William H. Starbuck
William Haynes Starbuck (born in Portland, Indiana, USA September 20, 1934) graduated from Harvard University (AB Physics, 1956), at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (MSc, 1959; Ph. D. 1964). William Starbuck is an organizational scientist who held professorships in social relations (Johns Hopkins, 1966–67), sociology (Cornell, 1967–71), business administration (Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1974–84) and management at New York University.
William Starbuck contributed to the concepts of self-designing organizations, organizational design, environmental niches, organizational equilibriums made of antithetical processes, relativity through time of levels of aspiration as well as to behavioral research methods and epistemological status. He contributed to the field of management through prescriptive organizational design studies, relativity of managers' perception, interaction between rationality and ideologies, prescriptive yet experimental methods, crisis management through unlearning behavioral and cognitive patterns. He pictured as early as 1963 organizations that melt into contradictory and antithetical processes, bringing challenging views of organizational behaviors and equilibrium, while never being trapped in any doctrinal commitment.
