Organizing Knowledge and Behavior at Yale's Institute of Human Relations

IN 1929 JAMES ANGELL, president of Yale, announced plans for a unique teaching and research center for those fields "directly concerned with the problems of man's individual and group conduct. The purpose is to correlate knowledge and coordinate technique in related fields that greater progress may be made in the understanding of human life. . The time has certainly come once again to attempt a fruitful synthesis of knowledge." The New York Times described the experiment as dismantling the disciplinary "Great Wall of China" and compared it with the Renaissance transformation of knowledge.1 The Institute of Human Relations (IHR), as the center was named, received over $4.5 million from the Rockefeller Foundation for its first decade of operation. The IHR was to be more than a research haven for social scientists, doctors, and lawyers: it was in actuality an experiment, an attempt to construct a cooperative and integrated scientific enterprise. The Institute's objective-an integrated, synthetic science, cooperatively managed and oriented to eventual practical applications-drew upon new ideals in the human sciences. By the early twentieth century postulates of moral autonomy and rational cognition seemed to be yielding to complex conceptions of action that stressed multiple, interdependent causation. Nineteenth-century idealism and positivism seemed to be giving way to ideas about an antireductionist, antiformalist, and pragmatic science. The limits of rationality and of simple mechanical models of action were indicated by innovations in biology and physics and reiterated in strong fashion by Freud and his associates.2 To the founders of the Institute these new conceptions suggested the need to transcend disciplinary boundaries and emphasize unification over specialization.