New Science of Organizations : Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations

This is the "New Science of Organizations" by Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, University of Toropnto Press

Alberto Guerreiro Ramos engaged the most critical issues of this century. Born in Bahia in 1915, proud of the heritage of Africa, he worked in Brazilian development, lectured widely in Europe and Asia, and reached the full range of his intellectual power in his sixteen years in the US, where he died in 1982. He worked with huge, steady, and persistent energy to bring the diversity of traditional and recent human experience into creative, discipline, and worthwhile conjunction in the process of development.

Ramos understood the homogenization and lack of incentives risked by socialist societies, and the unconstrained heterogeneity and anomie risked by market societies. He developed in The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations a model of social system delimitation, with a para-economic paradigm focused on realizing the full diversity of organizational arrangements used by both kinds of societies. Concentrating rigorously on substantive rationality, with concern for the full range of human values rather than only instrumental and economic ones, Ramos extends the work of Max Weber. In suggesting the appropriate use of market mechanisms in specific and disciplined enclaves, Ramos creates a fundamentally different alternative to the one described by Adam Smith.

Committed to understanding and dealing with the complexities of southern and northern experiences, Ramos rinds a creative way to integrate the best of which each is capable. The analysis has strong and clear implications for the development of both third-world and post-industrial societies.

As a scholar, Ramos integrated theory building with attention to the practical work of development. He inspired a generation of students as a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Public Administration. Critical Introduction to Brazilian Sociology (1957), The Brazilian National Problem (1960), Sociological Reduction (1955), Administration and Strategy of Development (1966), along with his several hundred other articles and books, represent a major enduring body of work. Ramos served also in the Brazilian School of Public Administration, the Rural University of Brazil, and as head of the Department of Sociology at the Advanced Institute for Brazilian Studies. He held visiting appointments at Yale, Wesleyan, Paris, Santa Catarina, as well as in the Academies of Science in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the Peoples Republ