ISBN The New Sciences Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations book English 224 pages

For the past eighty years, the market-centred theory of social and organizational systems has dominated private enterprise and public agencies. The late Professor Ramos exposes the failure of social science in general, and organizational theory in particular, to deal adequately with the needs of humanity in search of a meaning and order of existence and presents and alternative, a new science of organizations which address the problems of ordering social and personal affairs in both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ perspectives.

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 substa

‘Ramos’s pages are illuminated by brilliant rhetoric that one cannot but applaud. This is clearly an important book in the development of organization theory.’ Times Higher Education Supplement‘Guerreiro Ramos’s propositions about organizations are subtle and surprising…[his] analysis of our present discontents and their roots is powerful.’American Political Science Review‘Ramos, an internationally respected sociologist and public administrator, has produced an unusually taxing and challenging book…For those at all concerned with the direction of organizing theory, Ramos has taken an important step. AS such, the book should be rememberd as a signficiant work in the science of organization for some time.’Choice‘…a nicely argued, thought-provoking work.’ Congressional Staff Journal