The late Professor Ramos exposes the failure of social science in general 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.

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 substantive rationality, with concern for the full range of human values rather than only instrumental and economic ones, Ramos extends the work of Max Weber. In suggesting the appropriate use of market mechanisms in specific and disciplined enclaves, Ramos creates a fundamentally different alternative to the one described by Adam Smith.

Committed to understanding and dealing with the complexities of southern and northern experiences, Ramos rinds a creative way to integrate the best of which each is capable. The analysis has strong and clear implications for the development of both third-world and post-industrial societies.

As a scholar, Ramos integrated theory building with attention to the practical work of development. He inspired a generation of students as a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Public Administration. Critical Introduction to Brazilian Sociology (1957), The Brazilian National Problem (1960), Sociological Reduction (1955), Administration and Strategy of Development (1966), along with his several hundred other articles and books, represent a major enduring body of work. Ramos served also in the Brazilian School of Public Administration, the Rural University of Brazil, and as head of the Department of Sociology at the Advanced Institute for Brazilian Studies. He held visiting appointments at Yale, Wesleyan, Paris, Santa Catarina, as well as in the Academies of Science in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the Peoples Republic of China.

As a persona of action, Ramos served for a generation in the Brazilian Public Service Department of Administration, as a Delegate to the 1961 Session of the UN General Assembly, as an elected member of the Brazilian National House of Representatives, as Research Director in the Brazilian Department of Labor, and as adviser to President Vargas, Kubistchek, and Goulart.

As a human being, Alberto Gueereiro Ramos integrated these themes into a life of great vitality and outreach – scholar, adviser, poet, theoretician, teacher, friend – a genius of life. Serious with colleagues, warm and challenging and careful with students, Alberto fully embodied his own belief that life is an active process of deliberation to be fully embraced. Ramos lives on in the expanding impact of his work. He is one of those singular persons who fully experienced this century, along with what can be appropriated from the brief past of our species, and built from the diversity and conflict the promise of a better future. A citizen of the world, Ramos was, in this commitment to a more human future, also a special citizen of those two societies to which he gave so much – the United States and Brazil.

‘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