This book reports the result of a project March and Olsen conducted on decision-making in educational organizations. The main purpose of the project is “an attempt to understand how organizations deal with ambiguity — goals that are unclear, technologies that are imperfectly understood, histories that are difficult to interpret, and participants who wander in and out” (p. 8). Such situations, called “organized anarchies”, are becoming more and more common in the increasingly complex world.
Selected Editorial Reviews
The achievement of the book as a whole consists of the many important qualifications and corrective perspectives it provides for traditional models and theories of decision-making, and it should therefore be healthy reading not only for organizational theorists, but also for economists, statisticians and business administrators.
Runo Axelsson, University of Bradford