Search results

Presents the thoughts on decision processes of Chester I. Barnard, one of the century’s greatest management theorists. Includes his classic article, “Mind in everyday affairs”; his unpublished book, “The Significance of Decisive Behaviour in Social Action”; his correspondence with Herbert Simon, and significant comments found in his personal papers.

The purpose of this paper is to address the core concept of docility in Simon’s learning theories and elaborate docility as a missing link in organizational performance structures. In his book, Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947 with three subsequent editions, Herbert A. Simon introduced a new concept to the emerging field of organizational theory, docility.

In Administrative Behavior, Herbert A. Simon introduced to management and organization theorists the concept of docility. Simon adopted the concept and meaning from E.C. Tolman’s (1932) classic work, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, and his novel views on learning processes and key concepts like purpose (goals), thought processes (cognitive psychology) and cognitive maps. This paper elaborates on docility mechanisms and the implications for social learning in organizations.

This paper addresses this lacuna in the organizational literature, and the implications for current theories of organizations and organizational learning.

Docility is a tool to link individual learning with organizational learning in complex environments and changing technologies.

The paper traces origins of Simon’s docility and learning theories.

This chapter discusses the “seigniorage argument” in favor of public money issuance, according to which public finances could be improved if the state more fully exercised the privilege of money creation, which is, today, largely shared with private banks. This point was made in the 1930s by several proponents of the “100% money” reform scheme, such as Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, Lauchlin Currie of Harvard and Irving Fisher of Yale, who called for a full-reserve requirement in lawful money behind checking deposits. One of their claims was that, by returning all seigniorage profit to the state, such reform would allow a significant reduction of the national debt. In academic debates, however, following a criticism first made by Albert G. Hart of the University of Chicago in 1935, this argument has generally been discarded as wholly illusory. Hart argued that, because the state, under a 100% system, would be likely to pay the banks a subsidy for managing checking accounts, no substantial debt reduction could possibly be expected to follow. The 100% money proponents never answered Hart’s criticism, whose conclusion has often been considered as definitive in the literature. However, a detailed study of the subject reveals that Hart’s analysis itself appears to be questionable on at least two grounds: the first pertains to the sources of the seigniorage benefit, the other to its distribution. This chapter concludes that the “seigniorage argument” of the 100% money authors may not have been entirely unfounded.

The paper aims to explore the life and contributions of one of the most influential management scholars (Herbert A. Simon), who is known as the founder and contributor to many scientific fields. Simon's interdisciplinary approach in conducting his research in management has made him a significant figure in many disciplines.

The paper is of a qualitative nature, and information is collected from the books and articles that are written by Simon as well as those who have been familiar with his work. This paper concentrates on Simon's contribution to the decision‐making theory and, more specifically, his insights into the process of decision making in real world situations. It explores the tenets of the classical and neoclassical approach to decision making and argues that because of Simon's work, attention was diverted from concentration on studying the organizational structure to the behavior of the decision makers during the process of making decisions. This new orientation brought more attention to the behavioral approach in studying decision making in organizations. Special attention is given to Simon's “bounded rationality” model and its relation to the process of decision making. This paper also deals with Simon's view on the role of intuition in decision making and explores the practicality of using his model in the real world.

Simon opened up a new world of scientific inquiry that its main focus is on the development of the most effective and realistic model for the decision makers to predict future outcomes.

The paper only concentrates on the core contribution of Herbert Simon's work on the decision‐making process. It does not indulge itself in Simon's related work in other disciplines such as computer science and artificial intelligence. In addition, this paper does not deal with the new developments in the theories of decision making. Future research could concentrate on the new discoveries concerning the ability of humans to construct thinking machines in order to improve productivity in organizations.

The paper examines the productive life of Herbert Simon and develops a realistic portrait of his core contributions to humanity (decision making). It involves the reader with the intricacies of the decision making process as it is examined and studied by Simon.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the cognitive research of Herbert Simon to business strategy decisions, to begin a discussion of the emerging field of Behavioral Strategy.

Research on cognition, memory and expertise are organized, with the aim of enlightening the process of business strategy development.

The authors select four insights from Simon's work to form an integrative framework of decision making and apply this to illuminate existing approaches to schools of strategy thought and practice.

This paper should lead to research on how to advance the process of solving strategic problems, in both practice and theory. The most important limitation is that much additional research lies ahead, as this is a foundational view.

This paper is the first to recognize the potential for application of Simon's cognitive research to the practice of strategic decisions.

We provide a review of the research in this volume and suggest avenues for future research.

Review of the research in this volume and unstructured interviews with health care executives.

We identified the three central themes: (1) trust in leadership, (2) leading by example, and (3) multi-level leadership. For each of these themes, we highlight the shared concerns and findings, and provide commentary about the contribution to the literature on leadership.

While relation-oriented leadership is important in health care, there is a danger of too much emphasis on relations in an already caring profession. Moreover, in most health care organizations, leadership is distributed and scholars need to adopt the appropriate methods to investigate these multi-level phenomena.

In health care organizations, hands-on leadership, through role modeling, may be necessary to promote change. However, practicing what you preach is not as easy as it may seem.

We provide a framework for understanding current research on leadership in health care organizations.

This chapter investigates the nature of the transformation of macroeconomics by focusing on the impact of the Great Depression on economic doctrines. There is no doubt that the Great Depression exerted an enormous influence on economic thought, but the exact nature of its impact should be examined more carefully. In this chapter, I examine the transformation from a perspective which emphasizes the interaction between economic ideas and economic events, and the interaction between theory and policy rather than the development of economic theory. More specifically, I examine the evolution of what became known as macroeconomics after the Depression in terms of an ongoing debate among the “stabilizers” and their critics. I further suggest using four perspectives, or schools of thought, as measures to locate the evolution and transformation; the gold standard mentality, liquidationism, the Treasury view, and the real-bills doctrine. By highlighting these four economic ideas, I argue that what happened during the Great Depression was the retreat of the gold standard mentality, the complete demise of liquidationism and the Treasury view, and the strange survival of the real-bills doctrine. Each of those transformations happened not in response to internal debates in the discipline, but in response to government policies and real-world events.