Perspective – scholarship, scholarly institutions, and scholarly communities

Scholarship is less an individual than a collective activity. The history of ‘A Behavioral Theory of the Firm’ illustrates two key aspects of the collective nature of scholarship. The first aspect is the dependence of scholarship on the institutions of scholarship. For a period of about 10 years beginning around 1954, The Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology was an extraordinary incubator of ideas, the ‘Vienna Circle’ of its time. The second aspect is the cooperative interdependence of communities of scholars. Ideas take form and reproduce through an intergenerational, international pyramid of promiscuous and acrobatic intellectual intercourse.