An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of March and Simon’s Organizations: The Realized Contribution and Unfulfilled Promise of a Masterpiece

• Date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Russell K. Lemken,Marc H. Anderson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12527
• Published date: 01 December 2019

© 2019 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of

March and Simon’s Organizations: The Realized

Contribution and Unfulfilled Promise of a

Masterpiece

Marc H. Andersona and Russell K. Lemkenb

aIowa State University; bEast Carolina University

ABSTRACT March and Simon’s Organizations is a seminal work in management studies. We as-

sess the contribution Organizations has made to management studies through a citation context

analysis of 1,400 articles from top management journals. By categorizing the content from

Organizations cited in subsequent works, we find that two related categories associated with cogni-

tive limits and routines or programs account for half (50.5%) of all citation contexts since 1990.

We also investigate whether citations to Organizations have been peripheral or substantial to the

citing authors’ claims, how cited content has changed over time, and the extent to which citing

works have provided empirical evidence to test March and Simon’s propositions or have been

critical of their assertions. Our investigation reveals disturbingly few attempts to empirically

validate the assertions made in Organizations. Overall, we provide a critical reflection on how well

subsequent scholarship fulfils the aims and promise heralded by this masterpiece.

Keywords: bounded rationality, citation context analysis, empirical testing, organization

theory, routines

INTRODUCTION

March and Simon’s Organizations (1958, 1993) is one of the great enduring masterpieces

of management literature. First published in 1958,1

the book quickly became a classic.

One early analysis found that between 1969 and 1977, Organizations was the most high-

ly-cited organizational and management psychology book with a total of 594 citations

Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:8 December 2019

doi:10. 1111/jo ms.1 2527

Address for reprints: Marc H. Anderson, Ivy College of Business, Department of Management, Steve and

Becky Smith Management and Marketing Suite, Iowa State University, 2350 Gerdin Business Building,

2167 Union Drive, Ames, IA 50011-2027, USA (mha@iastate.edu).

Both authors worked equally on this project.

1538 M. H. Anderson and R. K. Lemken

© 2019 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

(Garfield, 1978).2

While there are other important early books in organizational the-

ory, such as Chester Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive (1938) and Herbert Simon’s

Administrative Behavior (1947), one could make a strong argument that Organizations marks

the birth of organization science as we know it today. A second edition of the book ap-

peared in 1993, which added a new introduction3

but left the main text unchanged.

More than a half-century after its initial publication, Organizations remains extremely

influential and continues to be highly cited. The book was ranked as the 25th most fre-

quently-cited work among all works cited in the Strategic Management Journal over the pe-

riod 1980–2000, and the percentage of articles citing Organizations remained remarkably

stable over the three seven-year periods within this timeframe (Ramos-Rodriguez and

Ruiz-Navarro, 2004). Anderson (2006) also reports that this high citation rate remained

stable over the 1977–2005 period. When Miner (2003, p. 253) asked 95 organizational

behaviour and strategic management scholars to rate the importance of 73 dominant

organizational behaviour theories, they collectively gave Organizations (combined with

Simon’s 1947 book Administrative Behavior) the highest mean importance rating (5.76 out

of 7). March (2007) reported that Organizations was the single most frequently-cited social

science work published in the year 1958. Today, Google Scholar lists more than 25,000

citations to Organizations, and it has been cited frequently in the most prestigious man-

agement journals.

Yet while it is clear that Organizations is one of the foundational works in management

and both has been and continues to be highly cited, knowing how frequently the book

is cited does not adequately represent the scholarly impact of its extensive diversity of

ideas (March, 2007). We know little about the specific content that authors have used from

Organizations, how peripheral or substantial that use has been, whether the reasons schol-

ars cite the book have changed over time, or—and this is particularly important—the ex-

tent to which the content in the book has been empirically tested or subjected to critiques

by authors who cite it. Given the seminal status of Organizations in the history of organi-

zation studies and its continuing relevance to scholarship today, examining these issues

in detail would yield insights into the development of the field of organization studies.

The present article describes a citation context analysis that addresses these issues con-

cerning the nature of the influence of Organizations on subsequent scholarship. We exam-

ine all of the citations to Organizations that have appeared in the eight top management

journals containing the greatest number of citations to this classic: Journal of Management

Studies, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management

Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and the Journal

of Management (we explain our selection of these journals below).

Our findings show that just two related content areas of Organizations, ‘Cognitive limits’

and ‘Routines and programs’, are cited far more often than other topics in the book. We

also find that a majority of citations to Organizations are peripheral in nature, and that

this peripheral use is increasing over time. Most importantly, we find that there have

been disturbingly few attempts to empirically validate or critique the assertions made

in Organizations. The overall contribution of our paper is a more complete and nuanced

view of the influence that Organizations has had on subsequent organizational scholar-

ship, which highlights future work needed to realize the potential of this classic work.

An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of March and Simon’s Organizations 1539

© 2019 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The remainder of the article presents the background to our study, the specific research

questions we examine, the method we use, our detailed results, and a discussion.

BACKGROUND

One emerging approach to examining the contributions of seminal works in organi-

zation studies is citation context analysis (Small, 1982). Citation analysis—in the form of

counting how many times given works have been cited—has been widely used by scholars

to establish journal rankings and impact factors (e.g., Podsakoff et al., 2005; Tahai and

Meyer, 1999; Zupic and Cater, 2015). Citation context analysis differs in that it involves

examining each specific passage from articles where those citations appear to discern how

the cited work is used in the author’s narrative. When authors cite a given work, they

acknowledge and emphasize certain knowledge claims rather than others, and in doing

so they help to collectively define the contribution of that cited work (Mizruchi and Fein,

1999). In an important way, it can be argued that any work’s influence on subsequent

scholarship is reflected in the citing passages of the works that cite it (Anderson, 2006).

In discussing the impact of his early work, March (2007, p. 540) noted that ‘in a world

of thousands of citations, the authors’ interpretations are only a small part of the story.

What the ideas … might be imagined to be was shaped by the articles that sought to use

them.’ Thus, citation context analysis examines how citing authors and their articles have

interpreted and shaped the contribution of a given scholarly work, as reflected by how

those citing authors have used that work in constructing their own arguments and knowl-

edge claims. A variety of scholars have used citation context analysis to examine the

nature of the contribution of specific seminal works in organization studies (Anderson,

2006; Anderson and Sun, 2010; Golden-Biddle, Locke, and Reay, 2006; Lounsbury and

Carberry, 2005; Sieweke, 2014).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The aim of the present research is to examine the scope and enduring nature of the in-

fluence that Organizations has had on the field of organization studies. We examine how

often the major content areas covered in Organizations are cited by peer-reviewed articles

in top management journals; how many of these citations are peripheral versus substan-

tial to the citing authors’ claims; how the use of Organizations in management scholarship

has evolved over time since the book’s introduction; how often citing authors have pro-

vided or discussed empirical evidence relevant to assertions made in Organizations; and

how many citations have been critical of Organizations and what those criticisms are. We

discuss each of these research questions in more detail below.

Research Question #1: What Content from Organizations Have

Subsequent Authors Cited in Their Own Works?

The seven chapters of Organizations include a compilation of more than one hundred

propositions concerning a variety of content areas—classical organization theory, deci-

sion-making, participation, conflict, the cognitive limits on rationality, and planning and