Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 42(4), 311–334 Fall 2006
Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20189
© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA: BUILDING AN
INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNITY
HUNTER CROWTHER-HEYCK
This article explores Herbert Simon’s attempts to build Carnegie Tech’s Graduate School
of Industrial Administration into a center for interdisciplinary social research. It shows that
despite the pressures toward disciplinary specialization created by the rapid growth of the
postwar social sciences, there were strong countercurrents supporting interdisciplinary
work. Support for interdisciplinary work came from a network of powerful new patrons
that were interested in transforming social science into behavioral science and that supported mathematical, behavioral-functional analysis whatever the topic of study. These patrons deliberately defined their goals in terms of solving problems, not building disciplines, and the networks of advisory committees they created enabled certain
entrepreneurial researchers, such as Simon, to exert influence across a range of fields and
institutions. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Though he split no atoms, Herbert Simon (1916–2001) was one of the most influential
scientists of the twentieth century. He played a central role in the transformation of the social
sciences into the behavioral sciences as well as in the development of computer science, becoming the foremost advocate of the information-processing model of mind. Homer Simpson
got an upgrade of his “brain-chip” in an Intel commercial a few years ago (enabling him to
lecture eloquently on “the pastry sciences”); we have Simon to thank, in significant part, for
making the joke plausible enough to be funny.
Simon’s professional journey began in the 1930s at the University of Chicago, where he
pursued a PhD in political science under the guidance of Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell,
Clarence Ridley, and other members of the renowned “Chicago School.” He received his PhD
in 1942 for his thesis on Administrative Behavior, publishing it in 1947. By the late 1950s, it
had become a staple of courses in business education, public administration, and organizational sociology (Simon, 1947). It is easily one of the ten most important works in public administration, and perhaps in all political science, of the twentieth century.
In the late 1940s, he began another journey, starting work in econometrics, for which he
would be awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics. In the mid-1950s, he began research
on the psychology of problem solving, for which he would receive the American
Psychological Association’s highest award for lifetime achievement. Also in the mid-1950s,
he wrote his first computer programs, starting down a path that would lead him and his colleague Allen Newell to receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award, that
discipline’s highest honor.
Simon’s career path settled down somewhat after the mid-1960s, as he eased into an endowed chair at Carnegie-Mellon University in computer science and psychology. Nevertheless,
he still found the time to extend his travels into the philosophy of science, the theory of design,
and sociobiology. His list of publications runs to over 800 items, and if they had to be categorized by discipline, the fields involved would include (at the least): political science, public administration, and management; operations research, systems theory, organization theory, decision theory, and economics (including theory of the firm, theory of the market, game theory,
HUNTER CROWTHER-HEYCK is an assistant professor of history of science at the University of
Oklahoma and author of Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (JHU Press,
2005). His current projects include a study of the relationship between the organizational revolution and
emergence of “systems thinking,” tentatively titled The Branching Tree.
311
312
CROWTHER-HEYCK
economic history, and econometrics); sociology, sociobiology, social psychology, and cognitive
psychology; and pure mathematics, statistics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science.
The interesting thing about this litany of fields is that although he won the highest
awards the disciplines of political science, economics, psychology, and computer science bestow upon their members, Simon never truly identified with any of them. When he was
elected to the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), for example, he was elected as a director at large because no one discipline could claim him. As he put
it, “Psychologists think that I am an economist, but economists think I am a psychologist. In
fact, I feel allegiance to none of these academic tribes, but regard myself as a citizen of the
world—a behavioral scientist” (Simon, 1961b).
At first, the multidisciplinary nature of Simon’s career seems to make him unique to the
point of aberration. It certainly has made him difficult for historians to understand. Because most
histories of the postwar sciences focus on disciplines while Simon defied disciplinary categorization, he often appears to be marginal where he was, in truth, central. John Gardner’s otherwise excellent account of the intellectual development of the cognitive sciences, The Mind’s New
Science, for instance, discusses Simon only in passing when he was arguably the most important
single figure in the cognitive revolution Gardner describes (Gardner, 1985). Similarly, the fine
studies of the behavioral revolution in political science by James Farr, Richard Seidelman, and
John Gunnell acknowledge Simon’s importance yet devote relatively little time to the analysis of
his work and its influence (Farr & Seidelman, 1993; Gunnell, 1993; Seidelman, 1985). Even Paul
Edwards’s remarkable study of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and the politics of
Cold War “closed world” discourse—a study that manages to deal with an extraordinary array of
actors, ideas, and events—does not explore Simon’s role to the extent warranted by his influence,
nor do similar recent explorations of cybernetics and the systems sciences by Peter Galison and
Thomas Hughes (Edwards, 1996; Galison, 1994; Hughes, 1998).1
The growing literature on the various postwar “revolutions” that transformed the social
sciences into the behavioral sciences suffers from a similar problem.2 In the existing treatments of postwar behavioral science, the multiple revolutions within the disciplines are analyzed as if they were unconnected, except insofar as they were all responses to Cold War
America (Bernstein, 2001; Capshew, 1999; Crowther-Heyck, 1999a; Dahl, 1961; Herman,
1995; Leahey, 2002; Ross, 2003). As a result, researchers who worked in the interstices between disciplines, such as Simon, come across as mathematically precocious gadflies rather
than active, and effective, evangelists for a new vision of behavioral science.3
1. Because the postwar exponents of operations research, cybernetics, systems theory, decision theory, game theory,
control theory, artificial intelligence, and early computer programming and design all conducted mathematical, behavioral analyses of system functions, this constellation of fields has come to be labeled the “systems sciences” by
recent historians. An extended bibliography on cybernetics and the systems sciences can be found in CrowtherHeyck (2005). Other sources include Fortun and Schweber (1993), Haraway (1983), Hayles (1999), Heims (1991),
Hughes and Hughes (2000), Kay (1997), Mindell (2002), and Mirowski (2002).
2. An extended bibliography on these multiple revolutions can be found in Crowther-Heyck (2005).
3. The one major exception to this rule is the work of Philip Mirowski, whose fascinating study of the links between
operations research, artificial intelligence (AI), and postwar economics, Machine Dreams, discusses Simon at
length. Mirowski’s analysis of Simon’s ideas agrees in most respects with my own, though his emphasis upon the
“cyborg” nature of Simon’s science is both quite novel and very valuable. Conceptualizing Simon as part of a larger
group interested in creating a “cyborg science” allows Mirowski to make many illuminating and provocative connections to other key figures in the systems sciences. Because the story of Simon’s intellectual development and influence now has been told in depth, both by myself and by Mirowski, the present article focuses on Simon’s work as
an institution builder. For these more substantial studies of Simon’s intellectual development and significance, see
Augier (2000), Crowther-Heyck (2005), Mirowski (2002), and Sent (2000).
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
313
If one shifts one’s focus slightly, however, to concentrate on the informal, interdisciplinary community of social scientists devoted to creating a mathematical, behavioral social science, then Simon’s significance becomes clear. This article seeks to explain both Simon’s interdisciplinary agenda and his success, hoping to provide a kind of proof by example of the
virtues of studying interdisciplinary communities as well as formal disciplines, especially in
the postwar United States. It focuses on Simon’s attempts to build Carnegie Tech’s Graduate
School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) into a center for interdisciplinary social research
and on his efforts to advance his vision for social science across the disciplines by influencing its patrons’ policies.
THE ARGUMENT
In this article, I suggest that despite—or rather, because of—the pressures toward specialization created by the rapid growth in the postwar social sciences, there were strong countercurrents supporting interdisciplinary work, so much so that “interdisciplinary” became a
word to conjure with (e.g., Berelson, 1963). Specifically, support for interdisciplinary work
came from a network of powerful new patrons, most notably the Ford Foundation and the military research agencies. These new patrons were interested in transforming social science into
behavioral science and thus supported mathematical, behavioral-functional analysis whatever
the topic of study. In addition, they deliberately defined their goals in terms of solving problems, not building disciplines, in sharp contrast to the agenda of many leaders of the prewar
social sciences, who desired above all to create intellectually sound, institutionally stable disciplines (Ross, 2003).
The major exception to this rule in prewar social science was the Rockefeller Foundation
and its chief beneficiaries, such as the University of Chicago’s Local Community Research
Council and the Yale Institute of Human Relations (Crowther-Heyck, 2005; Fisher, 1993;
Fosdick, 1989; B. D. Karl, 1974; B. Karl & Katz, 1981; Morawski, 1986; Ross, 1991;
Samelson, 1985). Although the Rockefeller Foundation did not play the same role after the
war as it did before 1941, when it was the major source of extra-university research funding,
the first postwar patronage system for the social sciences was very much the Rockefeller
agenda on a much larger scale. Indeed, a great many of the central figures—patrons, clients,
and brokers—that gave shape to the postwar patronage system had been supported by the
Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s or were trained in programs that were major beneficiaries of the Foundation’s largesse. Hence, the intent of this article is not to argue that Simon and
his patrons were doing something brand new but rather to show that they embraced certain
aspects of prewar social science and elaborated them on an unprecedented scale.
This new network of patrons supported the establishment of a number of interdisciplinary research institutes in the behavioral sciences in the United States between 1945 and the
late 1960s. In addition to the GSIA, some of the more prominent interdisciplinary research
institutes in the behavioral sciences were Harvard’s Department of Social Relations,
Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, RAND, Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social
Research, MIT’s Human Resources Research Laboratory, and the Ford Foundation’s Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Another example of this interdisciplinary
trend was the establishment of dozens of Departments of Social/Human Relations in colleges
and universities across the nation during the 1950s and 1960s. These interdisciplinary departments typically replicated the structure of the Harvard Department of Social Relations,
consisting of faculty from anthropology, sociology, and psychology, with the occasional political scientist. By the mid-1960s, some leading social scientists even went so far as to resJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
314
CROWTHER-HEYCK
urrect the old college course in “general social science,” believing that a behavioral synthesis
now was possible (Bierstedt & Samuelson, 1964).4
This network of patrons of interdisciplinary behavioral science was superseded in the
mid-late 1960s by a new set of patrons, most notably the National Science Foundation (NSF)
and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that made a sharp distinction between “pure” and
“applied” science and were concerned explicitly with the building of disciplines (Capshew,
1999; Chubin & Hackett, 1990; Harden, 1986; Klausner & Lidz, 1986; Larsen, 1992;
National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) Division of Extramural Research Programs.
Program Analysis and Evaluation Section, 1970; Solovey, 2004; United States Congress,
Office of Technology Assessment, 1991). At the same time that these new patrons grew to size
and influence, the Ford Foundation ended its program in the behavioral sciences, and the military research agencies, under pressure from Congress, began to curtail their support for the
kind of middle-range studies that had been the meat and drink of interdisciplinary research
(Solovey, 2004). As a result, interdisciplinary ventures became harder to sustain, though they
did persist in places where a valuable resource, such as an expensive instrument or an extensive dataset, had to be shared by researchers in different disciplines.
This story of Simon and the interdisciplinary communities he sought to create highlights
several factors of widespread importance in the postwar development of the social and behavioral sciences. First, it shows the importance of the ideal of interdisciplinarity in shaping
not only Simon’s work but also the reward system of the social sciences. Second, this study
highlights the importance of a new system of patronage for the social sciences, one characterized by multiple patrons with loosely connected agendas and interlocking boards of advisors, all far more concerned with solving “real-world” problems and with encouraging a
mathematical, behavioral approach across fields than with building disciplines (CrowtherHeyck, 2006). Because these patrons believed in the “linear model” of science, in which
“pure” research leads to “applied research” leads to solutions to practical problems, they did
support highly abstract research as well as practical applications: to Simon and his allies, realworld problems could be solved only through fundamental research. (On the “linear model,”
see Knowles and Leslie [2001].) While these patrons thus looked favorably upon fundamental research, they consistently defined their funding agendas around the solution of real-world
problems that invariably cut across disciplinary lines, and they deliberately eschewed discipline-based funding structures.
Third, Simon’s career reveals the opportunities that existed for scientists with entrepreneurial talents and that had the social skills necessary to serve as brokers within this new system of support for behavioral science. A successful scientific entrepreneur, such as Simon,
was able to mobilize support for his agenda from a variety of sources both internal and external to the institutions in which he made his home. The multiplicity of such sources not only
enabled Simon to remain relatively independent of any one patron but also encouraged him
to define his problem areas broadly so that he could package and repackage his findings to
suit a variety of related, but distinct interests.
In addition, the successful scientific broker, such as Simon, was able to parlay prominence in his specialty into membership in multiple research teams and multiple administrative and coordinating committees. Such brokers served the vital functions of representing the
4. Economists usually remained aloof from such ventures, and experimental psychologists typically were the first to
break away to re-form their own departments. For a “big picture” analysis of such institutes, see Hunter CrowtherHeyck, “Patrons of the Revolution: Ideas and Institutions in Postwar Social Science,” forthcoming in Isis, fall 2006.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
315
interests of different groups to each other and of coordinating research activity, in much the
same way that interlocking memberships on boards of directors help corporations simultaneously satisfy various stakeholders while coordinating their activities.5 Thus, the novel teamand-committee structure of postwar science rewarded not only the new breed of scientific administrators and grant-swingers—the bureaucratic scientists in the gray flannel suits so often
described in accounts of Big Science—but also a new kind of scientific broker skilled at informal, personal coordination who worked his coordinating magic by becoming a member of
multiple, interlocking advisory or administrative committees.
Here I should note that while many scholars have observed that teamwork was a distinct,
novel characteristic of postwar science, few have discussed the importance of committees in
the administration of postwar science (Schmidt & Werle, 1998). Given that committees are
nearly omnipresent in postwar organizational life, it is startling that there is so little research
on the functions and meanings of committees, whether in science or in business. This essay,
I hope, will take some first steps toward exploring the opportunities and constraints that this
new organizational structure brought to postwar behavioral science.
Finally, Simon’s story also reveals that the rise in the 1960s of civilian, federal patrons
of discipline-based “pure” science, primarily the NSF and the NIH, began to change the reward structure described earlier. The disciplines had never been entirely absent from the patronage system of course, but these new federal patrons gave renewed prominence to discipline building as an explicit goal of patronage and consequently tended to define program
areas in disciplinary terms. (Both of these agencies recognized this tendency by the 1980s, attempting to deal with this issue through “cross-cutting programs” and administrative reorganization, with varying degrees of success.) Even scientists committed to interdisciplinary
work, such as Simon, found the large-scale, long-term funding provided by such civilian, federal institutions hard to resist.
In these findings, the story told here bears many similarities to that told by Ronald Doel
about the development of solar system astronomy. In his analysis, Doel finds that “a key characteristic of modern science has been the creation of integrated scientific programs, designed
to counterbalance the continued fragmentation of the natural sciences and the entrenched authority of scientific disciplines” (Doel, 1996). Throughout his account, Doel emphasizes the
importance of the collaborative ideal in American science, the impact of shifting patterns of
patronage, and the vital roles played by certain key individuals, such as Harold Urey, and the
“transient institutions” they created. In my account, Simon plays much the same role that
Urey does in Doel’s: both were defiantly interdisciplinary researchers who combined entrepreneurial talents with the ability to communicate with specialists in other fields. Such individuals are rare, but American science int his period depended upon them for leadership and
coordination, just as it depended upon the interdisciplinary research institutes and “transient
institutions” that they created for innovation.6
5. Note that I by no means wish to idealize the interlocking board form of coordination. At its best, it was highly efficient at selecting talented people and important work for support with relatively little red tape. At its worst, it was
an “old boys club” prone to cronyism and group-think. On the functions of corporate boards, see “The Best and
Worst Corporate Boards” (1997), Berle and Means (1932), Cyert and March (1963), Donaldson and Preston (1995),
Johnson, Daily, and Ellstrand (1996), and Zald (1969).
6. Note that my account here is not intended as a brief against specialization, which is a logical, necessary, and powerful mode of innovation. Rather, this account is intended to show that, to Herbert Simon and many leading scientists and patrons of his generation, rapid growth in specialization needed to be balanced by new forms of coordination and integration. For an extended analysis of specialization and its intellectual and social ramifications, see
Balogh (1991).
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
316
CROWTHER-HEYCK
SIMON’S INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT
Despite appearances to the contrary, throughout his career Herbert Simon was in fact remarkably consistent in his pursuit of a single set of tightly linked goals. He did redefine these
goals over the course of his professional life, so the trajectory of his career is a curve, not a
straight line. But it is a continuous curve, unbroken. His later work on simulating individual problem solving, for example, was a direct descendant of his early work on decision making within
organizations, and in his analyses the limits to human reason always were set by our ability to
process information, not by our irrational passions or hidden subconscious drives. As he once
wrote, “I am often complimented, sincerely I think, on the range of my dilettantism . . . the compliments were largely undeserved [however] . . . what appeared to be scatteration was really
closer to monomania” (Simon, 1957c). The focus of that monomania was a grandly ambitious
goal: the creation of a unified, usable science of human behavior that could define and protect
the role of rational choice (and thus conscious design) in human affairs (Crowther-Heyck, 2005).
Simon first formed this goal during his years as a graduate student in political science at
the University of Chicago, where he encountered a stellar group of professors and graduate
students—Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, Harold Gosnell, Leonard White, Quincy
Wright, Herbert Beyle, Gabriel Almond, David Truman, Herman Pritchett, Avery Leiserson,
V. O. Key, and Don K. Price—all of whom shared a common outlook on social science and
its role in society (Bulmer, 1984; Crowther-Heyck, 2005; Farr & Seidelman, 1993; Gunnell,
1993; B. D. Karl, 1974; Ross, 1991; Smith, 1988).7 This outlook was not a formal doctrine,
but rather a linked set of beliefs about the science of politics. In Simon’s words:
It was Lasswell’s psychologizing and Gosnell’s quantitative and empirical methods that
most specifically symbolized the Chicago School. But what characterized it even more
fundamentally for me, and I think for a number of other graduate students, was its commitment to the proposition that political science is science. Along with that commitment
went a dissolving of departmental boundaries that made the whole university, and all of
its methodologies, available to the students of political science. (Simon, 1991)
Perhaps this science might never be as precise as physics; nevertheless, it could be a
proper science characterized by objectivity, empirical truth to nature, and theoretical rigor. In
this view, objectivity required that political scientists follow William Ogburn’s injunction to
separate the “is” from the “ought,” empiricism demanded that political science take political
behavior to be its data, and theoretical sophistication required that political science look to
psychology in order to understand the mechanisms underlying that behavior.
To these commitments to objectivity, empiricism, and theoretical rigor, the Chicago
School added a fourth vital element: a commitment to linking social research to social reform.
The problems of society—particularly those of the city—were the starting point for research.
This approach was exemplified by the Local Community Research Council (LCRC), which
coordinated an interdisciplinary research program into the problems of urban life, and in the
“1313” agencies, a group of 15 governmental associations, such as the Public Administration
Clearing House and the International City Managers Association, all headquartered at 1313
E. 60th Street. The 1313 organizations were devoted to the communication of information between researcher and practitioner. Their goal was to transform every government program
from an ad hoc response to a crisis into a planned experiment (Pritchett, 1945).
7. Four of the above, in addition to Simon, were named in a 1963 survey as being among the ten most important contributors to political science since 1945. Merriam, White, and Gosnell, who flourished before 1945, would have been
at the top of any similar list for the 1930s.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
317
This focus on problems of governance aided the “dissolving of departmental boundaries” that so impressed Simon. Harold Lasswell described the environment at Chicago at this
time as a “cross-disciplinary manifold,” and so it was (Q. Wright, Lepawsky, Buehrig, &
Lasswell, 1971). Simon took full advantage of the range of opportunities available to him, taking few classes but spending long hours reading and talking with faculty and graduate students from a variety of fields. The result: the only course listed on his graduate transcript is
one in boxing, and not one of the three professors that he believed influenced him most at
Chicago was a political scientist (Simon, 1991).8
The three that did influence him most strongly, in his account, were the philosopher of
science Rudolf Carnap, the mathematical biologist Nicholas Rashevsky, and the economist
Henry Schultz. All three were pioneers in the mathematical analysis of complex systems: logical, biological, and economic. Inspired as well as instructed by these three, Simon became
convinced that the key to reforming social science was to make it a mathematical as well as
a behavioral science. In addition, these three reinforced Simon’s own personal conviction that
human thoughts and actions that seemed irrational often were products not of irrationality but
of limited, or bounded, rationality: they simply were the products of our reason applied to radically different initial premises. This belief was strengthened by Simon’s work under Clarence
Ridley, who saw organizations as essential aids to rational decision making, not as iron cages
of bureaucratic irrationality. The sum of these factors was that Simon took as his central intellectual goal the analysis of how various constraints—first organizational, then cognitive—
both bounded and enabled reason (Crowther-Heyck, 2005).
Simon absorbed the Chicago School’s concern for the problems of urban life as well,
drawing his graduate stipend for his work with the International City Manager’s Association
(ICMA) and later directing a series of three studies for the University of California’s Bureau
of Public Administration (BPA), all funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (Simon, 1943;
Simon, Divine, Cooper, & Chernin, 1941; Simon, Sharp, & Shephard, 1942; Wirth, 1937).
These experiences all taught Simon that the solutions to social problems lay in interdisciplinary synthesis. If research and reform were to be united, so too must the disciplines: problems
in the real world did not respect disciplinary boundaries. At Carnegie Tech, Simon would try
to institutionalize interdisciplinarity on the Chicago model, both in the individual and in the
research team.
CARNEGIE TECH AND THE GSIA
When Herbert Simon came to Carnegie Tech (CIT) in 1949, he found a technical institute in the process of transforming itself into a research university (Cleeton, 1965; Fenton,
2000; Schaefer, 1992; Tarbell, 1937; A. Wright, 1973). Like many technical schools in the
postwar era, CIT sought to take advantage of the new enthusiasm for research among business and government leaders by creating interdisciplinary institutes that promised to apply
basic science to the solution of practical problems (Hounshell & Smith, 1988; Knowles &
Leslie, 2001; Leslie, 1993).
Founded in order to provide a practical education for mechanics, over its first 40 years
CIT progressively had expanded its program to include more and higher-level science. The
8. The three were Henry Schultz, a pioneering mathematical economist known for his work on the theory and measurement of demand; Nicholas Rashevsky, a biophysicist who created a new program in mathematical biology at
Chicago; and Rudolf Carnap, a philosopher famous as a leading exponent of the logical empiricism (aka logical positivism) of the Vienna Circle.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
318
CROWTHER-HEYCK
first major steps along this path came in 1912, when CIT became a full-fledged degree-granting institution, and in 1922 when Thomas Baker assumed CIT’s presidency and began to encourage the creation of research laboratories on campus. These laboratories all focused on applied research in areas of interest to their local industrial patrons. For example, Alcoa
supported the Metals Research Laboratory, Gulf Oil sponsored the Molecular Structure
Laboratory, and United States Steel, GE, Koppers, and Westinghouse supported the Coal
Research Laboratory (Tarbell, 1937).
The biggest changes in CIT, however, came after Robert Doherty took the reins in 1936.
Trained as an electrical engineer at Cornell, Doherty came to CIT from Yale, where he had
been dean of engineering. He hoped to instill some of the spirit that animated such research
universities in the Carnegie Tech faculty. In addition, his experiences at GE and at Yale had
convinced him that professionals in general, and engineers in particular, were too narrowly
trained. In his view, professional education needed to “place less emphasis upon routine
know-how and miscellaneous technical information, and much more upon [the] intellectual
skills [and] fundamental knowledge . . . essential to coping with practical situations”
(Doherty, 1950). For Doherty, fundamental research was necessary, not antithetical, to the education of engineers.
In 1940, Doherty put forward a set of guidelines that quickly became known as the
“Carnegie Plan” for engineering education. Doherty described this plan as a “major break
from education tradition,” and it was (Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1948; Doherty, 1950).
According to this plan, Carnegie Tech would strive to cultivate in its students: “1) the ability
to think independently . . . 2) the ability to . . . deal with the whole problem or situation and
not only part of it . . . 3) the ability to learn from each new experience . . . [and] 4) competence and interest in dealing with the responsibilities of citizenship” (Doherty, 1950). In short,
Carnegie Tech would train engineers to be professionals and citizens, not mere technicians.
A key element in this unusually broad vision of engineering education was instruction in
the social aspects of engineering. Doherty believed that training in economics, for example,
was vital, since engineers always design with a cost constraint. Also, he knew that successful
engineers typically advanced to management positions where technical skills alone were insufficient. As a result, Doherty committed himself to supporting programs in economics and
management as part of the Carnegie Plan (Gleeson & Schlossman, 1996).
Competing Visions
In 1949, Doherty was able to convince William Larimer Mellon to endow a new School
of Industrial Administration (SIA) at Carnegie Tech with a gift of $6 million, an extraordinarily large sum for business education at the time. Doherty and Mellon envisioned the SIA
as a center for professional training in management. They “valued its educational program
above all else, and they expected the school’s students to be its greatest product” (Gleeson &
Schlossman, 1996).
Herbert Simon, the first new hire for the School, had a different vision, however. This
vision was very much a product of Simon’s education at the University of Chicago and his
later experiences working at municipal research and planning agencies in Chicago and
Berkeley in the late 1930s and early 1940s. These experiences had taught Simon that reform
programs needed to be based upon a body of fundamental knowledge and theory. Too many
people, in his view, were guided by what he called “the Proverbs of Administration,” not by
the findings of administrative science (Simon, 1947). Research into the fundamentals of organizational sociology and social psychology, particularly into the ways in which organizations influenced the decisions of their members, was necessary for true reform.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
319
In addition, Simon’s aptitude for mathematics and his fierce positivism had led him to
pursue a mathematical, behavioral approach to social science, an approach that he proselytized with the relentless energy of a true believer. His association with the Cowles
Commission for Research in Economics prior to coming to CIT had only strengthened his
faith, for there he had found an illustrious group of kindred spirits (Christ, 1952, 1994).
Simon’s commitments to research-led reform, to interdisciplinary work, and to mathematical analysis led him to embrace a linked set of five beliefs about the future of social science. First, he believed that many fields, such as operations research (OR), game theory, organization theory, and cybernetics, were converging upon a shared set of questions and
methods, all related to decision making in complex social-technical systems. Second, he
thought that this area of convergence—the “systems sciences”—was fundamental to all social
science. Third, he was confident that the military sponsors of research in applied mathematics could be persuaded to support work in this area, as the Cowles Commission’s 1948 contract with the RAND Corporation indicated.9 Fourth, he believed that there was a need—and
a demand—for improved management training for administrators of large-scale organizations, public and private. And fifth, he was certain that the discoveries, methods, and models
of the new, “Buck Rogers” world of “systems science” should form the basis of this training
(Simon, 1953).
The way to capitalize upon these opportunities, in his view, was to create centers for research in this interdisciplinary region. The ideal center would conduct both empirical and theoretical work, bringing together specialists from several disciplines to work on projects
funded primarily by external contracts and grants (Berelson, 1951; Cooper, Rosenblatt, &
Simon, 1950; Simon, 1951a). Work would begin by addressing practical problems and would
move from the practical to the theoretical and fundamental before returning to the mundane.
The SIA, as defined by Doherty and Mellon, would not have been such a center, nor was
SIA Dean G. L. Bach inclined to deviate so far from its founder’s goals. Simon, however, saw
in the SIA the potential for creating a GSIA, a graduate school of industrial administration
and center for interdisciplinary social research. He guessed, correctly, that the school could
find the necessary resources and that CIT’s administrators (especially Bach) could be persuaded to follow his lead.
SIMON AT THE GSIA
Simon came to CIT in 1949 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he had
taught since 1942. Simon had found the atmosphere of a technical college congenial and had
enjoyed teaching engineers, so he looked forward to working at CIT. In addition, Simon saw
in CIT the opportunity to build something new, without having to tear down old, ossified
structures.
When he joined CIT, Simon was promised that he would be appointed head of the
Department of Industrial Administration (one of the two departments in the SIA), that he
would have a free hand in hiring and firing within his department, that he would be a member of the School’s three-man Executive Committee (and so have a voice in policy and personnel decisions), and that he would serve as the School’s representative on the Institute’s ex-
9. RAND was a crucial node in the postwar applied mathematics community, just as the Applied Mathematics Panel
of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) had been during the war. On RAND, see Hounshell (1997),
Jardini (1996), and Rider (1992). On the Applied Mathematics Panel of the NDRC, see Galison (1994), Mindell
(2002), Mirowski (2002), Rau (1999), and Weintraub (1992).
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
320
CROWTHER-HEYCK
ternal committee, overseeing the School’s operations (Bach, 1949, 1950). These appointments
gave Simon unusual status: in the School’s catalogue, for years he was listed out of alphabetical order, next to the dean.
He exercised his authority vigorously, hiring a young, talented, and like-minded faculty
of social psychologists and organization theorists to staff the industrial management program.
These included George Kozmetsky, Harold Guetzkow, James March, Allen Newell, and
Richard Cyert (who later became dean of the GSIA and president of Carnegie-Mellon).
Simon also used his authority to remove faculty members (particularly economists) who did
not see eye-to-eye with him. His authority was magnified when both Doherty and Mellon died
suddenly in the summer of 1950. The new president, Jake Warner, was not as interested in
management education as Doherty, and he left the School—and Simon—to their own devices.
In addition to his formal authority, Simon quickly came to wield great informal influence. His personal authority stemmed from many sources: from his personal influence with
Bach and other CIT administrators, to the table-pounding vigor with which he promoted his
vision for the School, to his obvious intellectual prowess. A number of the staff, particularly
in industrial management, were rather in awe of him, writing memos peppered with lines like
“Gee, Herb, you’re a genius” (Guetzkow, 1951a). In addition, in the School’s second year, “an
informal three-man elected faculty committee” was established “as an informal research
steering and coordinating group,” with Simon at the helm. Although there was “no thought
that this research group will dictate what research projects should be undertaken by individual faculty members,” it did “participate actively in decisions on the allocation of SIA funds
to research purposes” and “on [decisions about] the School’s acceptance of outside contracts
for research work” (Bach, 1951).
Perhaps the most important source of Simon’s influence, however, was his unique position as an integral member of all the major team research projects undertaken by the School
in its first five years. These projects, and the contracts and grants that supported them, organized all the research work of the school, and the pattern of interlocking memberships that
characterized these teams served as a microcosm of Simon’s ideal of interinstitution and interdisciplinary coordination. These projects included: (1) a subcontract via Simon’s old
friends at the Cowles Commission to work with the RAND Corporation (where many former
Cowles Commission staff found work in the late 1940s and early 1950s) on the theory of resource allocation; (2) a related study for the Office of Naval Research (ONR) on decision
making under conditions of uncertainty; (3) a contract with the Air Force and the Bureau of
the Budget for Project SCOOP—a study of intrafirm production planning and control; (4) a
study for the Controllership Foundation on the comparative merits of decentralization and
centralization in budgeting (a key mechanism of administrative control); and (5) an “inventory” of organization theory, funded by the Ford Foundation, which led to the book on
Organizations, coauthored by Simon, James March, and Harold Guetzkow (Bach, 1954;
March, Simon, & Guetzkow, 1958; Simon & Guetzkow, 1952). As the patrons and topics of
these projects indicate, they were distinct yet closely related, and researchers on each team
avidly sought to apply tools developed for one project to others.
The Air Force and the Cowles-RAND contracts were signed by early 1950. They included not only research expenses but also overhead payments sufficient to pay for “nearly all
the faculty time . . . allocated to research planning and development during the year ahead”
(Bach, 1950). This was fortunate, since the School’s new building was running well over
budget (Gleeson & Schlossman, 1996). These and the other contracts that soon followed enabled the School to dispense with tuition for its graduate students, which was quite unusual
for a business school. They also supported a very high staff-to-student ratio, enabling the facJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
321
ulty to spend the majority of their time on research. For the social sciences, the sums involved
were extraordinary: one of Simon’s colleagues, as part of an attempt to relieve him of his administrative authority, suggested in 1951 that Simon be set up with a $100,000 annual research budget—ten times his salary—in exchange for his letting slip the reins of power
(Simon, 1951c). Instructively, Simon refused.
Team Work
Such plentiful resources enabled the School to attract and equip talented researchers,
with the result that the staff quickly gained considerable recognition for its work in economics and in organization theory. Many business schools, from MIT to Chicago to Stanford, followed the GSIA’s model, often hiring GSIA staff to lead the way (Gleeson, 1997). Indeed, one
could say without exaggeration that the GSIA staff did more than anyone to create not only
the present model of the MBA but also the idea that a business school should be a research
institution. Bach played a particularly important missionary role in this endeavor, as he was
intimately involved in both the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation reports on business education that were published in 1959 (Gordon & Howell, 1959; Pierson, 1959). These
“Flexner Reports for Business Education” went along with a $35 million program of grants
to business schools by the Ford Foundation. Simon also played a role in making business
schools centers for research, promoting the GSIA as a model business school through his
links to Thomas Carroll (dean of the UNC Business School and the program officer at Ford
Foundation responsible for the business education program) and his participation on the
SSRC’s Committee on Research on the Business Enterprise.10
These contracts did more than pay the bills and win prestige, however, for they structured
the whole life and work of the School. In sharp contrast to standard prewar research practice
in the social sciences, which typically was conducted by individuals, the GSIA organized people into research teams. These teams were interdisciplinary and met weekly to discuss
progress. The staff wrote an endless series of memos and updates, and project leaders wrote
annual or semiannual reports for their patrons and for the dean, who compiled them for the
annual report of the School to the president, a set of now-familiar procedures for many researchers that was quite uncommon in academic social science at the time.
Although their research projects were not as severely results-oriented as other militaryfunded projects, which typically had a strong focus on producing specific tools to accomplish
specific tasks, such patronage did have the effect of encouraging the School’s staff to think in
terms of creating readily identifiable products—not just publications, but also theorems, models, and packageable, portable techniques. A perfect example of this emphasis upon portable
techniques was the development of “quadratic programming”—linear programming taken to a
higher power—by Simon and his colleague Charles Holt in the course of research funded by the
Air Force’s Project SCOOP (Simon, 1982, 1997). Quadratic programming techniques were applicable to a variety of problems across several studies, and they could be packaged and taught
as a defined set of techniques, which made them appealing to both Simon and his patrons.
As head of two of the five early projects and lead “hell-raiser” on the others, Simon produced a definable Carnegie Tech approach—or even “doctrine,” as some called it. His ideas
about decision making, bounded rationality, and the organization of systems came to charac-
10. Simon’s connections to the Ford Foundation began in 1951, when Bernard Berelson, a strong advocate of a behavioral approach to political science, became the foundation’s program director for the behavioral sciences.
Berelson appointed Simon to several advisory subcommittees for the foundation, and Simon took to such committee work like a duck to water.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
322
CROWTHER-HEYCK
terize the work of the School. Indeed, the effects of exposure to Simon could be dramatic.
Following a visit to Carnegie Tech, R. Freed Bales of Harvard’s Laboratory of Social
Relations playfully chastised his host:
Don’t tell anybody the horrible truth about the effect you had on me. My ideas are even
crazier than when I came. . . . About to abandon the stochastic approach, wavering away
from the multiple weighted factor approach, and teetering toward the grundlich-goshawful-fundamental-complex-information-processing-and-problem-solving-monster approach. My philosophy seems to have been affected. (Bales, 1956)
These contracts and grants also brought with them connections to the world beyond
Carnegie Tech, just as Simon intended. Simon was well aware that one of the dangers of interdisciplinary work is, ironically, isolation. Program officers at RAND, the Air Force, the
ONR, and the Ford Foundation, however, were involved with many projects at many sites and
wanted their charges to communicate with each other. As contract workers for RAND, for example, Simon and his colleagues were invited to Santa Monica for numerous weekend conferences and even entire summers. Similarly, the Cowles staff visited CIT on many occasions.
The ONR likewise held periodic conferences for all its clients in various areas of research,
helping to establish personal contacts as well as circulate results and techniques (Guetzkow,
1951b).
In a similar vein, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations—partly at Simon’s behest—gave
travel grants to researchers who wished to study at the interdisciplinary research centers they
supported. A steady stream of visitors came to Pittsburgh on such grants to discuss common
interests, to assist in replicating experiments that they had run elsewhere (Simon believed that
a tradition of replication needed to be created in the social sciences), and to participate in
seminars (Simon & Guetzkow, 1952). In addition, beginning in 1953 the SSRC, with money
from the Ford Foundation, organized a series of six- to eight-week intensive summer seminars
for promising young faculty (“Summer Research Training Institutes: A New Council
Program,” 1954). All of these seminars promoted a mathematical, behavioral approach to social science, and many focused explicitly on the area of convergence—the systems sciences—
that Simon had identified. This was no accident, since Simon played a major role in organizing the summer seminar program and put together two of the most famous seminars,
including one held at RAND in 1958 that became almost legendary in the worlds of artificial
intelligence (AI) and cognitive psychology.
The 1958 summer seminar on simulation techniques was a classic example of Simon’s
interdisciplinary vision and multipatron approach. Simon and his GSIA colleague Allen
Newell organized the seminar under the SSRC’s aegis with funding provided by the Ford
Foundation and the RAND Corporation. (As an indication of how close the relations were between Carnegie Tech and RAND, RAND continued to pay Newell’s salary throughout the
1950s, even though he moved to join Simon at the GSIA in the autumn of 1954.)
Planning for the seminar began in the summer of 1957, when Simon and Newell (then
running a summer seminar for the SSRC on organization theory) found that there was growing interest in the computer simulation aspects of their work on decision making. They proposed to their friends at the SSRC and the Ford Foundation an eight-week summer seminar
to teach younger researchers the techniques involved in computer simulation. Simon, who
would be elected to the SSRC’s board of directors the following year, already was a prominent member of the Council and was well connected to the Ford Foundation as well. Through
his good offices, Ford agreed to pay travel expenses, and the SSRC agreed to provide official
sponsorship and administrative assistance. RAND provided the facilities, and its large staff
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
323
provided technical support and instruction—no small matter at a time when access to toplevel computing facilities was enormously expensive. The various sponsoring organizations
divided the costs of housing the attendees, with RAND paying the lion’s share. The summer
seminar had quite an impact on the attendees: the psychologist George A. Miller, for example, based his influential text Plans and the Structure of Behavior on the concepts and techniques learned at this seminar, writing the text while in residence the following year at the
Ford Foundation’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Crowther-Heyck,
1999a; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960).
These projects and connections tied Simon, his colleagues at Carnegie Tech, and researchers at other centers into a self-aware community. This community lacked a formal
structure, but it made up for it with frequent and intense communication, competition, and
collaboration, the use of a common mathematical language and behavioral approach, and a
shared sense of mission regarding the importance of computer simulation and the need to understand decision making in complex systems.
The Ford Foundation
This community of mathematically oriented behavioral scientists drew support from
many sources: most notably, the Air Force, RAND, the Army, the Office of Naval Research,
the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. All of these
organizations had program officers who were committed to interdisciplinary, problem-oriented research and who favored mathematical, behavioral approaches. Simon took advantage
of the opportunities available, finding that having multiple potential patrons gave one greater
freedom as well as greater resources. This was true even in Simon’s dealings with the Ford
Foundation, the single most important node in the new network supporting behavioral science. Simon’s experiences with the Ford Foundation are worth closer examination, for they
were characteristic of a broader pattern.
The Ford Foundation first made its mark in the social sciences in 1951, when Bernard
Berelson was appointed program officer for the Foundation’s Area Five, “the behavioral sciences.” The term behavioral science was chosen to describe Program Area Five because the
Foundation desired to promote a particular kind of social science—mathematical, behavioral
social science—and because it wished to avoid channeling its funds through traditional disciplinary structures (Berelson, 1951, 1953).
Later that year, Berelson circulated a draft “Plan for the Development of the Behavioral
Sciences,” in which he set forth his agenda. Agreeing with the general planning committee
for the Foundation (the Gaither Committee)11 that “the critical problems which obstruct advancement in human welfare and progress toward democratic goals are today social rather
than physical in character,” Berelson stated that the “goal of the program is to provide scientific aids for use in the conduct of human affairs” (Berelson, 1951). Since the program’s ultimate goal was the solution of social problems, not the increase of abstract knowledge, “the
program [did] not fall within any one conventional field of knowledge, and traditional academic disciplines as such [were] not included or excluded. On the contrary, the program [was]
interdisciplinary and inter-field” (Berelson, 1951).
In keeping with these views, Berelson outlined a series of problem areas as foci for research, including “Political Behavior,” “Values and Beliefs,” “Social and Cultural Change,”
“Formal Organization,” “Communication,” and “Behavioral Aspects of the Economic
11. The Gaither Committee took its name from its head, H. Rowan Gaither, an experienced research manager who
had helped set up the RAND Corporation only two years earlier, with money from the Ford Foundation.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
324
CROWTHER-HEYCK
System” (Berelson, 1951). All these problem areas demanded interdisciplinary approaches,
Berelson argued, and required the active leadership of Foundation officers. In his view, the
Foundation should initiate action in these areas through specific programs and projects, while
it should respond to proposals in other areas (Berelson, 1951). The Foundation would not only
select but also commission work in certain fields, conducting “inventories” of “tested propositions” in specific problem areas.
The way Berelson organized the advisory apparatus for his Program Area is also instructive. He created a network of interdisciplinary committees to coordinate work in the
“problem areas” and their subdivisions and relied upon a pattern of interlocking membership
on these committees to provide coordination for the program as a whole. Two key figures,
Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, served on six such committees; Simon, Ralph Tyler,
and Thomas Carroll served on five, and another dozen leading behavioral scientists served on
two to four committees. This pattern of interlocking committee memberships fostered coordinated research without establishing centralized control or a formal hierarchy of authority
(Berelson, 1953).
The Ford Foundation’s ambitions may have been greater than those of the other patrons
of the systems sciences, but the assumptions that research should be oriented toward solving
problems; that it should adopt mathematical, behavioral approaches; and that it should be interdisciplinary were widely shared by the generation of social scientists trained during and
after the war, as well as by the program officers at other funding agencies. Similarly, its internal pattern of coordination through interlocking committee memberships mirrored the
structure of the patronage system for behavioral science as a whole. As a result, researchers
with entrepreneurial skills, such as Simon, were able to pursue interdisciplinary work and be
rewarded for it.
GROWING APART
Simon’s remarkable successes were not achieved without some stress among his faculty.
In particular, his vigorous advocacy of a behavioral approach to economics and management,
and his criticism of the assumption of “omniscient” rationality and maximizing behavior, concepts central to neoclassical economics, did not endear him to his colleagues in that field. The
forced departure of one young economist left the “strong feeling that one’s advancement rate
here depends largely on one’s adherence to the official doctrine,” and many were afraid to
argue with Simon, lest he “might interpret disagreement as heresy or stupidity” (Simon,
1951b). Some staff began to refer to themselves as “vassals,” and many felt that “issues raised
at staff meetings had been pre-decided” by the triumvirate of Simon, Bach, and William
Cooper (the economists’ representative), with most of the votes cast two to one against the
economists (Simon, 1951b). Economists did not like being told how to do economics, and
tempers flared.
Simon viewed such complaints as normal products of the “stresses that commonly go
with rapid organizational change” and did not believe that the “basic direction” of the School
needed to change (Simon, 1951b). He believed that the economists were “not so much opposed
to the special focus of the school’s activities as desperately intent on retaining their professional
roles as economists” (Simon, 1951b). Thus, he concluded, only giving the economists greater
control over their own program could allay resentment, although he worried that this might
prove a “hindrance to further progress in an interdisciplinary direction” (Simon, 1951b).
Despite the problems it caused, the tension between the economists and the organization
theorists could be creative as well as destructive. In the GSIA’s first decade, the shared sense
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
325
of being “leaders of the revolution” helped the staff use their differences as spurs to innovate,
both in research and in teaching. The tension remained beneath the surface, however, and the
greater the autonomy the economists gained, the less like Simon’s vision the School became.
Here Simon’s experience at the GSIA conformed to a broad pattern: economics and, to
a lesser extent, experimental psychology were the two social sciences most difficult to integrate into interdisciplinary research programs, primarily due to their higher status, access to
distinct funding streams, and greater disciplinary self-confidence. The history of the
Department of Social Relations at Harvard, to take but one example, reveals the prevalence
of this problem: Talcott Parsons’s original plan for the department included economics and experimental psychology, but neither group felt it had anything to gain from the union and so
remained aloof (Crowther-Heyck, 1997b; Parsons, 1977; Parsons et al., 1945). The same pattern would play out again in the 1960s when centers for research on poverty were established:
sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists often joined together in institutes, such
as the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT, while economists formed their own
institutes, such as the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Poverty (Aaron,
1978; Haveman, 1987; Marris & Rein, 1982; National Research Council (U.S.) Advisory
Committee for Assessment of University-Based Institutes for Research on Poverty, 1971;
O’Connor, 2001).
In the GSIA’s first decade, Simon played a key role in maintaining a sense of common
purpose. Although his sharp opinions could drive people apart, his ability to engage the economists on a serious level and his membership in so many of the School’s team research projects served to unite the staff. On another level, Simon’s prestige outside the School and his influential position within it made it clear that working with him was a far surer path to success
than was opposing him. In its second decade, however, this internal dynamic changed and the
divisions grew.
The Carnegie Grant
In the late 1950s, Simon’s role in the GSIA began to change. His research agenda shifted
strongly after 1955 toward using computers to study cognition. As his interests changed, he
withdrew from the GSIA’s other research programs, finding, as so many others have, that
computers tend to consume all of one’s time and intellectual energy. At the same time, the
areas that interested the School’s economists—operations research, quantitative controls, linear and quadratic programming—were being incorporated into the mainstream of economics,
which strengthened their ties to their parent discipline (Mirowski, 2002; Morgan &
Rutherford, 1998; Weintraub, 2002).
As the GSIA began to look less like the embodiment of Simon’s vision of the ideal research center, the prospect of undertaking interdisciplinary research with a new set of partners became more appealing. For Simon, the key step in creating a new alignment of interests
was the redefinition of his project from the mathematical modeling of decision making to the
computer simulation of problem solving. This subtle but significant move enabled Simon to
find a new set of patrons—ones interested in computing and simulation—and to establish a
new interdisciplinary program.
This shift in Simon’s research program had multiple sources—some intellectual, some
institutional, and some personal. One of the most important factors was Simon’s intense dissatisfaction with the inherent problems with maintaining proper experimental control in social field experiments (Crowther-Heyck, 2005). This dissatisfaction led him to search for
other ways of achieving control over the experimental situation without sacrificing relevance
to the world outside the laboratory. His experiences at the RAND Corporation’s Systems
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
326
CROWTHER-HEYCK
Research Laboratory in the early 1950s taught him that it was possible to bring social behavior into the laboratory if one redefined the problems under study—and if one used computers to help simulate the environment for the experimental subjects.
In 1955–1956, Simon and his colleague Allen Newell developed a program called the
Logic Theorist (or LT). Its success in simulating the problem-solving behavior of humans
convinced them that the future of behavioral science lay in the study of such simulated systems. Believing that simulation was “the hottest scent in the woods,” they applied for and won
another large grant ($750,000) from the Ford Foundation in 1957 (Bach, 1957; Simon,
1957a)—$500,000 was for a rotating Distinguished Research Professorship at the GSIA and
$250,000 was for an additional five years of work on “organization theory and business decision-making.” This heading no longer described Simon’s work with perfect accuracy
(though it does reveal the continuing connections between his computer science and his organization theory), but it was close enough to win the approval of the Ford Foundation’s new
Program Officer for Behavioral Science, Richard Sheldon. Sheldon, like many foundation officials, had become increasingly interested in the possible application of computer simulation
techniques to behavioral science, seeing in them the potential to deal with systems of great
complexity (Berelson, 1957; Sheldon, 1957; Simon, 1957b).
RAND also continued to provide significant resources for Simon and Newell’s work,
particularly access to state-of-the-art computing facilities and the best technical advice and
support available anywhere. RAND paid Newell’s salary and assigned five members of its
professional staff to work full time with Simon and Newell in 1960; in another two years, that
number had risen to ten. In addition, RAND sponsored Simon’s summer-long visits to Santa
Monica each year and paid his salary during his sabbatical in 1960–1961.
The new research program Simon envisioned, however, would require additional resources
and greater security. By 1960, he felt his interests and Ford’s diverging, leading him to restructure the grant to pay for a smaller portion of his group’s work over a longer period (Simon,
1960a, 1960b). He needed a new constellation of patrons in order to pursue his new interests.
The first new star in this constellation was the Carnegie Corporation of New York,
which Simon and Newell petitioned successfully for a grant of $175,000 (over five years)
in early 1960 (Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1960; Simon, 1960a). The Carnegie
Corporation had maintained an avuncular (but not parental) relationship with Carnegie
Tech since the 1940s, and under its directors Charles Dollard (1948–1955) and John W.
Gardner (1955–1967), it had expanded its mission to include the support of the social sciences, particularly as they related to education. Gardner, in particular, was interested in
supporting research into the psychology of learning and cognition, so much so that Jerome
Bruner referred to him as the “Medici” of cognitive psychology (Lagemann, 1989).
Gardner, like his fellow program officers at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, was an
advocate of interdisciplinary research. Simon knew of Gardner’s support for the new
Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, an interdisciplinary research institute founded in
1960 by Bruner and Simon’s friend George A. Miller, so he turned to Gardner and the
Carnegie Corporation to get his project on “complex information processing” (CIP) up and
running (Crowther-Heyck, 1999a).
The Carnegie grant provided essential seed money for Simon’s growing research program,
and that seed money soon was planted in the rich soil of federal funding. Though the sums received from the Carnegie Corporation were smaller than those received from Ford, the fact that
they were given specifically for work on the computer simulation of human information processing served to validate Simon’s conceptual reorientation. The big money would come later,
but this grant enabled others to share his unblinking confidence in the course he had chosen.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
327
Systems and Communications Sciences
Simon’s success with the Carnegie Corporation spurred further interdisciplinary ventures at CIT, including a new interdepartmental program in “Systems and Communications
Sciences” (Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1961, 1962). As early as 1959, Simon had begun
to think of creating a new interdisciplinary program covering the whole area of the behavioral
analysis of complex systems. This program would teach graduate students from a number of
disciplines how to analyze complex systems through computer simulation, thus bringing a
unified method and instrumental practice to a wide range of fields. The program would involve staff from many departments, including mathematics, physics, electrical engineering,
economics, industrial management, and psychology, and it would be funded, he hoped, by
foundations interested in pure rather than applied science.
Of all these varied players, the psychologists were the most reluctant. Although several
psychologists at Carnegie Tech were interested in cognition, the chair of the department,
Haller Gilmer, opposed Simon’s repeated requests that he make it the department’s central
focus (Gregg & Leavitt, 1960; Simon, 1961a). Simon returned from his sabbatical year at
RAND in 1960–1961 unwilling to wait any longer. He had come to see the psychological aspects of decision making as fundamental to understanding human behavior and so viewed the
participation of psychologists as essential.
When Simon won the Carnegie grant in the summer of 1961, he shifted into high gear.
Gilmer did not, and that autumn Simon issued an ultimatum to Gilmer and to CIT President
Jake Warner, writing:
I can fruitfully carry on my work at Carnegie only if there is on campus a strong graduate psychology program. . . . While we have made some progress in this direction . . . we
have made it only because GSIA was willing to supply the financial resources. . . . To
reach the goal will require vigorous leadership in the Psychology Department from a
chairman who is thoroughly sold on the objective. Because of what I perceive as a drift
in the department over the past two or three years . . . I no longer have confidence that
[Gilmer] will provide that leadership. (Simon, 1961a)
The message was clear: it was either Gilmer or Simon. Gilmer resigned the chairmanship in short order, and Simon’s choice for chair, Bert Green, took over in 1962 (CrowtherHeyck, 1999b). The program in systems and communication sciences was launched immediately, and the psychologists were now quite firmly on board. (It should be noted that Simon
and Gilmer remained on friendly terms despite Simon’s power play—and that the transformation of the department Simon launched was enormously successful. The Carnegie Mellon
Department of Psychology rapidly became one of the two or three most influential departments in the discipline, a position it still retains.)
The Computers of NIMH
Simon and Newell were not content with the Carnegie grant; it was a good beginning,
but it did not allow for the kind of growth they envisioned. In 1962, Newell wrote, “There is
an almost unanimous felt need to get Tech’s effort in this area funded in some sort of stable
long term way at an appropriate level and with appropriate freedoms” (Newell, 1962). Like
almost all researchers in fields related to computing, they found this support—and these freedoms—in the arms of the federal government. Unlike Simon’s earlier ventures, however, support for this new program came from patrons of (relatively) pure science: the Department of
Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH). While these new patrons anticipated that the research they funded would
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
328
CROWTHER-HEYCK
someday find application, both supported fundamental research and saw discipline building
as vital for scientific advance. ARPA, for example, consciously created the discipline of computer science through its program of support for “centers of excellence” in computing
(Campbell-Kelly & Aspray, 1996; Ceruzzi, 2003; Edwards, 1996; Guice, 1998; Hafner &
Lyon, 1996; Hughes, 1998; National Research Council (U.S.) Committee on Innovations in
Computing and Communications: Lessons from History, 1999; Norberg, O’Neill, &
Freedman, 1996). As support for their work began to come in the form of larger, longer-term
grants from patrons of pure science, Simon and Newell’s interdisciplinary program began to
evolve into two closely related, but distinct, departments: computer science and psychology.
The first major government support came in 1962, with a $400,000 grant (for one year!)
from ARPA to Newell for work on programming languages. CIT also won ARPA’s designation as a “center of excellence” in computing, in large part because of Simon and Newell’s
work. This designation generated a flow of millions of dollars during the 1960s and 1970s,
permitting a dramatic expansion of CIT’s computing facilities. While these grants did not support Simon’s work directly, they did bring a large, first-rate group of computer scientists and
top-level computing facilities together at Carnegie Tech, providing infrastructure for his work
and removing any incentive to leave. In the field of computing, particularly in programming
and simulation, there were no greener pastures than those of Schenley Park.
More directly related to Simon’s own work was another governmental award, also secured in 1962. In November of that year, Simon won a five-year grant for research on human
information processing from the National Institute of Mental Health for just over $1.2 million
(Simon, 1962). With such resources at their fingertips, Simon and his colleagues could pursue their work confident that the only “limits on our rate of progress” would be imposed “by
our own capabilities to generate fruitful ideas,” not by dollars or “hardware.” Such a lack of
limitations was unusual, Simon noted, for “computer simulation, while it does not compete in
cost with atom smashing or moon shooting, is not inexpensive” (Simon, 1979).
The grants from ARPA and NIMH had a double significance for Simon, however. While
the grants provided large-scale, long-term funding and thus status and security, they also removed the financial incentive for him to shape his work to appeal to an interdisciplinary network of problem-oriented rather than discipline-oriented patrons. The implications of this
shift became clear very quickly. By 1965, the program in systems and communications sciences had evolved (under ARPA’s patronage) into the Department of Computer Science, one
of the first—and best—in the country. (It is perennially ranked in the top three nationally, and
its strengths—artificial intelligence and software design—reveal its debts to Simon and
Newell.) Similarly, the Carnegie-Mellon Department of Psychology became a leader (at
Carnegie-Mellon, they say the leader) in the discipline with NIMH’s money and Simon’s leadership. As for Simon, he left the GSIA in body as well as spirit in 1965, taking up joint residence as the R. K. Mellon Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, thus trading his
interdisciplinary affiliation for a bidisciplinary one.
CONCLUSION
In this story of Simon, the systems sciences, and the GSIA, we see a familiar pattern,
common to a wide range of disciplines in postwar America. Time and again, interdisciplinary
research centers were founded and flourished, often in close contact with similar centers, together forming a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research community supported principally by military research agencies and by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations.
Some prominent examples of such communities, other than the systems sciences, include moJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
329
lecular biology, solar system astronomy, materials science, and solid-state physics (Doel,
1996; Kay, 1993; Leslie, 1993). Such centers and communities often were spectacularly productive but also tended to be unstable because they depended upon the continued cohesion of
groups held together by informal authority and by the shifting agendas of program officers at
problem-oriented funding agencies. As a result, communities like the one oriented around the
systems sciences usually dissolved into their component disciplines, perhaps changing them
in the process, or coalesced into new disciplines—such as computer science—that fit traditional university structures.
Centers like the GSIA repeated this pattern, either reproducing traditional disciplinary
divisions within themselves, devolving into university departments, or separating from the
university world entirely and reorganizing themselves as business enterprises. Which path
they followed correlated well with the nature of their financial support: institutes with multiple, problem-oriented patrons tended to maintain an interdisciplinary focus, while ones with
one or two dominant patrons tended to form disciplines aligned with those patrons’ interests,
especially if those patrons were discipline-oriented patrons of “pure” science, such as the
National Science Foundation, ARPA, or the National Institutes of Health. Finally, institutes
that supported themselves by producing marketable products or services tended to become
businesses, as in the case of MITRE (a spin-off of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories; Redmond &
Smith, 2000).
Historians of science and technology are used to studying such communities when they
become disciplines and such centers when they become permanent departments or laboratories or firms. We like to have a concrete endpoint to provide an implicit teleology, and we like
formal organizations because they produce extensive paper trails. Informal research communities—such as the systems sciences in Simon’s day—are more troublesome. We know they
exist because we can observe patterned relationships among researchers who shared a sense
of common endeavor and used a common language. But since such communities often are unstable and evanescent, there is a tendency to treat them as failed or “immature” disciplines,
especially if they do not organize themselves formally. There is some justification for this
view, for leaders who seek an enduring presence for their community (or greater personal
power within it) do strive to institutionalize their vision, as Simon did at Carnegie Tech.
In many cases, however, viewing such informal communities as “immature” disciplines
is not the best way to understand them. Such communities and the networks of extradepartmental, interdisciplinary centers in which they found homes have been among the most important sources of innovation in postwar science. They thrive precisely because they provide
an essential counterbalance to the otherwise insistent pressures toward specialization that pervade the academic world (Dennis, 1990; Doel, 1996; Galison, 1997a, 1997b; Leslie, 1993;
Lowen, 1997; Orlans, 1972).
Herbert Simon’s career at Carnegie Tech illustrates both community and institution
building on this interdisciplinary model. From the beginning, he sought to build the GSIA
into an interdisciplinary research institution organized around the mathematical, behavioral
study of decision making in complex systems. At the same time, he also sought to link the
GSIA with other such centers, forming a community united by a common perspective, a common language, and a common network of patrons. In these tasks, the challenge always was to
instill that perspective and teach that language without imposing formal central direction. The
most common means of doing so was to create a network of interlocking memberships on research teams and coordinating committees.
Simon’s ambitions suited the times, for the absence of any dominant single source of patronage for the social sciences meant that those who prospered were skilled at bringing toJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
330
CROWTHER-HEYCK
gether a variety of interests: scientific entrepreneurs and brokers. Those who were more comfortable with a stable, orderly system, or those who wished to be left alone, often found themselves on the outside looking in, puzzled and alarmed at how complicated their world had become. Simon saw this complexity as opportunity. Indeed, he was fond of telling his graduate
students that they “needed to learn to live with chaos for a while” (Crowther-Heyck, 1997a;
McCorduck, 1974). Good advice, perhaps, but Simon was comfortable with chaos because he
was always sure that an order lurked within. Similarly, when he embraced leadership rather
than formal control, it was because he was confident that when he found the truth, others
would see the light. If they did not—or even if they did—there was always another pattern to
find, another program to found, another set of patrons that would fund. For this entrepreneur
and broker, the world was always resource-full.
REFERENCES
Aaron, H. J. (1978). Politics and the professors: The Great Society in perspective. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution.
Augier, M. (2000). Models of Herbert A. Simon. Perspectives on Science, 8, 407–443.
Bach, G. L. (1949). Letter to Herbert Simon, Herbert Simon Papers (HSP), CMU Archives.
Bach, G. L. (1950). First Annual Report, 1949–1950. GSIA Papers, CMU Archives.
Bach, G. L. (1951). Second Annual Report, 1950–1951. School of Industrial Administration, GSIA Papers, CMU
Archives.
Bach, G. L. (1954). GSIA Annual Report for 1953–1954. GSIA Papers, CMU Archives.
Bach, G. L. (1957). Graduate School of Industrial Administration Annual Report for 1956–1957. GSIA Papers, CMU
Archives.
Bales, R. F. (1956). Letter to Herbert Simon. HSP, CMU Archives.
Balogh, B. (1991). Chain reaction: Expert debate and public participation in American commercial nuclear power,
1945–1975. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Berelson, B. (1951). The Ford Foundation behavioral sciences program: Proposed plan for the development of the
behavioral sciences program—Confidential and preliminary draft. HSP, CMU Archives.
Berelson, B. (1953). The Ford Foundation behavioral sciences division report, June 1953. HSP, CMU Archives.
Berelson, B. (1957). Letter to Herbert Simon, HSP, CMU Archives.
Berelson, B. (Ed.). (1963). The behavioral sciences today. New York: Basic Books.
Berle, A., & Means, G. (1932). The modern corporation and private property. New York: Macmillan.
Bernstein, M. (2001). A perilous progress: Economists and public purpose in twentieth-century America. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
The best and worst corporate boards. (1997, December 8). Business Week, pp. 90–104.
Bierstedt, R., & Samuelson, P. (1964). Modern social science. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bulmer, M. (1984). The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, diversity, and the rise of sociological research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Campbell-Kelly, M., & Aspray, W. (1996). Computer: A history of the information machine. New York: Basic Books.
Capshew, J. (1999). Psychologists on the march: Science, practice, and professional identity in America, 1929–1969.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Carnegie Institute of Technology. (1948). The Carnegie plan of professional education in engineering and science.
Doherty Papers, Carnegie Mellon University Archives.
Carnegie Institute of Technology. (1960). Draft press release re: Carnegie Corporation grant to GSIA. HSP, CMU
Archives.
Carnegie Institute of Technology. (1961). Description of a new doctoral program in systems and communications sciences at Carnegie Institute of Technology. HSP, CMU Archives.
Carnegie Institute of Technology. (1962). Announcement of an interdepartmental doctoral program in systems and
communication sciences.
Ceruzzi, P. E. (2003). A history of modern computing (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Christ, C. (1952). History of the Cowles Commission, 1932–1952. In Economic theory and measurement: A twenty
year research report (pp. 3–67). Chicago: Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, University of
Chicago.
Christ, C. (1994). The Cowles Commission’s contributions to econometrics at Chicago, 1939–1955. Journal of
Economic Literature, 32(1), 30–59.
Chubin, D. E., & Hackett, E. J. (1990). Peerless science: Peer review and U.S. science policy. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Cleeton, G. U. (1965). The Story of Carnegie Tech II: The Doherty administration. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Institute
of Technology.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
331
Cooper, W. W., Rosenblatt, D., & Simon, H. (1950). Memorandum: Research program of the school: Project on intrafirm planning. HSP, CMU Archives.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (1997a, September 19). Interview with Herbert Simon, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (1997b, May). Talcott Parsons, science, and social relations at Harvard. Paper presented at the
Johns Hopkins University Colloquium, Department of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (1999a). George A. Miller, language, and the computer metaphor of mind. History of
Psychology, 2(1), 37–64.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (1999b, April 28). Interview with Bert F. Green, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (2005). Herbert A. Simon: The bounds of reason in modern America. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Crowther-Heyck, H. (2006). Patrons of the Revolution: Ideals and institutions in postwar social science. Isis, 97(3),
420–446.
Cyert, R., & March, J. G. (1963). The behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Dahl, R. (1961). The behavioral approach in political science: Epitaph for a monument to a successful protest.
American Political Science Review, 55, 763–772.
Dennis, M. A. (1990). A change of state: The political cultures of technical practice at the MIT Instrumentation
Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, 1930–1945. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
Doel, R. E. (1996). Solar system astronomy in America: Communities, patronage, and interdisciplinary science,
1920–1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Doherty, R. E. (1950). The first fifty years. Doherty Papers, Carnegie Mellon University Archives.
Donaldson, T., & Preston, L. (1995). The stakeholder theory of the corporation: Concepts, evidence, and implications. Academy of Management Review, 20, 65–91.
Edwards, P. (1996). The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Farr, J., & Seidelman, R. (Eds.). (1993). Discipline and history: Political science in the United States. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Fenton, E. (2000). Carnegie Mellon 1900–2000: A centennial history. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Fisher, D. (1993). Fundamental development of the social sciences: Rockefeller philanthropy and the United States
Social Science Research Council. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Fortun, M., & Schweber, S. (1993). Scientists and the legacy of World War II: The case of operations research (OR).
Social Studies of Science, 23, 595–642.
Fosdick, R. (1989). The story of the Rockefeller Foundation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Galison, P. L. (1994). The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision. Critical Inquiry, 21(1),
228–266.
Galison, P. L. (1997a). Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galison, P. L. (1997b). Three laboratories. Social Research, 64, 1127–1156.
Gardner, H. (1985). The mind’s new science. New York: Basic Books.
Gleeson, R. (1997). The rise of graduate management education in American universities, 1908–1970. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Gleeson, R., & Schlossman, S. (1996, Spring). George Leland Bach and the rebirth of graduate management education in the United States, 1945–1975. Selections, pp. 8–46.
Gordon, R. A., & Howell, J. E. (1959). Higher education for business. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gregg, L., & Leavitt, H. (1960). Memo to behavioral science faculty. HSP, CMU Archives.
Guetzkow, H. (1951a). Letter to Herbert Simon. HSP, CMU Archives.
Guetzkow, H. (Ed.). (1951b). Groups, leadership, and men: Research in human relations. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.
Guice, J. (1998). Controversy and the state: Lord ARPA and intelligent computing. Social Studies of Science, 28(1),
103–138.
Gunnell, J. (1993). The descent of political theory: The genealogy of an American vocation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1996). Where wizards stay up late: The origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Haraway, D. (1983). Signs of dominance: From a physiology to a cybernetics of primate society: C. R. Carpenter,
1930–1970. Studies in History of Biology, 6, 129–219.
Harden, V. (1986). Inventing the NIH: Federal biomedical research policy, 1887–1937. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Haveman, R. H. (Ed.). (1987). Poverty policy and poverty research: The Great Society and the social sciences.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Heims, S. J. (1991). The cybernetics group. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Herman, E. (1995). The romance of American psychology: Political culture in the age of experts. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Hounshell, D. (1997). The Cold War, RAND, and the generation of knowledge, 1946–1962. Historical Studies in the
Physical and Biological Sciences, 27(2), 237–267.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
332
CROWTHER-HEYCK
Hounshell, D., & Smith, J. K., Jr. (1988). Science and corporate strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, T. P. (1998). Rescuing Prometheus (1st ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Hughes, T. P., & Hughes, A. C. (Eds.). (2000). Systems, experts, and computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jardini, D. (1996). Out of the blue yonder: The RAND Corporation’s diversification into social welfare research,
1946–1968. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Johnson, J., Daily, C., & Ellstrand, A. (1996). Boards of directors: A review and research agenda. Journal of
Management, 22, 409–438.
Karl, B., & Katz, S. (1981). The American Private Philanthropic Foundation. Minerva, 19(2), 236–270.
Karl, B. D. (1974). Charles E. Merriam and the study of politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kay, L. (1993). The molecular vision of life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the rise of the new biology.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Kay, L. (1997). Cybernetics, information, life: The emergence of scriptural representations of heredity.
Configurations, 5(1), 23–91.
Klausner, S., & Lidz, V. (Eds.). (1986). The nationalization of the social sciences. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Knowles, S. G., & Leslie, S. W. (2001). “Industrial Versailles”: Eero Saarinen’s corporate campuses for GM, IBM,
and AT&T. Isis, 92(1), 1–33.
Lagemann, E. C. (1989). The politics of knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, philanthropy, and public policy.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Larsen, O. N. (1992). Milestones and millstones: Social science at the National Science Foundation, 1945–1991. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Leahey, T. H. (2002). The mythical revolutions of American psychology. In W. Pickren & D. Dewsbury (Eds.),
Evolving perspectives on the history of psychology (pp. 191–216). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Leslie, S. W. (1993). The Cold War and American science: The military-industrial-academic complex at MIT and
Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lowen, R. (1997). Creating the Cold War university: The transformation of Stanford. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
March, J. G., Simon, H. A., & Guetzkow, H. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley.
Marris, P., & Rein, M. (1982). Dilemmas of social reform: Poverty and community action in the United States (2nd
ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCorduck, P. (1974). Transcript of interview with Herbert Simon, November 20, 1974. HSP, CMU Archives.
Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. (1960). Plans and the structure of behavior. New York: Henry Holt.
Mindell, D. (2002). Between human and machine: Feedback, control, and computing before cybernetics. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mirowski, P. (2002). Machine dreams: Economics becomes a cyborg science. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Morawski, J. (1986). Organizing knowledge and behavior at Yale’s Institute of Human Relations. Isis, 77, 219–242.
Morgan, M., & Rutherford, M. (Eds.). (1998). From interwar pluralism to postwar neoclassicism. History of Political
Economy Annual Supplement, Vol. 30.
National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) Division of Extramural Research Programs. Program Analysis and
Evaluation Section. (1970). Behavioral sciences and mental health: An anthology of program reports.
Washington, DC: U.S. GPO.
National Research Council (U.S.) Advisory Committee for Assessment of University-Based Institutes for Research
on Poverty. (1971). Policy and program research in a university setting: a case study, report. Washington, DC:
National Academy of Sciences.
National Research Council (U.S.) Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications: Lessons from
History. (1999). Funding a revolution: Government support for computing research. Washington, DC: National
Academy Press.
Newell, A. (1962). Notes on preliminary discussion of funding of the systems and communication sciences. HSP,
CMU Archives.
Norberg, A., O’Neill, J., & Freedman, K. (1996). Transforming computer technology: information processing for the
Pentagon, 1962–1986. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
O’Connor, A. (2001). Poverty Knowledge: Social science, social policy, and the poor in twentieth-century U.S. history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Orlans, H. (1972). The Nonprofit Research Institute: Its origins, operation, problems, and prospects. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Parsons, T. (1977). On building social systems theory: A personal history. In T. Parsons (Ed.), Social systems and the
evolution of action theory (pp. 22–76). New York: Free Press.
Parsons, T., Allport, G., Brinton, C., Kluckhohn, C., Mason, E., & Wild, P. (1945). Letter to President Conant. Paul
Buck Papers, Harvard University Archives.
Pierson, F. (1959). The education of American businessmen: A study of university-college programs in business administration. New York: McGraw-Hill.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
HERBERT SIMON AND THE GSIA
333
Pritchett, C. H. (1945). 1313: An experiment in propinquity. Charles Merriam Papers, University of Chicago
Archives, Chicago.
Rau, E. (1999). Combat scientists: The emergence of operations research in the United States during World War II.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Redmond, K. C., & Smith, T. M. (2000). From whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D story of the SAGE air defense computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rider, R. E. (1992). Operations research and game theory: Early connections. In E. R. Weintraub (Ed.), Toward a history of game theory. Supplement to the History of Political Economy (Vol. 24 supp., pp. 225–240). Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Ross, D. (1991). The origins of American social science. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ross, D. (2003). Changing contours of the social science disciplines. In T. Porter & D. Ross (Eds.), The modern social sciences. Cambridge History of Science (Vol. 7, pp. 205–237). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Samelson, F. (1985). Organizing for the kingdom of behavior. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 21,
33–47.
Schaefer, L. (1992). Evolution of a national research university, 1965–1990: The Stever Administration and the Cyert
years at Carnegie Mellon. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Schmidt, S. K., & Werle, R. (1998). Coordinating technology: Studies in the international standardization of telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Seidelman, R. (1985). Disenchanted realists: Political science and the American crisis, 1884–1984. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Sent, E.-M. (2000). Herbert A. Simon as a cyborg scientist. Perspectives on Science, 8, 380–406.
Sheldon, R. (1957). Letter to Herbert Simon. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1943). Fiscal aspects of metropolitan consolidation. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Administration,
University of California-Berkeley.
Simon, H. A. (1947). Administrative behavior. New York: Macmillan.
Simon, H. A. (1951a). Letter to Bernard Berelson, December 1951. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1951b). Letter to G. L. Bach. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1951c). Notes of conversation with W. Cooper—July 10, 1951. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1953). Letter to Tjalling Koopmans. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1957a). Letter to Bernard Berelson, March 1957. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1957b). Letter to Richard Sheldon. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1957c). Models of man: Social and rational. Mathematical essays on rational behavior in a social setting. New York: Wiley.
Simon, H. A. (1960a). Draft proposal for support of research on cognitive processes at the Carnegie Institute of
Technology. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1960b). Research on organizations in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie
Institute of Technology: Report on Activities, 1952–60. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1961a). Letter to Jack [Warner, President of CIT]. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1961b). Letter to Professor Sigmund Koch of Duke University. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1962). Application for research grant to NIH. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A. (1979). Models of thought (Vol. 1). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of bounded rationality: Volume I: Economic analysis and public policy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Simon, H. A. (1991). Models of my life. New York: Basic Books.
Simon, H. A. (1997). Models of bounded rationality: Volume II: Behavioral economics and business organization.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Simon, H. A., Divine, W. R., Cooper, E. M., & Chernin, M. (1941). Determining work loads for professional staff in
a public welfare agency. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Administration, University of California.
Simon, H. A., & Guetzkow, H. (1952). Memorandum to G. L. Bach on research into behavior in organizations—
Proposed program. HSP, CMU Archives.
Simon, H. A., Sharp, F., & Shephard, R. (1942). Fire losses and fire risks. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public
Administration, University of California-Berkeley.
Smith, D. (1988). The Chicago School: A liberal critique of capitalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Solovey, M. (2004). Riding natural scientists’ coattails onto the endless frontier: The SSRC and the quest for scientific legitimacy. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 40, 393–422.
Summer research training institutes: A new council program. (1954). SSRC Items.
Tarbell, A. W. (1937). The story of Carnegie Tech. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Institute of Technology.
United States Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. (1991). Federally funded research: Decisions for a
decade. Washington, DC: U.S. Congress.
Weintraub, E. R. (Ed.). (1992). Toward a history of game theory (Vol. 24 supp. to History of Political Economy).
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weintraub, E. R. (2002). How economics became a mathematical science. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wirth, L. (1937). Report on the history, activities, and policies of the Social Science Research Council. SSRC Papers,
Rockefeller Archives Center.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs
334
CROWTHER-HEYCK
Wright, A. (1973). The Warner administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1950–1965. Pittsburgh, PA:
Carnegie Institute Press.
Wright, Q., Lepawsky, A., Buehrig, E. H., & Lasswell, H. D. (1971). The search for world order: Studies by students
and colleagues of Quincy Wright. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Zald, M. (1969). The power and functions of boards of directors: A theoretical synthesis. American Journal of
Sociology, 75(1), 97–111.
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs