Decisions and Structures: A Dialogue between Herbert Simon and Critical Realists

Abstract

AbstractThis paper compares critical realist (CR) approaches and their applications to management with Herbert Simon's account of individual and organizational cognition to provide an integrated framework for analysing the interaction between human beings and social structures. We establish several important conceptual and methodological affinities between both approaches, such as understanding decision and bounded rationality or emergentist accounts of organizations. Such affinities provide a coherent explanation of psychological mechanisms accounting for agency–structure interplay. With such an explanation, Simon's cognitivism leads to a deeper understanding of Margaret Archer's morphogenetic cycles and reflexivity, and affords fresh insight into David Elder‐Vass's mechanisms of organizational role‐playing. Simon's type of cognitivism is a social cognitivism as well, which addresses and incorporates other social sciences. It allows for a Simon‐CR analytical synthesis, which contributes to the individualism/structuralism debate in social and management research. We propose new arguments for separating structures from agency in organization studies. We elaborate key analytical implications of our synthesis, characterizing, in particular, deviant organizational culture and work division in both morphogenetic and Simonian terms.