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Opening up Decision Making: The View from the Black Stool

Opening up Decision Making: The View from the Black Stool Set on its current course thirty years ago by Herbert Simons notions of bounded rationality and sequential stages, the research literature of organizational decision making is claimed in this paper to have suffered from three major limitations labeled reification, dehumanization, and isolation. In particular, it has been stuck along a continuum between the cerebral rationality of the stage theories at one end and the apparent irrationality of the theory of organized anarchies at the other. This paper seeks to open up decision making in three respects. First, the concept of decision is opened up to the ambiguities that surround the relationship between commitment and action. Second, the decision maker is opened up to history and experience, to affect and inspiration, and especially to the critical role of insight in transcending the bounds of cerebral rationality. Third, the process of decision making is opened up to a host of dynamic linkages, so that isolated traces of single decisions come to be seen as interwoven networks of issues. The paper concludes with a plea to open up research itself to the development of richer theory on these important processes. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Organization Science INFORMS

Opening up Decision Making: The View from the Black Stool

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Publisher
INFORMS
Copyright
Copyright © INFORMS
Subject
Research Article
ISSN
1047-7039
eISSN
1526-5455
DOI
10.1287/orsc.6.3.260
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Set on its current course thirty years ago by Herbert Simons notions of bounded rationality and sequential stages, the research literature of organizational decision making is claimed in this paper to have suffered from three major limitations labeled reification, dehumanization, and isolation. In particular, it has been stuck along a continuum between the cerebral rationality of the stage theories at one end and the apparent irrationality of the theory of organized anarchies at the other. This paper seeks to open up decision making in three respects. First, the concept of decision is opened up to the ambiguities that surround the relationship between commitment and action. Second, the decision maker is opened up to history and experience, to affect and inspiration, and especially to the critical role of insight in transcending the bounds of cerebral rationality. Third, the process of decision making is opened up to a host of dynamic linkages, so that isolated traces of single decisions come to be seen as interwoven networks of issues. The paper concludes with a plea to open up research itself to the development of richer theory on these important processes.

Journal

Organization Science – INFORMS

Published: Jun 1, 1995

Keywords: Keywords : decision making ; networks ; insight

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