ABSTRACT
The focus on the ‘problems of organizations’ can be said to have developed from the work done at Harvard University under the initial direction of A. M. Henderson, but usually associated with Elton Mayo. Henderson is an important link in the development of the theoretical construction of a model of the organization conceptualized as a ‘social system’ (See Russett, 1966). He encouraged and developed this conceptualization amongst a coterie of followers at Harvard who, like him, were of an ideologically conservative persuasion, the intellectual expression of which they found in the systems thinking of Vilfred Pareto, the Italian social scientist whose main work was The Mind and Society (1935).
