60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on Subsequent Research

• Author: Fabrice Lumineau,Timothy M. Devinney,Jan Hohberger,Ralf Wilden
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12531
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019

60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An

Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on

Subsequent Research*

Ralf Wildena, Jan Hohbergerb, Timothy M. Devinneyc and

Fabrice Lumineaud

aMacquarie University; bRamon Llull University, ESADE Business School; cUniversity of Manchester;

dPurdue University

ABSTRACT We provide an analytic and systematic review of the impact of March and Simon’s

seminal Organizations on management research and discuss the book’s value for current research

and propose future applications of it. Building on bibliometric and text-mining approaches, our

empirical analysis reveals that although Organizations was contextually based in the industrial

milieu of the 1950s, its concepts have found ongoing resonance with scholars. Further, we find

that much of this resonance appears to be driven by the ability of scholars in different ‘schools

of thought’ to find useful insights from March and Simon’s generalized theoretical structure.

However, we also observe that scholars have been selective in their usage of ideas from the book

over the last 60 years. Based our analysis, we propose a particular set of future research areas,

including a focus on new organizational forms and extending March and Simon’s ideas to multi-

level research, which can benefit from more holistically drawing on Organizations and connect its

original ideas to address current management problems.

Keywords: behavioral theory, bibliometrics, Carnegie School, Herbert Simon, innovation,

James March, literature review, organizations, text mining

A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.

Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:8 December 2019

doi:10. 1111/jo ms. 1253 1

Address for reprints: Ralf Wilden, Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University, 4 Eastern Road,

Macquarie Park, NSW 2109, Australia (Ralf.Wilden@mq.edu.au).

*Submission to the Special Issue in the Journal of Management Studies: ‘Commemorating the 60th anniversary of

March and Simon’s “Organizations” Special Issue Call for Papers’.

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management

Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations 1571

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management

Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

James March and Herbert Simon’s (1958) Organizations (hereinafter M&S) is one of the

most seminal publications in business and management, having been voted the seventh

most influential management book of the 20th century (Bedeian and Wren, 2001). The

initial publication, along with newer editions, has been cited more than 29,000 times (as

of August 2019) according to Google Scholar. Together with Simon’s (1947) Administrative

Behavior and Cyert and March’s (1963) A Behavioral Theor y of the Firm, M&S laid the founda-

tion of the Carnegie School (Gavetti et al., 2007). At the same time, similar to other work

emerging from the Carnegie School, M&S has been criticized for its generality (Gavetti

et al., 2007, 2012) and obvious propositions (Weick, 2017). However, despite M&S’s per-

ceived and anecdotally discussed impact on subsequent management research, there is

a lack of comprehensive and systematic reviews of its content and impact on business

research. The various traditional narrative based reviews of Administrative Behavior and A

Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Argote and Greve, 2007; Dosi and Marengo, 2007; Gavetti

et al., 2007, 2012) focus largely at looking at the larger impact of the Carnegie School.

The only direct review of M&S by Weick (2017) is predominantly a personal reflection.

Taking its significant impact on subsequent research into account, while accounting

for criticisms as well, we aim to provide a broader, more detailed, and systematic analysis

that better encompasses the wide scope of M&S and how it has inspired the research

that followed its initial publication. In line with Makadok et al. (2018), we offer a critical

perspective on the theoretical arguments advanced by M&S regarding: levels of analysis

(the who?), phenomena (the where?), and boundary conditions (the when?). To do so,

we structure our discussion in two parts, beginning with ‘taking stock’ of M&S, followed

by our ‘moving forward’ discussion, in which we outline that M&S is still relevant for a

significant array of applications in the study of organizations, and how future scholar-

ship can be enhanced by building on M&S’s original ideas. In doing so, we attempt to

take into account the context and time period in which M&S was written, and how its

relevance and use by scholars changed as the business and management environment

changed in the intervening 60 years.

From a methodological perspective, the diverse nature and wide impact of M&S make

it difficult to provide an inclusive and transparent review (Denyer and Tranfield, 2009)

using a traditional narrative review approach. Traditional narrative reviews are very flex-

ible due to their less formalized method (Hammersley, 2001), but they tend to rely on a

more limited number of studies (Rousseau et al., 2008) and are often criticized because

of their potential bias and lack of both transparency and reproducibility (Denyer et al.,

2008). Furthermore, there is often a bias associated with traditional literature reviews and

expert surveys as they are conducted based on the (conscious and subconscious) assump-

tions and perspectives of the review team (Ramos-Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro, 2004).

To borrow from M&S’s concept of bounded rationality, the sheer volume of relevant

publications combined with the diversity of fields from which they originate (spanning

management, strategy, psychology, sociology, and economics) exceeds the capabilities of

the best review team. Due to the size and diversity of M&S’s impact, this limitation would

be particularly salient for any traditional narrative review, as a review team would have

to focus and limit its analysis to particular aspects. To address concerns of inclusivity and

1572 R. Wilden et al.

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management

Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

transparency (Denyer and Tranfield, 2009), we combine two complementary empirical

methods. We use bibliometric coupling with network analysis to identify research streams

in the form of related publications based on the structure of their references. Further,

we apply text mining, which allows us to identify central concepts and themes in each

research stream and to map their evolution over the last 60 years. By using text mining,

we shift the level of analysis from publications, and their citations, to the actual content

of each publication.

Our review is structured as follows. First, we introduce M&S by summarizing the

book using text mining to identify its conceptual and thematic underpinnings as they

are revealed by the words and language used by M&S, without any presupposition as to

concepts and theories therein. Second, we then focus our attention on the scholarship

that has followed on from M&S, again without any preconception that might be biased

by our imposing a structure on that work. To do so, we use bibliometric coupling analysis

to isolate key research streams and their most representative publications followed on

from M&S, aggregating them into clusters that represent coherent ‘schools of thought’.

Third, we examine these research streams with text mining to identify the key thematic

underpinnings of each research stream, paying particular attention to their evolution. As

such, our analytic approach did not focus on a set of key concepts we a priori identified

as important but rather we derived concepts from the literature’s subsequent use of the

book. Fourth, we compare how these 60 years of research have built on the themes and

concepts that we uncovered in the original manuscript. Finally, building on a discussion

of how M&S has withstood the test of time, we provide suggestions for future research.

METHODOLOGY

Data

Our analysis is based on two main data sources: the book M&S itself and the jour nal

publications that cite M&S. The core data in the first instance were the text of M&S;

suitably converted into machine readable format, corrected for consistency and errors,

and with the bibliography deleted. In the second step, we created a database of all journal

publications that cite M&S. This was done by retrieving all publications (known as focal

publications) citing the book from the ISI Web of Science (WoS) database in June 2017.

We did not limit the search to specific journals or research areas (as frequently done in re-

views) as we were interested in the overall impact of the book and its diverse nature. WoS

is particularly suitable as it provides accurate and machine-readable bibliographic data

on older publications via passive listing. Also, as common practice in most bibliometric

reviews (e.g., Randhawa et al., 2016; Vogel and Güttel, 2012), we restricted our search to

English-language articles only and excluded books and book chapters from our sample.

This selection criteria led to an initial sample of 5168 articles citing M&S.

In the next step, we downloaded the abstracts for all citing articles. However, as WoS

did not list abstracts for articles before 1988, we had to complement our WoS data with

abstracts retrieved through Scopus. Overall, we obtained 99 per cent of abstracts for

our analysis. Finally, to enable the bibliometric analysis and to provide a meaningful