moment. Neva can Prussia-Germany concede that Bromberg, Graudenz, Thorn, (Marienburg), Posen should remain in Polish hands, and now there appears on the horizon, like a divine miracle, help for us in our deep distress. At this moment nobody should ask Germany to lift as much as a finger when disaster engulf Poland.”

Hans von Seeckt (1866–1936) German general

Memorandum (4 February 1920), quoted in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 68.

Yasser Harrak photo

“We can imagine the Palestinian identity as a person born in a village prior to the introduction of modern administration; a person whose village was divided between other villages, and whose date of birth is unknown. A person that started struggling to prove she exists in the 1960s and suffers today from a weakened structure and an uncertain future.”

Yasser Harrak Canadian liberal writer, columnist and human rights activist

Yasser Harrak. 2018. Palestinian Identity The Construction Of Modern National Consciousness (Book Review). Research Gate. Accessed January 23, 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322274860_Yasser_Harrak_-Palestinian_Identity_The_Construction_Of_Modern_National_Consciousness_Book_Review

“Religious structure often dilutes the spiritual experience.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 53

Valentino Braitenberg photo
Carl Schmitt photo

“The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

Political Theology (1922), Ch. 3 : Political Theology

Joseph Beuys photo
Albert Einstein photo

“That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 171.

Ervin László photo
Richard L. Daft photo
Jack Vance photo
Harold Innis photo
Alan Kay photo

“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05

Hermann Rauschning photo
Salvador Dalí photo
Fred Brooks photo

“The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

Brooks (1975, Chapter 9) as quoted in Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, by Steve C. McConnell

William O. Douglas photo

“The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Go East, Young Man: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas (1974), p. 449
Other speeches and writings

Jacques Bertin photo

“[Overall level questions involved an] understanding of the deep structure of the data being presented in their totality, usually comparing trends and seeing groupings.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 16; as cited in: Stacy Kathryn Keller (2008) Levels of Line Graph Question Interpretation.... p. 6

Eduardo Torroja photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“How many glorious structures we had raised
Upon Hope's sandy basis!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

St. George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner from London Literary Gazette (25th May 1822) Poetic Sketches. Second Series - Sketch the Fourth
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Jeff Koons photo
Eduardo Torroja photo