Alberto Guerreiro Ramos engaged the most critical issues of this century. Born in Bahia in 1915, proud of the heritage of Africa, he worked in Brazilian development, lectured widely in Europe and Asia, and reached the full range of his intellectual power in his sixteen years in the US, where he died in 1982. He worked with huge, steady, and persistent energy to bring the diversity of traditional and recent human experience into creative, discipline, and worthwhile conjunction in the process of development.
Ramos understood the homogenization and lack of incentives risked by socialist societies, and the unconstrained heterogeneity and anomie risked by market societies. He developed in The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations a model of social system delimitation, with a para-economic paradigm focused on realizing the full diversity of organizational arrangements used by both kinds of societies. Concentrating rigorously on substantive rationality, with concern for the full range of human values rather than only instrumental and economic ones, Ramos extends the work of Max Weber. In suggesting the appropriate use of market mechanisms in specific and disciplined enclaves, Ramos creates a fundamentally different alternative to the one described by Adam Smith.
Committed to understanding and dealing with the complexities of southern and northern experiences, Ramos rinds a creative way to integrate the best of which e
