Model Of Organizational Choice Research Articles

Public sector accounting harmonization in the European Union through the lens of the garbage can model

AbstractThe public sector accounting harmonization process that started in the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis led the European Commission to launch a project for the development of a set of European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS). This paper analyses the process and the decision‐making around development of the EPSAS through the lens of the garbage can model (Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25). More specifically, by identifying problems, participants, solutions, and choice opportunities, it discusses why the development of the EPSAS is taking so long and why the process does not seem to be progressing as planned. To this end, documents related to the process of EPSAS development are analyzed. The results provide evidence of problematic preferences and fluid participation possibly coupled with flight decisions—three elements of the garbage can model. Postponing decisions can be an option to dampen reluctance. The more the public sector becomes accustomed to the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) by adopting IPSAS‐like accrual accounting standards while waiting for the completion of the EPSAS, the less resistance there might be to moving to accrual accounting standards. However, at the same time, an imminent change to a new set of EPSAS standards might become less plausible if changes demand extra reform.

The Spread of Ideas in a Network-The Garbage-Can Model.

The main goal of our work is to show how ideas change in social networks. Our analysis is based on three concepts: (i) temporal networks, (ii) the Axelrod model of culture dissemination, (iii) the garbage can model of organizational choice. The use of the concept of temporal networks allows us to show the dynamics of ideas spreading processes in networks, thanks to the analysis of contacts between agents in networks. The Axelrod culture dissemination model allows us to use the importance of cooperative behavior for the dynamics of ideas disseminated in networks. In the third model decisions on solutions of problems are made as an outcome of sequences of pseudorandom numbers. The origin of this model is the Herbert Simon’s view on bounded rationality. In the Axelrod model, ideas are conveyed by strings of symbols. The outcome of the model should be the diversity of evolving ideas as dependent on the chain length, on the number of possible values of symbols and on the threshold value of Hamming distance which enables the combination.

The Strategic Garbage Can

Cohen, March and Olsen’s Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice is generally thought to describe organizations characterized by extremely distributed decision processes, to the point that their members can at most hope to exploit serendipitous opportunity windows that eventually appear on the scene. By analyzing a little-known report on American college presidents published by Cohen and March in 1974 we show that garbage cans were meant also as a tool to neutralize opponents by making them busy with irrelevant issues. We analyze the strategic usage of garbage cans and discuss this concept within the scholarly and the business literature.

Emergence of Organizations out of Garbage Can Dynamics

This paper derives an ecology of organizations out of the rules of Cohen, March and Olsen's Garbage Can Model of organizational choice. We show that the dynamics of organizational mortality implied by the model is broadly consistent with the results reported by empirical studies.

Cities of Noise: Sensemaking, Sensemakers, and Organized WorldsThe Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Kundera Milan. (Translated from the French by Linda Asher.) New York: HarperCollins, 2007.The Man Without Qualities, by Musil Robert. (Translated from the German by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.Invisible Cities, by Calvino Italo. (Translated from the Italian by William

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech author Milan Kundera suggests that a novel is “an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”. Novels are, indeed, arguably the most subtle tool of ontological inquiry, insightful meditations on how individuals, faced with questions and enigmas related to human existence, make sense of their ‘being in the world.’ (Heidegger, 1962). I have always admired the mastery with which great novelists are able to dissect and convey the most intricate aspects of human situations through their characters and plots. Novelists’ investigations are typically triggered by twists and turns that generate disturbance in the status quo and call for interpretations on the part of the characters involved. I refer to this disturbance as ‘noise’. In this essay, I shall comment on a tale of three cities that share the attribute of noise and are depicted in literary works by Milan Kundera, Robert Musil and Italo Calvino. I shall use this tale to develop considerations that are relevant to the world of organizations, and I shall also highlight some ways in which organizational scholars can learn from novelists.

Small Addition to the 'Garbage Can Model: Reconstruction and Logical Analysis'

For efficient operation of the collective decision making system, described by garbage can model (Cohen M., March J., Olsen J., 1972. A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice), the structure of the access problems and managers to the choices is crucial. The logic of the system is studied and developed a scheme that allows for arbitrary even N to get the probability distribution of the number of resolved problems and the types of decisions. For the case of arbitrary dimension of decision-making system and the three types of structures: 1) specialized access structure with specialized decision structure 2) unsegmented access structure with specialized decision structure 3) specialized access structure with unsegmented decision structure, in different types of energy load, an analytical solution: set the maximum number of problems that can be solved and obtained the probability distribution of outcomes.A comparison of the effectiveness of the system for four border options for the organizational structure: the one previously studied, and the three discussed in the article. The examples of the probability distribution of outcomes in the system dimension is ten, which is the subject of a number of studies that reconstruct the original model code and verified the results. The correspondence complexity of problems types of organizational structure, in which the decision-making system works most effectively.The work is a continuation of the previously published working paper “Garbage Can Model: Reconstruction and Logical Analysis” (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2490388).

Book Review: Alessandro Lomi and J. Richard Harrison (Eds.) Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 36: The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty

Book Review: Alessandro Lomi and J. Richard Harrison (Eds.) <i>Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 36: The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty</i>

Bailing outsourcing

In a model of organizational choice, this paper shows that in face of an increasingly expected bailout from the government, outsourcing input production to an offshore location is more likely an optimal choice for a firm. Such a response is consistent with the three trends in the US manufacturing sector after the crisis: (a) employment keeps declining; (b) massive layoffs have not stopped; and (c) imported intermediate inputs have been gaining importance.

Alessandro Lomi and J. Richard Harrison, eds.: Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 36: The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty

The article reviews the book Research in the Sociology of Organizations: The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty, Vol. 36, edited by Alessandro Lomi and J. Richard Harrison.

Sorting through the garbage can: under what conditions do governments adopt policy programs?

The paper aims at explaining the adoption of policy programs. We use the garbage can model of organizational choice as our theoretical framework and complement it with the institutional setting of administrative decision-making in order to understand the complex causation of policy program adoption. Institutions distribute decision power by rules and routines and coin actor identities and their interpretations of situations. We therefore expect institutions to play a role when a policy window opens. We explore the configurative explanations for program adoption in a systematic comparison of the adoption of new alcohol policy programs in the Swiss cantons employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The most important conditions are the organizational elements of the administrative structure decisive for the coupling of the streams. The results imply that classic bureaucratic structures are better suited to put policies into practice than limited government.

Passing the buck in the garbage can model of organizational choice

We reconstruct Cohen, March and Olsen's Garbage Can model of organizational choice as an agent-based model. In the original model, the members of an organization can postpone decision-making. We add another means for avoiding making decisions, that of buck-passing difficult problems to colleagues. We find that selfish individual behavior, such as postponing decision-making and buck-passing, does not necessarily imply dysfunctional consequences for an organization. The simulation experiments confirm and extend some of the most interesting conclusions of the Garbage Can model: Most decisions are made without solving any problem, organization members face the same old problems again and again, and the few problems that are solved are generally handled at low hierarchical levels. These findings have an implication that was overseen in the original model, namely, that top executives need not be good problem-solvers.

Passing the Buck in the Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice

We reconstruct Cohen, March and Olsen's Garbage Can model of organizational choice as an agent-based model. In the original model, the members of an organization can postpone decision-making. We add another means for avoiding making decisions, that of buck-passing difficult problems to colleagues. We find that selfish individual behavior, such as postponing decision-making and buck-passing, does not necessarily imply dysfunctional consequences for the organizational level.The simulation experiments confirm and extend some of the most interesting conclusions of the Garbage Can model: Most decisions are made without solving any problem, organization members face the same old problems again and again, and the few problems that are solved are generally handled at low hierarchical levels. These findings have an implication that was overseen in the original model, namely, that top executives need not be good problem-solvers.

The garbage can model of organizational choice: An agent-based reconstruction

We reconstruct Cohen, March and Olsen’s original Garbage Can model of organizational choice as a multi-agent system. We show that while some of the original results might be viewed as artifacts of particular modeling choices, the basic insights of the original model are confirmed over a wide range of experimental conditions. The simulation experiments confirm and extend some of the most interesting conclusions of the Garbage Can model: most decisions are made without solving any problem, the few problems that are solved generally pertain to the lower hierarchical levels and, consequently, the members of an organization encounter the same old problems again and again.

The Impact of Women in Congress

The Impact of Women in Congress. By Debra L. Dodson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 295p. 29.95 paper.This book provides an important contribution to the emerging literature on the impact of women legislators, particularly women in Congress. Following in the tradition of Sue Thomas (How Women Legislate, 1994), Cindy Simon Rosenthal (Women Transforming Congress, 2002), and Michelle Swers (The Difference Women Make, 2002), Debra Dodson explores the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women. Using a modified garbage can model (Michael Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olson, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly 17 [1972]: 1–25) as her theoretical framework (p 32–33), Dodson argues that this relationship will be probabilistic rather than deterministic. Her study asks the question: What factors mediate the relationship between the presence of more women in Congress and enactment of policies supporting women's issues?

Reconciling garbage cans and rational actors: Explaining organizational decisions about environmental hazard management

This paper argues that the garbage can model of organizational choice is an accurate description of organizational decision making for complex problems, but that the rational choice decision making model still applies to decisions of low and high importance. Choice situations in general are sensitive to variation in bureaucratic procedure and interest group attention. Decision importance, however, functions as an exogenous constraint on process-based explanations of observed organizational behavior. Importance is defined in terms of causal complexity and attention. For low importance decisions, causal complexity is low and so decision rules are relatively easy to apply. For high importance decisions, attendance is high and so adherence to formal policy is more likely. It is in the middle importance decisions, where causal complexity is sufficient to require interpretation of decision rules, and attention scarce enough that random groups or processes can dominate decision making, that consistent decision making is most severely constrained. These ideas are tested and confirmed in analysis of Environmental Protection Agency decisions for hazardous waste management at Superfund sites. The findings show that variation in the decision making process and variation in interest group participation are significant to explaining priorities. More specifically, decision importance has a U-shaped relationship with priorities, indicating that formal decision rules apply more in low and high importance decisions.

Making the Library Management Systems Acquisition: Achieving Resolution of a Tough Decision

At some point in their careers, library administrators will likely be involved in the acquisition of a new library automation system. Whether it is a first-time acquisition or a migration from old to new, the decision is perhaps the most challenging the administrator will ever have to make. Despite an abundance of information in the library literature on the mechanical and managerial aspects of acquiring a new automated system, there is scant information on, or investigation into, the decision-making process that leads to the selection of an automation vendor. Based on the premise that the automation decision is both complex and risky, it is a decision fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict. This study offers exploratory research on the automation decision process and those factors that lead to decision difficulty. Using the Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice as a theoretical framework, this study uses decision resolution as a criterion of decision success. Based on research to identify factors that have enabled decision makers to achieve resolution, the authors of this study seek to make recommendations that will enable administrators to better manage a tough decision.

A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice

Organized anarchies are organizations characterized by problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation. Recent studies of universities, a familiar form of organized anarchy, suggest that such organizations can be viewed for some purposes as collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work. These ideas are translated into an explicit computer simulation model of a garbage can decision process. The general implications of such a model are described in terms of five major measures on the process. Possible applications of the model to more narrow predictions are illustrated by an examination of the model's predictions with respect to the effect of adversity on university decision making.