The concept of choice as a focus for interpreting and guiding human behavior has rarely had an easy time in the realm of ideas. It is beset by theological disputations over free will, by the dilemmas of absurdism, by the doubts of psychological behaviorism, by the claims of historical, economic, social, and demographic determinism. The tools of intelligence as they are fashioned in modern theories of choice are necessary to any reasonable behavior in contemporary society. The argument that goal development and choice are independent behaviorally seems clearly false. It seems to me perfectly obvious that a description that assumes goals come first and action comes later is frequently radically wrong. The result is that many of the most influential, best educated, and best placed citizens have experienced a powerful overlearning with respect to rationality. Contemporary theories of decision making and the technology of reason have considerably strengthened our capabilities for effective social action.

Organizations have deep and pervasive effects on our lives at work and beyond. The previous century witnessed a massive transformation of advanced capitalist societies: whereas families and neighborhoods once constituted the basis of society, now large organizations play a pivotal role in every sphere (Perrow 1991). And the most recent decades have witnessed further, equally profound and disconcerting changes in this landscape. The aim of the present volume is to help scholars in organization studies better understand these changes. In particular, we highlight the enduring value of some of the older work in this field. The field of organization studies has become well established in both sociology departments and professional schools, most notably in business schools. However, in the course of this institutionalization, the field has progressively lost contact with its founding writers. To some, this represents a welcome sign of maturation: they might quote Alfred North Whitehead: 'A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost' (Whitehead 1916 413). Whitehead, however, was writing about the natural sciences, and the premise of this volume is that the social sciences are in this specific respect quite different, because in our field founders continue to play a crucial role. We have thus reversed Whitehead's warning as the clarion call for this volume. Without minimizing the potential contribution of more recent scholarship nor the value of earlier scholarship that has been less celebrated, we believe that these classics present unusually rich resources for research today. Most notably, these writers all struggled to make sense of the momentous social changes of their times. In contrast, organization studies today focuses too little on the big issues of our own times and too much on the narrower concerns of academic peers. The classics, this volume argues, serve both as a source of specific insights and also as encouragement to lift and broaden our aspirations. Alongside some thematic chapters, this volume includes contributions on each of several classic authors. Each chapter addresses the author's ideas and his or her context, the impact of these ideas on the field of organization studies so far, and the potential future research these ideas might inspire. The goal is not reverential exegesis, but rather to examine how these classics can enrich and enliven organizational research—how they can help us make better sense of the social changes currently under way, and perhaps equip us to act more intelligently in our efforts …

The earliest contributors to discussions of strategy were advisors to military leaders, and that model was carried into early business schools, where the teachers of strategy were, for the most part, people with extensive experience as executives or advisors to them. The key course materials were anecdotes and cases, and the standard intellectual discourse was organized around recollected episodes in organizational history. The central contributions of the early teaching of strategy were consciousness of the complications introduced by complexity, competition, and attention to the second-order surprises of intentional action. There was neither a pretense of theory nor a significant involvement in research. Although it shared in the onus of a general academic skepticism about the academic legitimacy of research on business, the "discipline" of strategy sought to emulate the attributes of more established disciplines. The new field was typified by an early open interdisciplinary flavor that facilitated the differentiation of a new field, and a subsequent refinement that restricted access. By the start of the twenty-first century, this process had run much of its course, and the field of strategy had taken its place as a reasonably respectable academic specialty. The history of an emphasis on real organizations in real situations led to an openness to anchors drawn from sources other than conventional economics. These included particularly the theory of games, the evolutionary theory of the firm, and the behavioral theory of organizations. The struggle for respectability in economics was repeatedly frustrated by the difficulty of discovering a formulation that honored the litany of economics while fitting the observations of real strategy making. The future seems likely to be more of the same, a combination of efforts to secure recognition through emulation of the standards and barriers to entry that characterize established disciplines, and of exploratory gambits that are mostly destined to be forgotten. The optimal balance is likely to be as elusive as it is in other domains.

Humans use reasons to shape and justify choices. In the process, trade-offs seem essential and often inevitable. But trade-offs involve comparisons, which are problematic both across values and especially over time. Reducing disparate values to a common metric (especially if that metric is money) is often problematic and unsatisfactory. Critically, it is not that values just shape choices, but that choices themselves shape values. This endogeneity of values makes an unconditional normative endorsement of modern decision-theoretic rationality unwise. This is a hard problem and there is no escaping the definition of good values, that is, those that make humans better. This removes the wall between economics and philosophy. If we are to adopt and enact this perspective, then greater discourse and debate on what matters and not just what counts will be useful and even indispensable.

Power is a major explanatory concept in the study of social choice. It is used in studies of relations among nations, of community decision making, of business behavior, and of small-group discussion. In order to explore the power of power in empirical theories of social choice, this chapter proposes to do two things: First, it identifies three different variations in this basic approach to power as an intervening variable to suggest the kinds of uses of power. Second, the chapter examines six different classes of models of social choice that are generally consistent with what at least one substantial group of students means by social power. It asks what empirical and technical problems are there in the use of the concept of power and in the use of alternative concepts, and under what circumstances the concept of power does, or can, contribute to the effective prediction of social choice.

Theories of political control of bureaucracy have a basic objective to explain and ensure how administration can be accountable and subordinate to the formally designated institutions of democratic decisionmaking. Theories of bureaucratic politics stake their claim to utility on a convincing demonstration of the intellectual poverty of the politics-administration dichotomy. Institutional theory in public administration is concerned with the organization and management of contained and bounded public institutions. Postmodern theory in many ways is the culmination of the theoretical fragmentation in public administration that began with the assault on the politics-administration dichotomy. Postmodern theory is a subjective approach to studying social phenomena that focuses heavily on language, the context of human interactions and the social construction of reality. Governance has stealthily crept into the discipline's …

Much of intellectual history is punctuated by the flaring of intellectual outliers, small groups of thinkers who briefly, but decisively, influence the development of ideas, technologies, policies, or worldviews. To understand the flaring of intellectual outliers, we use archival and interview data from the RAND Corporation after the Second World War. We focus on five factors important to the RAND experience: (1) a belief in fundamental research as a source of practical ideas, (2) a culture of optimistic urgency, (3) the solicitation of renegade ambition, (4) the recruitment of intellectual cronies, and (5) the facilitation of the combinatorics of variety. To understand the subsequent decline of intellectual outliers at RAND, we note that success yields a sense of competence, endurance in a competitive world, and the opportunity and inclination to grow. Self-confidence, endurance, and growth produce numerous positive consequences for an organization; but for the most part, they undermine variety. Outliers and the conditions that produce them are not favored by their environments. Engineering solutions to this problem involve extending time and space horizons, providing false information about the likelihoods of positive returns from exploration, buffering exploratory activities from the pressures of efficiency, and protecting exploration from analysis by connecting it to dictates of identities.

ZusammenfassungSoziale Konflikte bezeichnen das Erleben einer Unvereinbarkeit der Überzeugungen oder Interessen mindestens zweier Parteien und sämtliche Aktivitäten der Parteien, die sich aus der erlebten Unvereinbarkeit ergeben. Deskriptive Ansätze der Konfliktforschung versuchen, die Erscheinungsformen sozialer Konflikte systematisierend zu beschreiben. So kann beispielsweise mit Blick auf das Konfliktthema zwischen Aufgaben- und Beziehungskonflikten unterschieden werden. Erklärende Ansätze beschreiben den Zusammenhang zwischen Entstehungs- und Verlaufsbedingungen, Konfliktverhalten und Auswirkungen desselben. So postuliert das Dual-Concern-Modell, dass das Verhalten im Kontext sozialer Konflikte durch zwei Motive bestimmt werde: Selbstbehauptungsmotiv sowie Unterstützungs- oder Kooperationsmotiv. Präskriptive Ansätze formulieren Handlungsempfehlungen zur Konfliktvermeidung und -beilegung. Auf dieser präskriptiven Ebene lassen sich z. B. integrative und distributive Verhandlungstechniken erörtern.

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The main task of scholars is to help good ideas forged by their predecessors find a new life in the imaginations of their successors. In this essay, we consider some aspects of this process from our experience with garbage can ideas of organizational decision making. We record our memories of initial encounters with them, impressions of their current condition, and some thoughts on convolutions they may experience in the years ahead.

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The United States Air Force (USAF) currently faces a shortfall in the type and number of electronic combat (EC) aircraft capable of operating with an Aerospace Expeditionary Wing (AEW). This has a direct impact on the USAF’s global attack core competency and undermines the combat power of any deployed AEW. Why have EC assets been allowed to deteriorate to this state? The answer begins with people, who have a flawed understanding of the theory of airpower. Because the theory is not understood correctly, money is not dedicated to the needed technology. Because the technology isn’t developed or is lacking, that community—if you will—fails to get representation at the higher levels of leadership. This cycle of organizational behavior repeats itself over and over until acted upon by an outside force—in this case the shootdown of a US F-117 during the Kosovo action. This is not the first time that the USAF has been through this cycle of organizational behavior. The almost exact same scenario played out in the famous pursuit versus bombers debates of the 1930s. Pursuit lost out and thereby lost money, technology, and people in key leadership positions. It was not until the horrific bomber losses of 1943 that leaders fully realized the mistake they had made. This paper explores the connection between the two stories, looks at the current state of EC, and offers some suggestions for the future.