Garbage Can Model Research Articles

How sports clubs decide to adopt an outdoor smoke-free policy: a qualitative study applying the Garbage Can Model

BackgroundOutdoor smoke-free policies (SFPs) at sports clubs can contribute to protecting people from second-hand smoke (SHS). However, in absence of national legislation, it is uncertain whether and how sports clubs decide to adopt an SFP. The aim of this study was to explore the decision-making process at sports clubs in relation to the adoption of an outdoor SFP.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were held with key stakeholders at 20 Dutch sports clubs (in field hockey, football, tennis, or korfball) with an outdoor SFP. Thematic analysis was applied, and themes were defined in line with the four streams of the Garbage Can Model (GCM).ResultsWe identified four motivating factors for sports clubs to start the decision-making process: 1) SHS as a problem, 2) intolerance of smoking behavior, 3) advantages of an outdoor SFP, and 4) external pressure to become smoke-free. The decision-making process involved a variety of participants, but the board, influential club members, and smokers usually played major roles. Decisions were discussed during both formal and informal choice opportunities, but only made during formal choice opportunities. With regard to solutions, sports clubs adopted a partial or total outdoor SFP. In addition, sports clubs followed different strategies with regard to the decision-making process, which we classified along two dimensions: 1) autocratic vs. democratic and 2) fast vs. slow.ConclusionA number of factors motivated sports clubs to start the decision-making process. These factors were mainly linked to a strong non-smoking norm. Decision-making involved different participants, with a key role for the board, influential club members, and smokers. Governments and other external organizations may contribute to SFP adoption at sports clubs in several ways. They may advise clubs on strategies of decision-making and how to involve smokers in this process.

Do institutional designs matter for planning review? A garbage-can simulation approach

ABSTRACT The fact that institutional design coordinates decisions are not a new idea, but the study of its effectiveness under different settings is still unrevealed. In this paper, inspired by the garbage-can model, we conduct a set of computer simulations of collective decision making based on urban land use planning and design review process. The simulation results show that institutional designs matter in affecting organizational performance, and that different distributions of case intricacies result in different outcomes of the collective decision making for planning review.

Decision-making in crisis management of a serious digital incident: A garbage can approach.

Managing crisis challenges the ability to make numerous decisions under great uncertainty. This study address the decision-making process, and how the mix of involved individuals, prior knowledge, and available decision-makers forms the decisions made during a crisis. A large-scale exercise with a cyber-attack scenario was chosen as the study's case. The organization studied have highly skilled crisis management personnel; however, they are not used to manage a large-scale cyber-attack scenario. The garbage can model (GCM) of Organizational Choice with a few modifications is used as the analytical framework in the study.

Under Pressure: Why School Managements Use Garbage Can Model of Decision?

This qualitative study identified and analyzed the occurrences of the Garbage-Can decision making model in public schools. The study was based on semi-structured interviews with 34 teachers from elementary and middle schools in Israel. Data analysis showed three major decision areas in which the Garbage-Can model was employed, and the conditions under which these decisions were made. Specifically, salient occurrences of Garbage-Can decisions making were found regarding pedagogical decisions, opportunities to obtain additional resources, and change management. The main conditions that evoke the use of the model are administrative limitations which create pressure and ambiguity, and time limits which do not allow systematic decision making. Results of this study may inform school principals and policy-makers when making decisions in schools.

Searching for Gold in The Garbage Can: Decision-Making on Resource Utilization in Schools Using the Garbage-Can Model

ABSTRACTThe study employed qualitative methodology, relying on semi-structured interviews, in order to identify and analyze occurrences of the garbage-can decision-making model regarding resource attainment and allocation in Israeli schools. Results indicate that the garbage-can model of decision-making is salient when school principals try to use opportunities to obtain additional resources, manage human resources, and implement additional teaching hours under conditions of pressure and urgency. Results of this study may inform school principals and policymakers when making decisions concerning resources, especially when conditions are stipulated for the resources’ provision.

The Strategic Reality Check - Quo Vadis Croatia?

The process of strategic management is the core of the strategic management literature. The classical contributions of the founders of strategic management suggested that the process should be directed as deliberate and controlled as possible and every step should be rational based on data and facts. The opposing approach in strategy is emergent approach allowing changes in the process from the moment it starts the implementation stage. Furthermore, if the whole process is flexible we are talking about the adaptive approach to the process of strategic management. At the other end of spectrum there is organizational anarchy and garbage-can model of strategy development. The reality check of Croatian national strategy starts from the statistical data produced by the Croatian Chamber of Economy in 2006 and 2010. The Croatian economy is dominatingly based on trade in almost each of the counties, non-competitive processing industry with a large number of employees, and construction. These three sectors are vital for the Croatian economy and should be the focal parts of the future strategies.

Learning in ‘Organized Anarchies’: The Nature of Technological Search Processes at Trade Fairs

Bathelt H. and Gibson R. Learning in ‘organized anarchies’: the nature of technological search processes at trade fairs, Regional Studies. Trade fairs have become an important temporary organizational form for the establishment of inter-firm linkages and networks. Despite recent insights into the nature of knowledge flows, the causal mechanisms linking trade fairs to processes of technological searches and choices remain underspecified. Taking this as a starting point, this paper provides a conceptual and empirical account of the technological search and related learning processes between geographically distant firms at trade fairs. Building on the concept of ‘organized anarchies’ and the ‘garbage-can model’ of organizational choice, it reconceptualizes the nature of search processes and applies this conceptualization to an explorative study of four business-to-business fairs in North America. This provides a dynamic explanation of how inter-firm interaction and observation support technological search processes, which may lead to distinct wider patterns of technological specialization and/or diffusion.

English

  This research study on the government decision-making process on the policy level towards Thai State owned enterprises (SOE) offers some ideas that may provide a useful interpretation of the government decision-making process on the policy level of public administration. The researcher aims to propose a better understanding of government policy formulation and implementation towards Thai SOE through two case studies. The findings of the study support the analytical framework that in the stage of agenda setting, the garbage-can model is the decision-making model that helps explain the processes of agenda setting, due to the variety of participants that influence the decision-making processes. However, the incremental model is more explanatory in the following stage. Once the policy is decided and implemented, policies are formulated and the day-to-day operational decisions are made incrementally by the ministry’s high-ranking officials and the SOE management. Moreover, the researcher found that government policies towards these two SOEs were, very often, on and off, and the government took about three to four decades with several governments to push the policies to be implemented and accomplished.   Key words: Organizational decision-making process, State owned enterprises (SOEs), satisfying model, incremental model, garbage-can model, the garbage-can model in political institutions as according to Kingdon’s theory, Thai administrative culture, the politics of despotic paternalism.

Decision Making in Eurocentric and Afrocentric Organizations

This article lays the foundation for how Eurocentric and Afrocentric organizations employ decision-making models differently. An investigation of the archetypes for each organization and its cultural dimensions develops the bases from which to draw conclusions about their decision-making preference. For the purposes here, decision-making includes rational, emotional, political-coalitional, and garbage-can models. This paper also reviews how emotions impact those processes. Findings show that Eurocentric organizations tend toward more rational and political models with strategic use of emotions. Afrocentric organizations deploy more garbage-can or holistic models. When members from Eurocentric organizations employ political models, they aim to please leadership. Members in predominately Afrocentric organizations frown on such behavior. Members from Afrocentric organizations express emotions more freely and with less strategic intent than their counterparts. When members from these cultures encounter each other, having an understanding of these decision-making models may help unpack the negative connotation associated with the concept of cultural baggage.

Decision Network: a planning tool for making multiple, linked decisions

Few techniques exist specifically for planning analysis. Commonly used decision techniques focus on different, partial aspects of coordinating decisions. The garbage-can model focuses on the context in which decisions emerge to explain descriptively how organizational choices are made; the strategic choice approach focuses on the relationship between decisions from which rational actions can be taken; and the decision tree focuses on the causal sequence of decisions from which the optimal path of a plan can be derived. Drawing on the theoretical foundation of these three commonly used techniques, we introduce the conceptual framework of a tool for planning analysis, namely Decision Network, that addresses context, relationship, and sequence of decisions, with a numerical example demonstrating how the decision problem can be formulated and solved. Decision Network can be used by decision makers who are faced with more than one decision in order to make plans. Much can be built on this tool to address spatial issues.

A Spatial Garbage-Can Model

In this simulation, based on a spatial garbage-can model, I treat the urban dynamic system as a set of random-walk elements interacting with each other in time. Five elements are considered: decisionmakers, choice opportunities, problems, solutions, and locations. Decisionmakers, problems, and solutions meet in an unpredictable way, are thrown into garbage cans as choice opportunities in certain locations, and something happens. In contrast to most traditional spatial simulation techniques, in which space is global and static, I consider in this simulation locations of facilities as dynamically floating on the stream of opportunities, interacting with other elements. The simulation results imply that the relationship between problems and choice opportunities dominates the outcome of the evolution, whereas the effects of the spatial structure as well as the structures of decision and solution are insignificant. The model may provide useful insights into how urban dynamics evolve.

Bounded optimization of resource allocation among multiple agents using an organizational decision model

Multi-agent System (MAS) can be used to dispose bounded optimization problems with dynamically changing resources because its autonomous distributed management model aspect is fitted to dealing with such external disturbances. One of the problems in multi-agent optimizations is that it is difficult to rigorously define the optimization criteria with respect to the global optimization in advance. Rather, it may depend much on more situated factors such as temporal availability of resources and coexistence of current conflicts, conflicts among what has been already scheduled and what is to be scheduled. In this paper, an organizational model called Garbage Can Model (GCM) is introduced. In GCM, through its three decision-making strategies and the fluidities of problems and resources, solutions made by an individual agent are concerned with several agents that are co-existing in the environment. The problems allocated to each agent are solved not only by an agent's own efforts, but also by the change of problem solving status of other agents. Our simulation experiment shows that GCM is a preferred framework for multi-agent optimization problems in dealing with the above difficulties.

Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada

Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada. By Stuart N. Soroka. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002. 168p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.The literature on agenda setting has gathered momentum in recent years by tapping into garbage-can models, exploring the dynamics of policy subsystems and decision making, and relying on increasingly sophisticated empirical techniques. Stuart Soroka makes two important contributions with this book: First, he develops an integrating framework for the sprawling literature on agenda setting, and second, he attempts to measure and test hypotheses on agenda-setting dynamics in a parliamentary and federal political system.

Policy Framing and Learning the Lessons from the UK's Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis

The 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) epidemic cost over £8 billion and wreaked havoc upon the British countryside. The paper examines the institutional response to the crisis and the subsequent inquiries. Drawing on the ‘garbage-can model’ of organisational choice and ideas of ‘policy framing’, it argues that the institutional response to FMD was tightly focused on agricultural interests. Subsequently, a compartmentalised approach to lesson learning has been partial in its coverage. The result is that important lessons, of a more holistic and integrated nature, have been overlooked despite the replacement of the Ministry of Agriculture with a new Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

So You Want To Get a Tenure-Track Job ….

pared it to the garbage-can model of organizational behavior (Zahariadis 1994). Recent articles in PS have provided some information about the formalities of the job market (Furlong and Furlong 1994; Anagnoson 1994), but were chary on practical advice. Better-informed job applicants will not be able to eliminate the uncertainty of the process, but they can convert it into risk, a more manageable commodity (Knight 1921). There are three problems, however, that hinder the transmission of this information to graduate students. First, there is very little institutional memory within graduate student associations. Those that get jobs leave soon afterward, before the next wave of candidates seriously thinks about the market. Advisors

Foreign Policy Decision Making, Garbage Cans, and Policy Shifts

The organizational process, bureaucratic politics, and presidential management models of U.S. foreign policy decision making have dominated scholarly analysis. However, these models have difficulty explaining major changes in policy. This article modifies the garbage-can model of organizational choice, combining it with the foreign policy decision-making models, to explain policy shifts. If the four streams of policy hypothesized by the garbage-can process are divided into active and passive categories, policy shifts are a two-step process: a catalytic phase in which decision makers decide whether they see an opportunity to change established policy, followed by a connecting phase in which decision makers try to connect policy streams to produce a policy shift. During this second phase, the foreign policy models are most useful. Further study of policy shifts is important in a complex and unstable post-cold-war environment in which policy shifts may be more typical.

From organized anarchy to controlled structure: effects of planning on the garbage-can decision processes

In this paper the effects of planning on complex decisionmaking processes are explored. Planning is defined narrowly here as a comparison of and selection among available related choices. The model used to represent the complex decisionmaking processes is called the garbage-can model and was originally proposed by Cohen et al (1972). Two simulations were conducted. In the first the effects of planning investments on organizational choice behavior were considered. Planning investments were conceived of as the decision time horizons of planning taken into account at a particular time step in making a decision. The second simulation was similar to the first except that a particular type of organization, the land development firm, was used and its decision processes were compared with those of a generic organization. The results suggested that planning increases decisionmaking efficiency but at the cost of resolving fewer problems. The land development firm is not different from the generic organization in te...

Urban County Fiscal Stress

Data obtained from 67% of U.S. urban county governments surveyed in 1988-1989 relate to the meaning of fiscal stress and its causes, forms of stress experienced, and respondent actions taken to alleviate fiscal problems. Stress indicators judged to have the highest validity (debt default and inability to meet payrolls) were rarely evident, yet vulnerability to less severe forms of stress was relatively widespread and not limited to any class of chronically distressed counties. Chief causes of stress were changes in the intergovernmental fiscal system-not structural economic or demographic changes. Responses to stress conformed more to an organizational-political rationality model than to the garbage-can model of decision making.

Exploring the garbage can: A study of information flows

The Garbage Can Model (GCM) has been used to study behavioral aspects of organizations and has been found to be a useful paradigm. In this study, the GCM has been used to study the behavioral implications of informal information systems of business entities. Currently little is known about this issue. As such, hypotheses are developed based upon the empirical findings which may provide a foundation for subsequent research. These hypotheses are: (1) problem senders and problem solvers are paramount in organizational problem identification, (2) both General and Problem type communications are correlated with and might result in Solution identification, (3) both General and Solution related communications are correlated with and might result in Problem identification, and (4) role stress is an important factor in the Problem-General-Solution communication linkage.

Coping with Fiscal Stress

The process by which large cities respond to fiscal stress is analyzed in light of the "garbage-can model" of organizational decision making. The model is informed by the assumption that choices are often ill-defined and ambiguous, resulting in a decision process that is poorly structured. When applied to the fiscal retrenchment process, the expectation is that the selection of various financial management strategies may be difficult to explain. To the extent that coherence exists, it is likely that the process will be executive-dominated. These expectations are generally confined when the retrenchment behavior of a large group of cities is tested within a multivariate framework.