The Challenges of March and Simon’s Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue

• Author: Rouslan Koumakhov,Philip Bromiley,William H. Starbuck,Denise M. Rousseau
• Date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12534
• Published date: 01 December 2019

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

The Challenges of March and Simon’s Organizations:

Introduction to the Special Issue

Philip Bromileya, Rouslan Koumakhovb,

Denise M. Rousseauc and William H. Starbuckd,e

aUniversity of California; bNEOMA Business School; cCarnegie Mellon University; dUniversity of Oregon;

eNew York University

ABSTRACT March and Simon pushed the study of organizations into the mainstream of aca-

demic writing about business. We outline central ideas discussed by the book and its pioneering

role in studying cognitive processes underlying boundedly rational human beings. Through

their representational approach, March and Simon defined and explicated key mechanisms

of individual and organizational decision-making. Organizations provided an empirically-based

understanding of human behavior and coordination, and set up core scientific criteria for creat-

ing the cumulative body of management and organization research. We summarize the papers

presented in this special issue and point out contributions by Organizations that have been under-

stated, forgotten or ignored in management studies.

Keywords: Carnegie School, decision-making, empirically-based theory, management

cognition

INTRODUCTION

Last year – 2018 – a book that profoundly shaped management studies, James March

and Herbert Simon’s Organizations, celebrated its 60th birthday. What many management

scholars often regard as the foundation of the infor mation processing approach to orga-

nizations (also termed Behavioral Theory of the Firm or the Carnegie School) continues

to inspire research and debate. The book still impresses today by its drawing on nearly a

dozen different disciplines, its critical analysis and synthesis of diverse literature, its re-

peatedly stated goal of ‘replacing fancy with fact’, its numerically indexed 206 variables

and several hundred proposed relations for empirical verification, and its dense yet clear

language. This special issue commemorates the anniversary.

Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:8 December 2019

doi:10. 1111/jo ms .125 34

Address for reprints: Rouslan Koumakhov, NEOMA Business School, 59 Rue Pierre Taittinger, 51100 Reims,

France (rouslan.koumakhov@neoma-bs.fr).