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Comments on the Theory of Organizations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon
Affiliation:
Carnegie Institute of Technology
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Extract

This is an attempt to sketch in very rough form what seem to me some of the central concepts and problems of organization theory. In the first section I have tried to define the field of organization theory and to indicate with some care what justification there is for regarding it as a distinct area of theory, related to, but by no means identical with, the theory of small groups and the theory of social institutions. The comments in the second section on subject-matter areas simply spell out the implications, many of them perhaps obvious, of the central argument of the first section.

This paper is concerned with all kinds of organizations, and not simply with those that fall within the area of public administration. This definition of the scope of organization theory reflects my own conviction that there are a great many things that can be said about organizations in general, without specification of the particular kind of organization under consideration. Moreover, even if we were interested solely in governmental organizations, I believe that a great deal can be learned from the comparison of their characteristics with those of other kinds of organizations, and from attempts to explain the similarities and differences that are found. Neither of these statements denies the existence of numerous and important phenomena that are peculiar to governmental organizations or the need for theory in public administration to deal with these phenomena.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , December 1952 , pp. 1130 - 1139
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1952

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References

1 The relation between organizational behavior and individual decision-making and problem-solving processes is discussed in the author's Administrative Behavior (New York, 1947)Google Scholar, Ch. 5. My researches in the decade since this connection occurred to me have steadily deepened my conviction that a very deep relation—not by any means analogical or metaphorical—exists between decision processes in organizations and the processes described by Gestalt psychologists in their study of the problem-solving process. Since the purpose of this paper is to state problems, not to solve them, I will have to be content here with this simple statement of my belief.

2 For an introduction to the literature, see Guetzkow, Harold (ed.), Groups, Leadership, and Men (Pittsburgh, 1951)Google Scholar, and “Human Relations Research in Large Organizations”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 7, no. 3 (whole number), 1951Google Scholar.

3 An overreaction from the excessive emphasis on formal organization in the earlier work on organization theory has led, in the last two decades, to an almost equally serious neglect of the importance of attitudes toward legitimacy. The same overreaction—from legalistic analyses of the state in terms of “sovereignty” to a pure power-politics approach to political behavior—has occurred in the other areas of political science as well. (Lasswell, and Kaplan, , for example, in Power and Society (New Haven, 1951)Google Scholar come very close to treating legitimate authority as an epiphenomenon that has no independent influence on the development of a system of political behavior.) With the reconstruction of “legitimacy” as a psychological, rather than a legal concept, the way is now open to a reconciliation of the formal and the informal (legitimate authority and power) within a behavioral framework.

4 This point is also elaborated upon in Administrative Behavior. See particularly pp. 39–41, 80–84, 96–102, 240–44.

5 See von Neumann, John and Morgenstern, Oskar, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, 1944)Google Scholar, especially Ch. 2.

6 Cf. Dahl, Robert A., “The Science of Public Administration: Three Problems”, Public Administration Review, Vol. 7, pp. 1–11 (Winter, 1947)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For further discussion of these mechanisms in the context of mathematical models, see Simon, Herbert A., “A Formal Theory of Interaction in Social Groups”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 17, pp. 202–11 (04, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “A Comparison of Organization Theories,” Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming.

8 I believe that this usage does not do too much violence to the term, at least as it is used by economic historians and those concerned with the dynamic theory of the firm, e.g., Schumpeter. In terms of this definition, entrepreneurship is not peculiar to business concerns but is present (and, I believe, to the same important extent) in governmental and voluntary organizations as well. Examples of important entrepreneurs in governmental, non-profit, and voluntary organizations would be William Alanson White, Gifford Pinchot, William Rainey Harper, Clarence Streit—the list is inexhaustible. Anyone attempting to describe the roles of men like Charles Merriam and Louis Brownlow within the fields of political science and public administration can hardly avoid using the concepts of entrepreneurial theory.

9 The process that Philip Selznick refers to as “cooptation” fits in here also. See his TV A and the Grass Roots (Berkeley, 1949)Google Scholar.

10 See the excellent survey of the economic literature in Arrow, Kenneth J., “Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations”, Econometrica, Vol. 19, pp. 404–37 (10, 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 This last proposition is an important part of our justification, in the first part of this memorandum, for the study of “levels.” The issues involved are discussed with great sophistication by Schneirla, T. C., “The ‘Levels’ Concept in the Study of Social Organization in Animals”, in Rohrer, John J. and Sherif, Muzafer (eds.), Social Psychology at the Crossroads (New York, 1951)Google Scholar.

12 My former colleague, Victor A. Thompson, first pointed out to me the significance of this distinction.

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