The History on Sociocybernetics, RC51, of the International Sociological Association

Abstract

It is a distinct pleasure to have the honor of extending a welcome to this World Congress on behalf of the co-host organization I represent, the Research Committee on Sociocybernetics, RC5l, of the International Sociological Association. “Socio” indicates a concern for the structure and development of human relationships and, indeed, I was trained as a sociologist. I do teach in a department of sociology and, in fact, my genealogy, by way of my own mentors, goes back through C. Wright Mills and, critically, the Columbia school of the 1950’s. My association with that nomothetic discipline and its primarily present-oriented perspective, however, is mitigated by my long-time affiliation with the Fernand Braudel Center. This represents the collapse of the nomothetic-idiographic, and if you like, science-humanities or quantitative-qualitative, antinomy in both my personal disciplinary and institutional allegiances and my intellectual point of departure with which that collapse is bound up. As I was thinking about what to write, I was reminded that Ludwig von Bertalanffy, so many years ago, suggested that the systems approach he was advocating rendered moot this divide. So, from this deceptively simple premise, then, let me tell you something about the Research Committee on Sociocybernetics of the International Sociological Association.