Richard Ferdinand Ericson (1919–1993) was an Americanorganizational theorist, professor emeritus of management and director of the Interdisciplinary Systems and Cybernetics Project, Program of Policy Studies in Science and Technology atGeorge Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Richard Ericson received a bachelor's withPhi Beta Kappa and a master's degree atUniversity of Chicago and received his doctorate in economics atIndiana University Bloomington in 1952.
He was a full professor atStetson University and head of the Department of Management in the School of Business from 1952 to 1956. From 1956 he was appointed associate professor of management in hospital administration at theState University of Iowa. In 1959 he was a consultant to the Ohio Department of Transportation. After that he moved to Washington DC in 1960, where he had been named professor of business administration atGeorge Washington University, and there in 1969 he became professor of management.
Ericson was organizationally active. He was chairman of the Comparative Administration Task Force at the Academy of Management from 1966 to 1968, and president and managing director of theSociety for General Systems Research in 1968 for a year. In 1969 he became director of the Interdisciplinary Systems and Cybernetics Project, Program of Policy Studies in Science and Technology at George Washington University inWashington, D.C.[1]
Ericson was a member ofPhi Beta Kappa,Beta Gamma Sigma, theAmerican Economic Association, theAmerican Management Association, theSociety for General Systems Research, the American Cybernetics Association, the Academy of Management, theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, and theWorld Future Society.[1]
One of his students was an author on management and systems thinkingStephen G. Haines.[2]
Ericson's research interests were in the fields of general systems and cybernetics approaches to management theory and practice, value issues in contemporary management.[3] Ericson (1979) believed that "society has now thrust upon it a kind of moral imperative to focus efforts on the utilization of general systems concepts and conceptualizations by policy-forming executives, administrators, andmanagers in all kinds of large-scale organizations."[4]
In his 1972 paper "Visions of Cybernetic Organizations" Ericson stipulated, that in his days a great number of people associated the word "cybernetics" with "computerized information networks, closed loop systems, and robotized man-surrogates, such asartorgas andcyborgs."[5]
The essence of the cybernetic organization, Ericson argued is that "they are self-controlling, self-maintaining, self-realizing. Indeed, cybernetics has been characterized as thescience of effective organization, in just these terms."[5] In modern organizational cybernetics, the organization is viewed as "a subsystem of a larger system(s), and as comprised itself of functionally interdependent subsystems."[6]
Ericson was president of theSociety for General Systems Research in the year 1978–79. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in Houston. as Gaines (1979) recalled, Ericson "called for anaction research agenda for the Society for General Systems Research whereaction research is that which results from application of transforming concepts and techniques in an ongoing real world organizational context."[4]
Ericson has written and edited several books and articles.[7] A selection:
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