Scholar's Award: The Branching Tree: Organization, Process, and Hierarchy in the 20th-Century Social and Behavioral Science

在1925年至1975年期间，社会科学和行为科学的许多领军人物都接受了对科学和自然的新视角。这些科学家认为世界是一个复杂的、层次分明的系统，他们根据对该系统各个子单位的研究重新定义了他们的科学。在这种观点下，科学的目标是构建系统行为的正式模型，其主要方法是开发模型，使一个复杂的系统，如数字计算机，能够模拟另一个系统的行为，如人类的大脑。从这一世界观产生的科学是行为主义和功能主义，其特点是痴迷于组织和过程，特别是能量的组织和处理(二战前)和信息(二战后)。我建议探索这一新观点的起源和发展，重点关注一群在生物学、科学和社会方面有影响力的思想家，他们认为生命系统的生理学与“社会有机体”的结构和功能之间存在着强烈的相似之处。这一群体包括对将他们的有机机械模型推广到社会上感兴趣的生理学家(L.J.亨德森、沃尔特·坎农、拉尔夫·杰拉德)，以及战后社会科学中“行为革命”的领导人，他们中的许多人试图将他们的工作建立在生理类比的基础上(J.G.米勒、卡尔·多伊奇、塔尔科特·帕森斯、赫伯特·西蒙)。学术价值：这个项目有四个主要优点：第一，它将阐明本世纪中叶左右社会科学中各种革命之间的联系，这些革命在几乎所有以前的著作中都被分开处理。其次，它将通过探索对生命系统的新理解的出现，揭示生物学思想和社会思想之间的联系。我认为，这种理解是基于对新的组织和信息技术的经验。第三，它将提供对一批极具影响力的科学家的工作的洞察，这些科学家基本上没有进行持续的历史分析。第四，它将上述世界观与与“组织革命”相关的更广泛的社会变化联系起来。更广泛的影响：这项研究将在三个领域产生更广泛的影响：首先，这项研究将帮助我们更连贯地了解20世纪科学的概念和背景之间的关系，影响我们在科学史上教授本科课程的方式。其次，这项研究将对社会科学家、管理理论家和对各自领域的历史发展感兴趣的生物学家有价值，帮助他们了解一些基本假设和实践的来源。第三，由于这项研究的一个主要特点是它关注组织和信息技术在生物和社会科学中被用作模型和隐喻的方式，它将帮助受过教育的门外汉理解他/她每天遇到的技术是如何变成现在的形式和意义的。

Between 1925 and 1975, many leading figures in the social and behavioral sciences embraced a new perspective on both science and nature. These scientists saw the world as a complex, hierarchical system, and they redefined their sciences in terms of the study of the various subunits of that system. The goal of science, in this view, was to construct formal models of system behavior, and its chief method was to develop models that would enable one complex system, such as the digital computer, to simulate the behavior of another, such as the human mind. The science that flowed from this worldview was behaviorist and functionalist, and it was characterized by a fascination with organization and process, especially the organization and processing of energy (before WWII) and information (after WWII). I propose to explore the genesis and development of this new view, focusing on a set of influential thinkers on biology, science, and society who saw strong parallels between the physiology of living systems and the structures and functions of "social organisms." This group includes physiologists interested in extending their models of organic machinery to society (L.J. Henderson, Walter Cannon, Ralph Gerard), as well as leaders of the postwar "behavioral revolutions" in the social sciences, many of whom sought to ground their work in physiological analogies (J.G. Miller, Karl Deutsch, Talcott Parsons, Herbert Simon). Intellectual Merit: This project has four primary claims to merit: first, it will illuminate the connections among the various revolutions in the social sciences around mid-century, which have been treated separately in almost all previous works. Second, it will shed new light on the links between biological and social thought by exploring the emergence of a new understanding of living systems, an understanding that, I argue, was grounded in experiences with new organizational and informational technologies. Third, it will offer insight into the work of a set of extremely influential scientists who largely have escaped sustained historical analysis. Fourth, it links the worldview described above to the broader social changes associated with the "organizational revolution." Broader Impacts: This study will have broader impacts in three areas: first, this research will help us develop a more cohesive picture of the relations between the concepts and the contexts of 20th-century science, affecting the way we teach our undergraduate courses in the history of science. Second, this study will be of value to social scientists, management theorists, and biologists interested in the historical development of their own fields, helping make them aware of the sources of some of their basic assumptions and practices. Third, because a central feature of this study is its focus on the ways that organizational and informational technologies have been used as models and metaphors in biological and social science, it will help the educated layman understand how the technologies he/she encounters every day came to have their present forms and meanings.