The Department of Social Relations and "Systems Theory" at Harvard: 1948-50

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 607-648

  Vidich, Arthur J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247322768     PISSN: 08914486     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1022923107834     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. See his essay "Values and Value-Orientations in the theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification, Toward a General Theory of Action," Harper Torchbook, 1962, NY, originally published in 1951.
2. "Values and Value-Orientations in the theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification, Toward a General Theory of Action," 1962, Ibid.
3. I learned of this report, numbered HUG 4490.5 (7-19-4), from Willow Powers, who included a reference to it in a copy of her 1995 interview with me about my participation in the Ramah project. Dr. Powers interviewed me for several hours as part of her study reassessing the data produced under Kluckhohn's sponsorship on the Indians in the Southwest. Her study is a dissertation submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico. I have drawn on the protocol of this interview supplied by Dr. Powers for parts of this discussion.
4. This and related issues are discussed in Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, "Qualitative Methods: Their History in Sociology and Anthropology" in Norman K. Denzen and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 33-59, esp. 29-31.
5. See Guy Oakes and Arthur J. Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, chapter I, pp. 19-20, 36 for evidence indicating this.
6. For a more complete discussion of Parsons's work at that time, see Stephen Turner, "The Origins of Mainstream Sociology and other issues in the history of American Sociology," Social Epistemology, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1994), pp. 41-67, esp. pp. 54-55.
7. See also my book with Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions (1985), New Haven, Yale University Press;
8. Talcott Parsons: The Early Essays, ed. with an introduction by Charles Camic (1991), Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
9. Forest G. Robinson (1992), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, which details Murray's tumultuous love affair over a period of forty years with Christiana Morgan, a protégé of Carl Jung. To learn so long after the fact that this had been a key element in Murray's life while we were his students, knowing nothing of his other life, adds a dramatic touch to my Harvard education.
10. This quotation is from documents to be discussed later.
11. Taken from the cover jacket of Love's Story Told, op. cit.
12. Classmates I remember are Jesse Pitts, Kaspar Naegele, Ralph Patrick, Robert N. Wilson, John White, Tom O'Dea, Robert Endleman, Kim Romney, Jack Fischer, Irving Rosow, Joseph Kahl, John Money, James Olds, Norman Jacobs, Donald Michael, John Gullahorn, T. M. Mills, Nathan Kogan, Monro Edmundson, Otto Von-Mering, Edward Winter, Iwao Ishino, Edward Wellin, Charles Lang, Robert Rappaport, Nahum Medalia, Michael Olmstead, Robert Feldmesser, and Norman Birnbaum.
13. Love's Story Told, Op. cit., Preface, pp. V-VIII.
14. Faculty members whose research was reported in thumbnail sketches are L. Postman and J. S. Bruner (Current Investigations of the Perception Project). G. W. Allport and Gardner Lindzey (Prejudice and the Identification of Jewish and Non-Jewish Faces), Allport and Lindzey (Audiogenetic Seizure Susceptibility and Emotionality in Five Inbred Strains of Mice), M. B. Smith (Study of Opinion Dynamics), C. H. Combs (Investigation of . . . Theories and Techniques of Psychological Scaling), W. O. Jenkins (Studies of Partial Reinforcement [and] Temporal Gradient of Secondary Reinforcement), R. L. Soloman (Problem of Anxiety [and] Study of token reward behavior in children), Erich Lindemann (Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry), R. F. Bales (Content Analysis of Social Interaction in Small Groups), E. Hanfmann (Investigation of the Qualitative Individual Variability in Thinking). Plenty of faculty research was underway in the department, but it did not give the team an indication of whether or not any of it was strategic.
15. With respect to both economics and political science, Parsons in Toward a General Theory of Action, op. cit., gives these fields a similar status in his theory of action: "Economic theory has its conceptual foundations in the categories of action theory here set forth, but only becomes a distinctive subtheory of the general theory on a considerably more elaborate level of differentiation than that reached here; the case of political science is somewhat different. . . It is likely to draw from a much wider range of the components of the general theory of action and to find its distinctiveness in the way it combines these components in relation to its special empirical interests, rather than in the technical elaboration of a narrow and sharply focussed segment of the theory of action as is the case with economics" (pp. 28-29).
16. See Appendix 1 for a casuistic statement justifying the exclusion of economics and political science from among the chosen.
17. This is report 'c,' which provides a summary of Murray's book and will not be given further consideration here.
18. Barry M. Katz in his book, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1989), lists the names of Harvard professors, some of them then members of social relations faculty, and other academics who had careers in the research and analysis division of the O.S.S.
19. For a more complete discussion of this problem, see Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, "Social Theory and Field Research," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 65, No. 6 (May 1960), pp. 577-84,
20. reprinted in Small Town in Mass Society, 1968, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 381-96, and in a third edition of this book, 2000, The University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL.
21. A thoughtful appreciation of Naegele's life and work will be found in Philipp O. Naegele's "Foreword" in KASPAR D. NAEGELE, Health and Healing, ed. by Elaine Cummings (San Francisco: Jossly-Bass, Inc.; 1970) pp. IX-XVI.
22. Stanford M. Lyman in a personal communication informed me that he was told that Garfinkel has authored a monograph entitled A Parsons Primer, which has circulated unpublished among Garfinkel's ethnomethodological colleagues and disciples.
23. The topics appear in a listing of "Doctorates in Sociology: 1932-1989," published by Harvard's Department of Sociology in 1989. I thank my former colleague, Mustafa Emirbayer, for supplying me with this document. Most of the dissertations accepted by Harvard's sociology program did not explicitly deal with social theory. The list does not include the names of psychologists or anthropologists such as David Schneider, Clifford Geertz or myself, who, after the dissolution of the Department of Social Relations that conferred our degrees, do not appear on this list. Presumably, we are on the lists of graduates from the reconstituted departments of anthropology and psychology.
24. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, 1999, Granta Books, London, for an example of how American culture was exported to Europe during the Cold War years. Saunder's study covers all aspects of culture including art, music, literature, painting, book distribution, conference organizing and so forth. It offers a detailed examination of the extra-institutional networks by which ideas and political orientations were controlled and transmitted to other parts of the world.
25. For helpful suggestions and comments, I thank Larry Carney, Stanford M. Lyman, Robert N Wilson, Nathan Kogan, Jamie Vidich, Mary Vidich and David Goddard. Guy Oakes discussed with me in detail several drafts of the manuscript, and comprehensively edited the final version.