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Boulding was president of numerous scholarly societies including the American Economics Association , the Society for General Systems Research , and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was not only a prolific writer and a creative integrator of knowledge, but an academician of world stature -- indeed, a magisterial figure in the discipline of social science. For Boulding, economics, sociology, etc. where not social sciences -- rather, they were all aspects of a single social science devoted to the study of human persons and their relationships (organizations). Boulding spearheaded an evolutionary (instead of equilibrium) approach to economics. See Kenneth Boulding's Evolutionary Perspective.
Boulding emphasized that human economic and other behavior is embedded in a larger interconnected system: To understand the results of our behavior, economic or otherwise, we must first research and develop a scientific understanding of the ecodynamics of the general system, the global society in which we live. Boulding believed that in the absence of a committed effort to the right kind of social science research and understanding, the human species might well be doomed to extinction. But he died optimistic, believing our evolutionary journey had just begun.