Social Science…a surprise and delight! 🤔☝️💡

As many of you know, I trained as a musician.  I still make music regularly.  Perhaps not as much as I once thought I might, but still regularly.  I play 4 concerts each year with my local symphony, the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra (“CWSO”).  I play string quartets for weddings each summer.  I help my wife with her church music position.  I co-own a private music studio program (although, truth be told, that’s not really making music - it’s running a business).  So, yeah, I'm still an active musician as much as I’d like to be.

But upon entering my “second career” as an executive coach and organizational consultant (with a brief stop along the way as a website builder and digital marketer), I realized that there’s something else I’ve been doing my entire life, and it’s something that actually comes much more easily and organically to me than music ever did…social science.

From the moment I began to observe, think, feel, and analyze, I’ve been incisively and insatiably curious about what makes us humans value and behave the way we do.  That’s social science in a nutshell.

Social science once referred only to the field of sociology.  I would argue that sociology is still the primary social science, hence its name.  

It is for this reason that sociology holds the central and pivotal position in my new theory of commerce, which identifies and expounds upon the (mostly hidden) layers of human interactivity:

The umbrella of social science has since expanded to include many other related fields.  A few of the most prominent are psychology, economics, philosophy, history, and anthropology (and each of these have expanded in turn to include numerous subdisciplines of their own).  These are probably no surprise.

A few others that you likely know to fit: religious studies/theology, education, political science/law, communication.

But when we examine the list of social sciences on Wikipedia there’s a few entries that surprised and delighted me, and which I instinctively knew to be true all along, but wouldn’t necessarily have guessed.

These, in particular, are: management, marketing, and information science.

What this means is that growing sustaining businesses, or organizations of any kind really, is actually a branch of social science.

It seems obvious really, at least in hindsight.  Management is the study and practice of coordinating groups for a purpose.  Marketing is the study and practice of persuasion through media.  And information science is the study and practice of how we track, analyze, and store the relational observations that we find significant.  Those are my own definitions of the moment, but that’s how I see them.

Think about it though…if we take a step back, wouldn’t EVERY area of human study be properly categorized as some kind of social science?  Humans do everything in groups and for groups.  Without group identity and allegiance there is no motivation to or validation for any of the work we do.  When you truly see and grasp this dynamic, it changes the way you see and work from top to bottom, and that’s the essence of my executive coaching and organizational consulting.

I love music and always will.  I still draw daily inspiration and assistance from the lessons of performance, teamwork, critical thinking, and creativity that I have learned, and continue to learn from music.  But I’m continually surprised and delighted by the rich, expansive, and rewarding new lessons I find all over my landscape of experience that are unlocked by approaching life and work as a social scientist.

Do you think this kind of insight could be helpful for your leadership and organizational success?  Let me know and we can chat about it: https://aaronjmarx.com/work-with-me

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