CROSSING BOUNDARIES AND CATEGORIES
Kazukiyo Kurosawa

The World Productivity Congress offers a wide variety of points of view regarding the meaning of and measurement of productivity. Almost all of them, however, promote themes belonging to domains such as Industrial Engineering, Managerial Economics, Ergonomics/Human Engineering, Operations Research, Systems Engineering, etc. There might be an unexplored question. What is the major reason we raise various topics as such these and discuss them in a circle called productivity science?

Might this cause us to search in vain to set up the fundamental framework of productivity science?

However important it might be, the so-called productivity ratio is just only one formal aspect of the topic. Thus, it must be dangerous to increase the ratio per se without having explored other aspects of productivity semantics.

Productivity semantics deals fundamentally with the interface between Mankind and Nature from macro and microscopic perspective and a concretely defined practical standpoint.

Productivity problems span both natural science and socio-human science. Thus, productivity science must necessarily be a border-line (or boundary-spanning - gls) science. It necessarily has an aspect of being a meta-science. Therefore, it is imperative, or at least useful, to formalize the theory with mathematical logic, especially category theory.

However, to accomplish this we must address it in a certain substantial structure defined by productivity semantics.

A typical and one fundamental pattern of the theory might be illustrated as follows: Labor productivity is defined as a first order category in productivity science. Building on this, total cost productivity would be defined as a second order category (in accordance with logical necessity). Using category theory, or mostly category of groups, in this way, the properties of index numbers of different types of productivity measurement would provide insightful perspectives for constructing a system of productivity measurement. In this way, the so-called "separability problem" in total factor productivity can be disposed of in the total system of variants of types of productivity. While this example is only a suggestion, this approach might be very useful in support of the goal of constructing our productivity science.

Influential Readings

• Dosse, FranÇois. (1999) Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences. University of Minnesota Press
• Hayakawa,S.I (1972) Language in Thought and Action, 3rd ed. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
• Korzybski, Alfred. (1933) Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. The Institute of General Semantics.
• Machlup, Fritz(1967) Essays in Economic Semantics. New Jersey.
• Mac Lane, S. (1971) Categories for the Working Mathematicians, Graduate Texts in Mathematics 5, Spring-Verlag.
• McCloskey, Deirdre. (2001) Measurement and Meaning in Economics. Edward Elgar. · Reynolds, J.C.(eds) (1985) Algebraic Methods in Semantics. Cambridge University Press.