Opening up Decision Making: The View from the Black Stool

Ann Langley, Henry Mintzberg, Patricia Pitcher, Elizabeth Posada and Jan Saint-Macary
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Ann Langley: Département des Sciences Administratives, Université du Quebec à Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada H3C 4R2
Henry Mintzberg: Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1G5
Patricia Pitcher: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada
Elizabeth Posada: D’epartement des Sciences Administratives, Université du Quebec à Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada
Jan Saint-Macary: Département des Sciences Administratives, Université du Québec à Hull, Hull, Quebec, Canada

Organization Science, 1995, vol. 6, issue 3, 260-279

Abstract: Set on its current course thirty years ago by Herbert Simon’s 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.

Keywords: decision making; networks; insight (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:6:y:1995:i:3:p:260-279

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