Decision Premises Research Articles

A new opera house: combining entrepreneurship, garbage can features and windows of opportunity

This study looks at the decision-making that culminated in the building of a new opera house in Oslo. The decision was finally taken in 1999 and the new opera house was finished in 2008. To analyse the decision-making process we use a ‘revised garbage can model’, as presented by Kingdon, which combines the concept of political entrepreneurship through instrumental coalition-building with garbage can features. The winning coalition included actors from parliament and local government but also local private business interests, and it succeeded because it managed to capitalize on a window of opportunity opened by other actors. The main reasons for this were that the opera project was temporarily decoupled from a large road-building project and managed to bring on board interests connected to a more extensive city development in Oslo's inner east city. The relative weakness of the cultural arguments for building an new opera house were evident during the whole process, making the decision to build it a side effect or spin-off from other concerns and interests. The study, which is a single embedded case, is based on a wide range of public documents, interviews and newspaper articles. Points for practitioners Decisions on major public projects may not follow a strict rational trajectory because of imbalances between sectors, side effects and coalition features. This means that ‘weak sectors’ may either accept decision premises from other sectors or engage in coalitions with them to get large projects decided on. The broader actors are able to anchor such large projects, i.e. the more different interests they can fulfil, the larger probability of reaching a decision on them. Such a pragmatic approach may be both crucial in realizing the projects at all and also move the projects away from the original ideas behind them.

Autopietic decisions approach: a governance research network case study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the autopoietic decisions approach (<Greek: autos=self, poiein=to produce) means self-(re)production and to know the constitution of the governance in the organization of a research network. Design/methodology/approach – The approach selected was Luhmann's Social System Theory, an autopoietic decisions system. A historical case study was reconstructed in which information was recollected by in-depth interviews and a survey. The network results, the extensive communications submitted by the members of two network congresses (2006 and 2010) were analyzed by networks analysis techniques. Findings – The approach and model developed were useful to identify the decision premises, which have been the constitutional structure of the research network. Practical implications – Development of a governance approach useful to a research network organization which retro-feeds the quality movement guidelines. Originality/value – The quality movement proposes a systematic regulatory approach, via the ISO9000 standard family. This approach has not sufficed for institutions of higher education. One of the reasons is that it favors the “management of things” from a processes standpoint, which conforms to the General Systems Theory. However, the core of higher education is not “things” but rather the “people” participating in it – particularly professors, students, and the university community – who are participating in the creation, teaching, association, and diffusion of knowledge. The unsolved problem refers to governance.

Distributed expertise and instructions

Purpose – The idea of Simon according to which instructions are premises for further decisions is formalized with respect to informationally decentralized organizations. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is built on the economic theory of teams by Marschak and Radner. Team theory is particularly suited to the analysis of informationally decentralized systems. Teams are composed of agents who strive for a common aim, but are informed of different parameters that characterize the state of nature. In particular, the members want to maximize the team payoff function that depends on both the actions of the members and the state of nature. Findings – For teams à la Marshack-Radner, since every member needs to compute optimal action rules, the paper shows that two types of expertise are required: forecasting expertise (as competence over the randomness of the parameters that affect the team payoff function) and organizational expertise (as comprehension of the relevant characteristics of the other members). When the members are supposed to have complete expertise, the only role of orders is the communication of information about the state of nature. Instead, when instructions report actions under the control of the senders, the team population can be classified into ranks, each one having a particular computational problem to solve. The paper analyzes the conditions under which instructions can correspond to different and ordered degree of intelligibility of the team operations. Through instructions non-decodable information is built directly into the decision rules chosen by the receivers, and instructions can realize economies in the use of expertise. Originality/value – Instructions are formally shown to play a crucial role when expertise is differently distributed across agents.

George Washington’s Precedents

As the founding president of a new republic, which he called an “experiment” in government, George Washington was keenly aware of the importance of “precedents” in shaping “institutions.” Following the recommendation of Herbert Simon (1947) who believed that administrative theory should be based on identifying decision premises, this study identifies premises, stated as propositions, which guided Washington in what he called his “public administration” for a new nation. These propositions comprise a coherent theoretical framework, based on Enlightenment thinking and values, for studying and practicing public administration.

Le management de l'oubli dans la conduite des organisations

Cet article propose un modèle d’oubli organisationnel. Il est basé sur une analyse de la littérature et s’appuie sur des travaux empiriques auxquels les auteurs ont été associés. Trois cas d’entreprises nourrissent notre réflexion. Le modèle proposé suggère que l’oubli relève d’un phénomène qui ne peut être dissocié de l’apprentissage. Il incite à revisiter le modèle d’Action-Sélection-Rétention, largement diffusé dans la littérature, en précisant le phénomène de construction des prémisses qui vont guider l’action et en mettant en évidence des éléments d’actions stratégiques influençant l’oubli. Par apprentissage, des prémisses de décision sont activées ou désactivées et l’équilibre entre les deux définit ce qui peut être oublié.

Environmental Integration and Policy Implementation: Competing Governance Modes in Waste Management Decision Making

Research into environmental policy integration (EPI) has focused very much on coordination issues associated with the preparation of policies at national and international levels. We instead examine some challenges in implementing EPI at the local level. We look at legal and policy frameworks relating to environmental governance and actual waste management decision making in five Swedish cities. We observe an implementation gap between the high-level policy ambitions relating to environmental governance of the waste sector, as expressed in national policy frameworks, and the local-level decision-making procedures and outcomes. Several discrepancies are identified: between national waste policy and the local decision premises, between local waste planning and project decision making, between knowledge gathering and project decision making, and between the legal mechanism in the development consent process and the national environmental quality objectives framework. Our study indicates that the governance frameworks at different levels are quite different, and at least partly incompatible, which causes important coordination problems across levels. Sectoral developments towards an industrial marketisation of waste have rendered frameworks such as local waste plans obsolete. We also find that the more traditional and coercive forms of governing the sector, such as consent, bans, and taxes, are the ones that have steering power, whereas new procedures, such as management by objectives, lack sufficient institutional and cognitive support structures to be effective.

Several Simple Shared Stable Decision Premises for Technochange

This study explores decision premises that were used to manage and stabilise a complex technochange programme in a financial institution. Decision premises were extracted from business maxims, principles and rules using linguistic techniques. In the paper, the premises are juxtaposed with their consequences. The evidence of documents, observable practices and software configurations supports the analysis. It is found that decision premises form a hierarchical, self-causal as well as self-contradictory system of reasoning that was applied over any individual situation, particularly a conflict. By virtue of being several but not many, decision premises reinforce the 80-20 rule of many consequences stemming a few causes. In the case firm, decision premises were used in order to make technochange efficient as well as institute cost-saving and business ownership of software development. But there were drawbacks of intensified politics, software development delays, short-sighted capability decisions and work fragmentation for the front-line employees.

Contrasting Perspectives of Strategy Making: Applications in ‘Hyper’ Environments

We revisit the original meaning of turbulence in the socioecological tradition of organization studies and outline a perspective on strategy making grounded in that tradition. This entails a contrast of the socioecological perspective with the more well-known neoclassical perspective on strategy, based on their core decision premises and their different understandings of environmental turbulence. We argue that while some mainstream strategy approaches have taken important strides toward addressing advanced turbulence, many others remain tethered to the neoclassical origins of the strategy discipline and are insufficiently responsive to the new landscape of strategy that now characterizes many industries. This new landscape is construed as the ‘hyper environment’, in which positive feedback processes and emergent field effects produce high volatility. We use two case illustrations from the US healthcare sector to examine how neoclassical and socioecological perspectives contribute to strategizing in hyper environments. Implications for strategic management theory and practice flow from this analysis.

A Role for Instructions

The paper is concerned with instructions as a way of setting premises for subsequent decisions in models of teams a la Marschak-Radner, under information diversification. The paper suggests that instructions can bridge people’s differences in knowledge: they do not require mutual understanding between the sender and the receiver as other forms of communication do. In particular, the knowledge of both the team payoff function and the team organisation can be ordered according to hierarchical ranks. First, the paper shows the equivalence between commands and communication in Marschak and Radner (1972). Second, it derives the requirements in terms of knowledge of the members that follow from given structures of task assignment, information diversification and message flows. Hierarchical ranks are shown to correspond to different degrees of intelligibility of the members with respect to the team operations.

Decision Premises and their Implications for Developing Decision-Making Expertise

The problem and the solution. Decision making is a complex phenomenon, even when studied in relative isolation. Decisionmaker premises that influence the decision-making process are not fully understood. One solution for gaining further understanding of actual decision making in practice could be through longitudinal case studies of actual decision makers. This report is from a 4-year case study of a small business owner's decision making within the two core realms of his work-business operations and technical production. New insights about decision premises being both mediators and constraints in the process were revealed.

Mental Models in Decision Making and Implications for Human Resource Development

The problem and the solution. Humans constantly construct mental models of reality, which include their assumptions, beliefs, experiences, and biases about the world. In fact, humans construct mental models of reality often without an awareness of it. In decision making, mental models include an individual's perception of a situation, variables in the system, alternative solutions, decision premises, and biases. Because mental models reflect the decision structure and are difficult to understand on a concrete level, this article aims to illustrate the influence of mental models on decision-making processes and, more important, how they can be made explicit and altered. In addition, this article suggests that working with mental models can be viewed as a developmental process and thus is within the domain of human resource development expertise.

Improving decision-making with scenario planning

Decision makers struggle with four important contributors to decision failure, namely, 1) bounded rationality, 2) a tendency to consider only external variables, 3) the stickiness and friction of information and knowledge, and 4) mental models that include decision premises or policies. Whether independent or combined, these decision problems can form the ultimate in decision error—folly. The four problems in decision-making are reviewed in detail and scenario planning is posited as a tool for preventing the impact of each, ultimately with an aim of avoiding folly.

Decision Premises, Institutions and Organisation

In formal reasoning, premises are decisive; but most economists are reluctant to treat them as problematic, either for analysts or economic agents. After illustrating the significance of alternative premises for economic theory, we explore the implications of Knightian uncertainty and cognitive limitations for the formation and co-ordination of decision premises as well as the development of dispersed and asymmetric knowledge. Institutions help people to frame decision spaces while facilitating knowledge-sharing; and formal organisation promotes investment in decision-making systems and the development of organisation-specific institutions. A discussion of authority, trust and strategy concludes.

Decision premises, decision cycles and decomposition

This paper deals with firms as both users and generators of productive knowledge and decision-making skills. Human cognitive powers and human knowledge are often insufficient for the formal logic of choice, but well adapted to pattern making and pattern matching; shared patterns are part of organizational and social capital. From problem identification to the review of outcomes, decision processes are guided by decision premises, and complexity is decomposed by fallible organizational design; thus cognitive repertoires develop (and sometimes deteriorate) over time.

The Role of Negotiated Belief Structures in Strategy Making

This article introduces the concept of a negotiated belief structure to help analyze how political and information-processing forces work to create decision premises within a strategy-making group. Negotiated belief structures are defined as the beliefs or assumptions that underscore a strategic decision, the enacted beliefs or assumptions that reflect the politics of decision-making. Negotiated belief structures may be limited, contested, contextual, or dialectical in nature. These types of belief structures and their implications for strategic decision making are discussed and a prescription for managing the strategymaking process is suggested.

The Values of Public Administrators: a Comparison With Lawyers, Social Workers, and Business Administrators

This pilot study compares the professional values of public administration students and alumni with a similar group of social workers, business administrators, and lawyers. It reflects the belief that professional values and value patterns strongly influence the way that professionals define and resolve problems. The authors hypothesized that value differences would be found among the four groups surveyed and that the public administrators would hold a distinctive value pattern. They constructed a questionnaire containing value scales plus a small number of demographic items which were administered to the members of the four groups. A factor analysis of the Professional Value Scale was conducted. Examination of this analysis revealed significant differences between members of the four groups in their value preferences. On the basis of their study, the authors conclude that the value conflicts and ambiguities found suggest significant underlying differences in the decision premises of the professional groups surveyed.

The Use of Social Science in a Norwegian Ministry: As a Tool of Policy or Mode of Thinking?

Both producers and users of social science tend to think of it as an instrument ; perspectives and results from science forming direct premises for policy decisions The article summarizes a study of how research contributions in specific fields of transport research are used in the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communication. Despite institutional closeness and cultural similarities between research community and user community, we found that much direct use is unusual. The subject matters of social science, although frequently posed as social problems, may in effect constitute social conflicts, and as such cannot be solved by knowledge and information alone. The use of social science in the conceptualization process and as political ammunition is, however, important enough. The article points out obstacles to such use, primarily in the organizational structure of the Ministry.

Some considerations in selecting interactive and analytical decision approaches for EMS councils.

The application of analytical and interactive decision models to decisions, in EMS councils, with various levels of uncertainty is described. Uncertainty is defined as having temporal, procedural, quantifiability, and environmental attributes. Highly uncertain decisions are unique, with unknown decision procedures. Decision premises, like available funds or demands for services, are constantly shifting in uncertain environments. Low uncertainty occurs when decisions are repeatable and follow known procedures. Past practice can be used as templates when uncertainty is "low" because funding levels and use rates are predictable. The results (e.g., validity, risk of omission, etc.) of applying interactive and analytical decision models under varying levels of uncertainty are discussed.

Polity and Decision Premises: The Church and the Private School

C onsiderable evidence suggests that religious denominations' formal (traditional) polity structures, i.e., congregational, presbyterian, and episcopal patterns, persist in influencing internal control and other structural processes of contemporary denominations (e.g., see Harrison, 1959; Gustafson, 1963; Newman, 1970; Wood, 1970; Takayama, 1974 and 1975). Because denominations' formal polities embody traditional ethos and symbols, as well as the theological underpinnings of their respective polities, polity differences significantly influence the way in which informal and bureaucratic power structures and the environment affect internal control in denominations (Takayama, 1975:17)1 This paper reports results of a study based on and extending the previous research into the relatively neglected area of political actions of local churches. The subject under study was local churches' policy decisions to open new church-related private schools in response to court-ordered busing for racial integration in the public schools. More specifically, the role of church polity in influencing decisions of local churches to begin schools at that particular time was examined. It was expected

Organizational Archetypes of a Multi-National Company

Decision premises, within which plans are made, should be formulated with an eye to the organization that will implement the results. This assertion seems especially relevant for multi-national companies which consist of a headquarters with subsidiaries around the globe. Four archetypes of the relationship between a headquarters and its subsidiaries are presented. These are based on theory developed by Leavitt (executive-workers), and Churchman and Schainblatt (analyst-manager). Each archetype is developed by using existing literature to explore patterns of bounded rationality that would emerge in different organizational structures. After an example of a corporation illustrative of the archetype, appropriate planning guidelines are presented for investment discount rates, pricing policy, product design, planned managerial rotation, and liquid asset management.