Human Organizations and Social Theory
About the Book
In the 1930s, George Herbert Mead and other leading social scientists established the modern empirical analysis of social interaction and communication, enabling theories of cognitive development, language acquisition, interaction, government, law and legal processes, and the social construction of the self. However, they could not provide a comparably empirical analysis of human organization.The theory in this book fills in the missing analysis of organizations and specifies more precisely the pragmatic analysis of communication with an adaptation of information theory to ordinary unmediated communications. The study also provides the theoretical basis for understanding the success of pragmatically grounded public policies, from the New Deal through the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan to the ongoing development of the European Union, in contrast to the persistent failure of positivistic and Marxist policies and programs.
About the Author
Murray J. Leaf is a professor of anthropology and political economy at the University of Texas, Dallas, and the author of Pragmatism and Development: The Prospect for Pluralism in the Third World and other books.Reviews
Blurbs
"This stimulating work offers a new, promising, integrated theory of social behavior. A timely and welcome attempt to move social theory beyond the debate between positivism and postmodernism."--Martin Ottenheimer, author of The Anthropology of Kinship: An Introductory Text
"Murray J. Leaf's ambitious project for studying cultural meaning systems holds the promise of grounding anthropological knowledge about culture empirically. His efforts help establish the ontological status of culture and pave the way for a more scientific anthropology."--Lawrence A. Kuznar, author of Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology
"Finally we have a book that addresses anthropology as a science predicated on our understanding of human societies developed through rigorous fieldwork and not through the distorting lens of science as it was defined by logical positivists. Leaf concludes that anthropology is an experimental science based on 'radical empiricism.' A must read for anyone who takes seriously the vision of anthropology as a science grounded in rigorous fieldwork."--Dwight Read, author of Artifact Classification: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach
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