Alumni Book

I have one thing left to do-----. Up to now, in a career that went back and forth between academia and executive experience I have written articles or chapters based on my research or experience in such divergent organizations as Ford Aircraft, IBM, Kaiser Cement, HSA, New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., the priests of the New York Archdiocese, Sanus (an entrepreneurial start-up of an HMO, and NYLCare, its large corporate successor). In each I attempted to do what I was challenged to do: from Blumer -- to thoroughly understand the continual emergent nature of their world as perceived by organizational participants;  from Bendix -- to understand the structural, historical  and ideological  processes involved in these organizations; from Selznick -- the role of power, politics, and the "imbuement" of values involved in organizational units.  Out of this came materials on pronoia, demotion, boundary roles, delegitimation of the non-profit sector, professionalization as a control device, the growth or cynical knowledge in the priesthood,  rhetorical reticence in politics, the role of beliefs about market processes and organization structure, and power and conflict as inherent organizational processes.  And then there was my plea in 1975 at an ASA session to stop ignoring the flow of money as a key to understanding organizational behavior. And now -- I will attempt to do just that in a comparative study of those above organizations in order to explicate relations between personal experiences and organizational processes in such issues as money flow, blame, centralization/decentralization, etc. Wish me luck.

I can claim few, if any significant contributions to academic sociology. After my dissertation on 'Employee Rights and the Employment Relationship' was published by the U.C. Institute of Industrial Relations and a subsequent book on the sociological process of Professionalization was published by Prentice-Hall, and after some further graduate level course work in management, my career turned toward applied research and development and then into administration. Initially I served for 13 years at Stanford Research Institute (Now SRI International) in charge of management development and organization development projects. Our clients for such work included federal government agencies such as the U.S. Air Force (projects on the organization of research laboratories and the management of scientific personnel): state agencies (design of the new Department of Ecology for the State of Washington); Indian reservations such as economic and social development programs on the Colville, Crow, and Navajo reservations and many other applied projects. For a two-year period thereafter I served as Chairman of the Department of Sociology at the American University, Washington, D.C..during which time I also participated in the design of a new College of Public Affairs at that university.

After returning to California (San Francisco), I became corporate manager of management development programs at Bechtel Corporation, an international construction firm. Then after several years of independent consulting work on organizational design, I became Director of Extended (Continuing) Education at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo California for 11 years. More recently, I've served on several boards of directors of non-profit corporations. At times during the above years, I taught sociology courses part-time to adults at Pennsylvania State University, University of Alberta-Calgary, University of California Extension, Stanford University, University of San Francisco, and Antioch University-West.

For me, the U.C. Berkeley graduate program in sociology provided a strong foundation for my lifelong work, especially in classical sociological theory (e.g., Weber, Durkheim. and other authors of the '75 great books'). The fact that sociology (along with inputs from other disciplines) can provide a significant foundation for practical applications in 'the world' I believe is illustrated by the variety of involvements I have had in my own life.

Obituary for Ida R. Hoos

By KATIE HAFNER, New York Times, May 5, 2007

Ida R. Hoos, a prominent critic of assessing technology solely on the basis of mathematical models that failed to take account of societal factors, died on April 24 in Boston. She was 94 and lived in Brookline, Mass.

The cause was complications of a lingering case of pneumonia, said Judith Hoos Fox, her daughter.

Dr. Hoos, a sociologist, was widely recognized as an outspoken critic of systems analysis, which came to prominence after World War II. The approach used mathematical models to perform cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments on complex technologies like radar systems and military aircraft.

With the concept strengthening in the 1950s and ’60s, when the use of computers to assess technology grew more popular, she wrote widely on a need to balance it with other considerations like effects on the work force.

“A kind of quantomania prevails in the assessment of technologies,” Dr. Hoos wrote in 1979 in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. “What cannot be counted simply doesn’t count, and so we systematically ignore large and important areas of concern.”

Dr. Hoos urged national decision makers to take such assessments “with a large measure of skepticism lest they lead us to regrettable, if not disastrous, conclusions.”

Harold A. Linstone, emeritus professor of systems science at Portland State University and longtime editor in chief of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, said Dr. Hoos was in many ways the intellectual conscience in the field of technology assessment.

“She basically pointed out that in a lot of complex social and technical systems, a reliance on these systems analysis approaches couldn’t always do the job,” Dr. Linstone said. “She would not accept the superficial answers or phony arguments.”

Dr. Hoos also questioned the usefulness of systems analysis when evaluating public policy. Her 1972 book, “Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique,” cast a critical eye on the prevailing methods for evaluating education, waste management and health care.

“These technical-think-tank types were riding high,” and Dr. Hoos “wasn’t averse to pointing out that the king was naked,” said Louis Feldner, an engineer who worked with her on several technical committees over the years. “And she was respected for it.”

Ida Simone Russakoff was born on Oct. 9, 1912, in Skowhegan, Me., the middle of seven children. Her parents were immigrants from Russia, her father a jeweler.

She graduated from Radcliffe in 1933. While studying for her master’s degree, which she received from Harvard in 1942, she founded Jewish Vocational Services in Boston, to help Jewish women who were working in the city’s garment district find better jobs.

In 1942, she married Sidney S. Hoos, an economist. The couple later moved to Berkeley, where Mr. Hoos taught in the agricultural economics department at the University of California.

Ida Hoos began to pursue her Ph.D. there and became interested in the effects of automation and technology on workers. She received her doctorate in 1959, and her dissertation was published in 1961 as “Automation in the Office.” Another book, “Retraining the Work Force,” was published in 1967.

Dr. Hoos remained at the University of California as a research sociologist, first at its Institute of Industrial Relations, then at the Space Sciences Laboratory. At the laboratory, where she was the lone social scientist, she expressed concern over the effect of satellite surveillance on individual privacy.

She retired from the university in 1982. Over the years, she also served on committees at the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the Department of Energy.

In addition to her daughter Judith, of Boston, she is survived by another daughter, Phyllis Daniels of Goldendale, Wash.; a brother, Philip Russakoff of Skowhegan; three granddaughters; and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Hoos was largely unfazed by being a woman in what was seen as a man’s field. In an unpublished memoir, she wrote of serving in the 1980s on a high-level committee at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The committee had a preponderance of aerospace industrialists.

“I was the only woman,” she wrote, “and thoroughly used to the Happy Hour salutation of ‘Hey fellas — oh, excuse me, Ida!’ ”

On Jan. 1, 1984, Dr. Hoos was called by National Public Radio and asked for her thoughts on George Orwell’s predictions of universal surveillance, now that the year had actually arrived.

“On that subject,” she later recalled, “I could only say that thanks to the dramatic developments in information technology, we had already been here a long time.”

Autobiography

UC Berkeley was an important step in the way sociology influenced my career. My undergraduate years at Radcliffe, under the wonderful inspiration of Gordon Allport, had already provided the template to guide me. thus, 5 years out of Radcliffe, I founded and ws director of a then-unique social service organization, Jewish Vocational Service, which is still flourishing and is still a major force in occupational guidance, training, and placement in the Boston area. With many branches and myriad activities, it is recognized for its service to the entire community.

Marriage to Sidney S. Hoos, on leave from UC Berkeley to the War Department OQMG in Washington, put a temporary end to my work in Boston along with my part-time graduate program at Harvard. My main focus was Fannie Farmer and Dr. Spock, with Kuchen and Kinder all-important, while our two daughters grew up and Sid kept the armed forces in the far-flung theatres of war supplied. After the war, we returned to Berkeley, Sid much honored for his service and greatly advanced on the academic ladder.

A sabbatical at Harvard for Sid meant a refresher at the Pierian Spring for me. A return to ivy-clad Emerson Hall inspired me to desert Girl Scout cookie sales. Gordon Allport exhorted me: You just mustn't stay graduated. Herb Blumer smoothed all the administrative hurdles. My thesis, 'Implications of Electronic Data-Processing for the Clerical labor Force', became a book, Automation in the Office, published by Public Affairs Press and was translated into German. I wrote and delivered the series 'Office Automation in America' for the Voice of America. My sister commented that if only I had titled my work 'Sex and Automation', it would have attracted more attention!

With our two daughters now 12 and 16, we took our first sabbatical abroad, this time a year (for Sid) under the joint sponsorship of the Ford Foundation, the Italian government, and UC. Our year in Naples was a high point. When we returned to Berkeley in September 1961 I was considering another PhD in Romance Languages, just for the fun of it but but the Institute of Industrial Relations, under Art Ross and Peg Gordon, invited me to join their research program, 'Unemployment and the American Economy' and, always interested in adjustment to technological change, I designed a study of retraining programs. My book, Retraining the Work Force was published by the UC Press and ran through two editions.

Technological advance was evident on every front. Not only the more mechanical aspects of handling data but the very process of managerial thinking were becoming subject to new concepts and theories. The 'dominant paradigm' embraced only the quantitative. What you could not count did not count. The social and human aspects were systematically avoided in the rush to be 'scientific.'