Educators From The United States

""Institutional economics" alone meets the demand for a generalized description of the economic order. Its claim is to explain the nature and extent of order amid economic phenomena, or those concerned with industry in relation to human well-being. In the words of Edwin Cannan, it attempts to tell "why all of us are as well off as we are" and "why some of us are better off than others." Such an explanation cannot properly be answered in formulas explaining the processes through which prices emerge in a market. Its quest must go beyond sale and purchase to the peculiarities of the economic system which allow these things to take place upon particular terms and not upon others."

"Both the old and new approaches share a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organisation, and each views institutionalisation as a state-dependent process that makes organisations less instrumentally rational by limiting the options they can pursue. Both emphasise the relationship between organisations and their environments, and both promise to reveal aspects of reality that are inconsistent with organisations’ formal accounts. Each approach stresses the role of culture in shaping organisational reality."

"The new institutionalism focuses instead on nonlocal environments, either organisational sectors or fields roughly coterminous with the boundaries of industries, professions, or national societies. Environments, in this view, are more subtle in their influence; rather than being co-opted by organisations, they penetrate the organisation, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action and thought."

"Paul DiMaggio (1997) has looked at the interaction between cognition and social life. He notes that under everyday circumstances, people organize information via automatic cognition."

"The new institutionalism in organization theory and sociology comprises a rejection of rational-actor models, and interest in institutions as independent variables, a turn toward cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supra-individual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individual’s attributes or motives."

"Although there are as many ‘new institutionalisms’ as there are social science disciplines, this book is about just one of them, the one that has made its mark on organisation theory, especially that branch most closely associated with sociology."

"Organizations compete not just for resources and customers, but for political power and institutional legitimacy, for social as well as economic fitness."

"Organizations tend to model themselves after similar organizations in their field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful."

"Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim's exhortation to study 'social facts as things', yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature."

"purportedly represents a distinctive approach to the study of social, economic, and political phenomena; yet it is often easier to gain agreement about what it is not than about what it is."

"[Schemata are] knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information."

"By , we mean those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products."

"What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as afield, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes—coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change."

"Organizations may try to change constantly; but, after a certain point in the structuration of an organizational field, the aggregate effect of individual change is to lessen the extent of diversity within the field."

"The appeal of any agreement depends on its terms."

"It is a principle universally agreed upon, that all powers not given are retained."

"Among those principles deemed sacred in America; among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty, which the government contemplates with awful reverence, and would approach only with the most cautious circumspection, there is none of which the importance is more deeply impressed on the public mind than the liberty of the press. That this liberty is often carried to excess, that is has sometimes degenerated to licentiousness, is seen and is lamented; but the remedy has not yet been discovered. Perhaps it is an evil inseparable from the good with which it is allied; perhaps it is a shoot which cannot be stripped from the stalk without wounding vitally the plant from which it is torn."

"The liberty of the press ought to be left where the Constitution has placed it, without any power in Congress to abridge it; that if they abridge it, they will destroy it; and that whenever that falls, all our liberties must fall with it."

"Librarians need to focus not on individual, physical libraries but on the larger networks–physical and digital–of which their libraries are part."

"To put things in perspective, recall that all the great libraries of antiquity–including the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum–have disappeared completely. However, the world did not lose the knowledge they contained when they disappeared. Some of what was held in those libraries had been moved to other locations, either to be copied or because it was stolen. Even the fate of the libraries of antiquity shows that preservation relies not on the persistence of specific institutions, but on proper functioning of a system that includes redundancy and the sharing of knowledge across institutions. There is a great deal more progress to be made in this respect during this transition to the digital age, but the importance of doing so is unmistakable."

"No man shall be more exacting of me or my conduct than I am of myself."

"Infidelity is consumption of the soul."

"Be yourself, but always your better self."

"I would rather trust my child to a serpent than to a teacher who does not believe in God."

"The Lord never does anything arbitrarily."

"No righteous rules, however rigid, are too stringent for me; I will live above them."

"Libraries, as spaces, need to continue to inspire the public to dream big and to think great thoughts. Cities, towns, and academic communities of all shapes and sizes need the free, open public spaces that libraries–and only libraries–provide."

"The fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom. This life is one great object lesson to practice on the principles of immortality and eternal life. Man grows with his higher aims. Let naught that is unholy enter here."

"The fireside is an emblem of the future heavenly home...To obtain the highest conception of the calling of a man and a woman in the capacity of parents, one must look upon them from an educational point of view, for from no other does the grandeur of this sacred relationship so well present itself to the mind with all its intricate complexity. The home is the sanctuary of the human race, where each generation is consecrated for its life's mission. The parents are the high priests, responsible to God for the spirit of their ministry"

"Every human being is a world in miniature. It has its own centre of observation, its own way of forming concepts and of arriving at conclusions, its own degree of sensibility, its own life's work to do, and its own destiny to reach. All these features may be encompassed by general conditions, governed by general laws, and subject to unforeseen influences and incidents, but within the sphere of their own activity, they constitute that great principle which we call individuality."

"I have been asked what I mean by 'word of honor.' I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls--walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground--there is a possibility that in some way or another I may escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of the circle? No. Never! I'd die first!"

"He that cheats another is a knave; but he that cheats himself is a fool."

"Youth demands recreation, and if it is not provided in high places, they will seek it in low places."

"The preference for [the term] 'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalizations; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. ... For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual. ... The insistence on 'queer' ... has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence."

"Indeed, it would probably be true to say that the fruit of metaphysical thought is not knowledge but understanding."

"The reader is therefore exhorted...to suspend his judgement concerning the final truth of things, since probably neither he nor anyone else knows what these are, and to content himself with appreciating the problems of metaphysics. This is the first and always the most difficult step. The rest of the truth, if he is ever blessed to receive any of it, will come from within him, if it ever comes at all, and not from the reading of books."

"Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art. You have yourself to begin with, and a time of uncertain duration to work on it. You do not have to be what you are, and even though you may be quite content with who you are, it will not be hard for you to think of something much greater that you might become. It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of."

"Many people ... go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal."

"I shall maintain that there simply is no such thing as philosophical knowledge, nor any philosophical way of knowing anything, and defend the humble point that philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom."

"For philosophy, it is supposed by vast numbers of students and teachers of the subject, has for its goal philosophical knowledge, and indeed, even certain knowledge. It is presupposed, therefore, that there is such a thing as philosophical knowledge, and there are even men who think themselves the possessors of at least some of it."

"Understanding, however--and sometimes a very considerable depth of it--results from seeing the obstinate difficulties in views which often seem, on other grounds, quite obviously true...Let the reader be warned accordingly, that whenever he hears a philosopher proclaim any metaphysical opinion with great confidence, or hears him asset that something in metaphysics is obvious, or that some metaphysical problem turns only on confusions of concepts or upon the meanings of words, then he can be quite sure that this man is still infinitely far from philosophical understanding. His views appear to him devoid of difficulties only because he stoutly refuses to see difficulties."

"Psychology is an attempt to gain a scientific understanding of human nature. We are all deeply interested in knowing human nature. When we are not talking about ourselves we are usually talking about our neighbors."

"Psychological knowledge is now necessary for the citizen if he is to play his part wisely in public affairs. Our age is greatly interested in social and political questions. There is a widespread belief that the evils of the world may be abolished by the magic of mass action."

"It will hardly be denied that a revolution, whatever else it may be, is a phenomenon of the crowd. I have endeavored to approach the historical survey of revolutionary movements from the standpoint of social psychology."

"The so-called natural sentiments of the average man are mostly the inherited prejudices of the once suppressed classes. The emphasis upon natural goodness is, psychologically speaking, unwillingness to submit such prejudices to wholesome self-criticism. Hence the democratic government tends to support each crowd in its delusion of infallibility. The crowd rationalizes its will to rule in terms of narrow and parochial ideas of righteousness and seeks to force conformity to such ideas upon all. The imagined vindication of the common man's notions of goodness is regarded as the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Hence democracy has always manifested a certain crusading spirit, and the democratic Utopia is envisaged as a sort of Roman peace with "righteousness" established by force rather than assent."

"Individuality is a cultural achievement rather than a gift of nature. During the 19th century it was rather common for people to believe they were expressing their individuality by being "natural.""

"In just the measure that education aims to develop the individual with independence of judgment rather than to indoctrinate him with tradition and custom and official dogma, to that degree it separates him from the mass and is successful insofar as it emancipates his mind from the tyranny of herd opinion."

"Crowd mentality is a kind of simultaneous psychosis which may take possession of any group."

"The greater the industrial and political organization, the greater is the emphasis on the individual as a mere mass unit, and the smaller his importance as a single separate person."

"The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind."