Reflections From the PhD Student Cohort of 1963 at the “Carnegie School”

By the end of the first day at Carnegie Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) for the start of the 1963 fall term, it was clear to me that the GSIA culture was not like anything I encountered at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where I had just completed an MSc thesis based on March and Simon’s (1958) “Organizations. ” From the opening session of the PhD orientation, it dawned on me that we, the PhD students, were being overwhelmed by an inspirational driven intellectual and demanding work environment. It was also instantly evident that Herb Simon, Bill Cooper, Dick Cyert, and a gentle but brash Jim March were on a mission that we only fully absorbed later. What was it like to be a student at GSIA at a time of intense ferment in the social and organization sciences? It is difficult to convey the atmosphere of those days. PhD students were immediately immersed and engulfed by the intellectual ferment that swallowed them. We experienced this in many forms and on many levels. The culture had a cult-like quality of proselytizing and socializing into a hotbed revolution of the social sciences, overlaid with a war on the barren classical economic theory of the firm. It was evident from the get-go that the faculty were on a mission to remake social science by advancing interdisciplinary inquiry; building on a common foundation of information processing, judgment, and decision making processes; and, at the same time, pioneering a new model of business education. The faculty felt that they were, so to speak, the chosen instrument of the Ford Foundation giving voice to the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Commission reports on business education and demonstrating the legitimacy and power of social science management and organization research. But as students, we also felt visible competitive intellectual tension among this assembly of brain power. As PhD students, we experienced the revolution firsthand. The PhD program had a minimal structure. The dissertations of Alan Newell (list processing computer code) and Bill Starbuck (collection of papers) were held up as models redefining what the PhD dissertation could be. So were the Ford Foundation dissertation awards that GSIA students achieved (including Bonini, 1962; Clarkson, 1962; Hammer, 1963; Stedry, 1959; Tonge, 1961; Williamson, 1967). Moreover, it was left up to us PhD students to figure out how we chose to meet the few requirements, and it did not matter whether we enrolled in courses or whether we absorbed the relevant knowledge on our own. The crucial challenge was to pass the dreaded written interdisciplinary field examinations in the spring of the second year: one week of five examinations (8 hr in the major field; 4 hr in economics; 4 hr functional areas of business—finance, marketing, and production; 4 hr in quantitative methods and accounting; and 4 hr in an area outside of GSIA). GSIA had a very active faculty seminar series. It seemed that regardless of the specialization or topic, the entire faculty and PhD students were in attendance, and it was de-rigor to disembowel the guest speaker of the day. Similarly, the entire faculty assembled for PhD dissertation proposals, and approval required an actual vote of the group in attendance. The psychological and intellectual toll that students felt was intense. Not surprisingly, around 50% of the admitted PhD students self-selected to transfer to other schools or left the program without completing their dissertations (all but the dissertation ABD). My introduction to Jim was in his PhD seminar in the fall term of 1963. I actually can only recall two imprinting events. On the first day, he shared with the chosen few PhD students a working paper that he completed that summer somewhere in a Colorado mountain retreat and that we were to discuss the following week. The title of the paper was “The Power of Power,” which later appeared in “Varieties of Political Theory” edited by David Easton (1966). Although I had studied the little red book (Organizations) by Jim and Herb under the guidance of Jacob Marschak, and my MSc thesis at UCLA created an employee behavior simulation model based on Chapter 4 (the decision to join and the decision to produce), I was unprepared to decipher Jim’s Power of Power paper. I did not realize this at the time but the paper was vintage Jim. Every sentence is precise and carefully constructed. Nothing extraneous. It demonstrated the application of mathematical precision to the exploration of the concept of power that was loosely applied in theories of influence in Sociology and Political Science at the time. As I was struggling that first week to comprehend the paper, I was beset 572549 JMIXXX10.1177/1056492615572549Journal of Management InquiryLewin research-article2015