ABSTRACT
By the middle of the twentieth century, the rising status of science led to an increasing dominance of the scientistic aspect of modernism. This status was enhanced by the success of management “science” (operations research) in managing the military logistics of World War II. The social “sciences” promised explanatory models that would allow the kind of “social engineering” of which earlier social reformers (Friedmann 1987) had dreamed. In his classic and influential Administrative Behavior, Herbert Simon (1945) proposed a normative model of “rational decision making” based on the “rational maximizer” of economic theory and on positivistic sociology.
