|
Dear EGOSians,
Dear James March,
It is a great privilege and pleasure for me to introduce James G.
March to all you EGOSians. As Jim is well known to all organization
researchers, there is really no need to introduce him so I could
stop at this point. The consequences would probably be unimportant,
but such behaviour wuld certainly be inappropriate.
The EGOS board's nomination of you, Jim, as an EGOS Honorary
Member is based on two main premises: your seminal contributions to
organization theory and your enduring support in the development of
the European organization research community. At the beginning of
your very active retirement, this EGOS colloquium in Finland, in the
year 2000 is, we think, the right place and time to honour you.
I.
From your early years at Carnigie Institute of Technology you
have produced important contributions to organization theory.
Classics such as Organizations (with Herbert Simon, 1958),
A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (with Richard Cyert, 1963)
and Handbook of Organizations (1965) have deeply influenced
organization research. The more recent A Primer on Decision
Making (1994) sums up many years of reflection on decision
making, and is invaluable for the new generations of scholars.
I do not dare to engage in an overview or interpretation of your
complete works. The Pursuit of Organizational Intelligence
from 1999 and the forthcoming The Dynamics of Rules clearly
show that you still have much to add to your list of works.
Colleagues are working on more comprehensive interpretations of your
intellectual work (cf Augier, 1999) and, in forewords to some of the
later editions of your 'classics', have offered your own reflections
on your major ideas. Therefore, I will not attempt to engage in a
comprehensive interpretation of your research. A brief, biased, and
basically 'Finn'ish' reading of parts of your works will have to
suffice.
Around 1965, as a novice embarking on the study of organization
theory, I was happy having to struggle with books such as
Organizations and A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. When I
graduated, Handbook of Organizations was among my presents.
I dwell on these early contributions, because they were crucial in
giving focus and direction to the emerging 'organization theory'.
Decision behaviour and organizational action were
selected as the core issues. Organization theory was oriented
towards empirical investigation and model building based on actor
behaviour, rather than on abstract, formalized model construction.
You have avoided the path that would 'freeze' organization theory
into an infertile modelling of those aspects of organizational
behaviour/decision making that can most easily be grasped. You have
persistently pursued a different route – which you have been trying
to tease us into following – one which liberates and enriches our
theoretical field by contesting the premises upon which we base our
models and understandings of what is going on in organizations. Thus,
in your own practice, you have been trying to navigate between
exploration and exploitation. You have been trying to prevent
us, as organization theorists, from ending up in a competence
trap, whereby, although we may become very apt at conducting
analyses and building models, these may be neither very relevant,
nor innovative.
Two main examples of your continued efforts to push the frontiers
of our knowledge illustrate this:
The Conception of Organization
Organizational actors do not pursue one objective, nor do they agree
about the objectives. Participants are induced to make contributions
to the organization based on much more individually bound
calculations. Organizational units are oriented towards different
objectives and decision processes are infused with politics. 'Firms
can be seen as coalitions of multiple, conflicting interests
using standard rules and procedures to operate under conditions of
bounded rationality' (1992: xi–xii).
Organizations are more than stable, compartmentalized decision
making units. They are arenas for decision making where flows of
problems, solutions and actors are brought together for decision
making. How this is done may be more or less stable and predictable.
Ambiguity, chance, opportunity and actors' attention and allocation
of energy may play important roles (1988). The garbage-can model
of choice allows us to understand decisions in a wide range of
organizations, from bureaucracies to organized anarchies, such as
our beloved universities and business schools, by tightening and
relaxing the assumptions about the factors that are brought together
within the model's parameters.
The Conception of the Decision Making Process
A rational or bounded rational actor scheme cannot grasp the
important behavioural aspects of decision making processes. By
engaging in decision making processes, we not only pursue but also
discover goals and shape our preferences. Our collection of
information not only precedes the decision, but may even become
intensified after the decision has been made. We seek legitimization
and confirmation. There is an alternative decision logic to that of
consequential choice. The logic of appropriateness and
rule-following points towards decisions as being much more closely
linked to our interpretation of situation, identity and norms. As
Don Quixote – one of our favourite characters - interprets
situations from the perspective of a knight whose task it is to come
to the rescue of ladies threatened by monsters. Windmills turn into
monsters and not completely fair maidens become ladies.
Constructivist ideas gain importance in a theoretical universe
previously dominated by Sancho Panza realism.
Those lines of investigation have led you to broaden both your
and our interests from decision making to the individual and
organizational pursuit of intelligence, thereby shifting emphasis to
learning – from others as well as from our own experiences – and
making history important. The encoding of pst experiences into
organizational routines and rules is a core process in
organizational learning. Organizational adaptation, not only
day-to-day, but in the long run, becomes of vital concern. For years
– it was a great experience to hear you lecture on this topic in
1998 – you have been preoccupied wit the risk that business schools
and university departments would become too concerned with relevance,
at the expense of generating fundamental knowledge. 'Both the
generation of new ideas and persistence with them are encouraged by
long future time horizons. These, in turn, are facilitated
by conceptions of a long past connected to a long future by a sense
of continuity and progress' – to cite your conclusion in a
recent article (1999: 80).
II.
For me, this statement reflects not only a theoretically derived
conclusion, but is also a codification of your style as a leader,
mentor and colleagues for many members of the international
community of organization researchers.
Intertwined with, and inseparable from, your theoretical
development, for decades you have engaged in co-operation with
European scholars, and have patiently supported the development of
European organization research by bridging European and American
organization analysis.
This is reflected in several publications co-authored with, or
with contributions from, European researchers. Among these, I will
only mentioned the vintage anthology Ambiguity and Choice in
Organizations (1976, co-edited with Johan P. Olsen) and a more
recent, and widely cited, book Rediscovering Institutions
(1989, co-authored with Johan P. Olsen). More publications could
also be mentioned to substantiate your long-term collaboration with
European researchers, but I must confess, I have not read them all.
Furthermore, throughout your busy career you have received with
great hospitality and given support to an impressive number of both
young and senior European researchers. Since 1989, the exchange of
ideas with Scandinavian countries has been formalized in the
Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR) with
you as the 'founding father' and animator of a decade of research at
the SCANCOR research centre at Stanford University. During those
years you profoundly inspired the two hundred or so scholar from
Scandinavia who stayed at SCANCOR for longer or shorter periods.
However, your intensive contacts with the Scandinavian countries
have not prevented you from extending your network and support to
embrace researchers from all over Europe.
Finn Borum
Copenhagen Business School
Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology
|
