Most of the actors are dead

 “…those whose activities generated the relations constitutive of industrialism, imperialism, political parties, a state educational system or a national health service, were quite different people from those who later had to live in a society made up of these structures amongst others. The crucial element of this insight is a recognition of Auguste Comte's important aphorism that the majority of actors are the dead.”- Archer, M.S., 1996. Social Integration and System Integration: Developing the Distinction. Sociology, 30(4), pp.679–699.

quantophrenia

“Mechanics offered a means for the conceptualisation of labour as common human labour (with the key category of power), and manufacture made it possible by splitting craftwork into simple, repetitive operations. This fragmentation became the basis of the commensurability of effects and of the principle of rational calculation and saving derived from it...quantification is far more than counting, measuring and calculating – it is a Weltanschauung, an anthropology, political philosophy, political economy, morality; it can become even a social malaise (‘quantophrenia’). - Jovanovic, G., 2011. Toward a social history of qualitative research. History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), pp.1–27.

History, tradition, and authority

“Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition.” - Hannah Arendt in the Introduction of Benjamin, W., 1968. Illuminations, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

The multiple paths of organisation as culture

“However, the idea that organizations might profitably be viewed as cultures did not attract sustained attention until the late 1970s, when the notion entered managerial discourse via two paths. The first was through the work of theorists who argued that organizations should be viewed as socially constructed systems of meaning (Wilkins, 1979; Pettigrew, 1979; Van Maanen, 1979; Dandridge, Mitroff, and Joyce, 1980; Louis, 1981; Martin, 1982; Pondy et aI., 1983). Influenced by anthropology and symbolic interactionism, these scholars sought to counterbalance systems rationalism by promoting an alternate paradigm for organizational analysis. The second and more influential path was through the work of consultants and applied researchers who wrote primarily for practitioners (Silverzweig and Alien, 1976; Peters, 1978; Ouchi and Price, 1978; O'Toole, 1979; Baker, 1980; Schwartz and Davis, 1981). Although the second group used images similar to the first, their claim was more pragmatic: By heeding the symbolics of leadership and by attending to employees' values, managers could enhance their firm's competitiveness...By the mid-1980s the practitioner-oriented view had become dominant, even in academic circles (Barley, Meyer, and Gash, 1988).” - Barley, S.R. & Kunda, G., 1992. Design and devotion: Surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(3), pp.363–399.

The Adjacent Possible

“And human culture, in general, is ceaselessly creative as the biosphere and culture expand into what I call the Adjacent Possible. The point is that at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe has not had time to make all possible complex objects, such as all proteins length 200. The universe, at these levels of complexity, is on a unique trajectory. When my friend Gertrude [here Kauffman is using the  storybook name he gave the first ever flying squirrel in Earth’s evolution] flew, she changed the material and behavioral features of the evolving universe. So did Picasso.” - Kauffman, S.A., 2007. Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred. Zygon, 42(4), pp.903–914.

Fact or Value?

“…reductionism…has…left us in a world of fact — cold fact with no scientific place for value.” - Kauffman, S.A., 2007. Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred. Zygon, 42(4), pp.903–914.

Clash of symbiosis

“It is one thing for a craftsman to improve his craft. It is one thing to establish a business on the basis of an invention made by an independent inventor. It is quite another thing for an organization to undertake regular and systematic investigations which will obsolete its current products and methods of production and cause it to change in ways it is bound to find uncomfortable if not downright disastrous. It is one thing for businessmen to exploit for business the results of scientific research. It is quite another thing for business to establish a permanent living arrangement with science, and for scientists, technologists and businessmen, with their very different value systems, to enter into a kind of symbiosis quite unknown before the twentieth century.” - Schön, D.A., 1967. Technology and change: the new Heraclitus, New York, NY: Dell Publishing Company., p. xiv