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The administrative state is situated in a physical and ecological context that requires a conceptualisation of rationality broader than the instrumental rationality that characterizes most administrative theorising. Various scholars have contributed to clarifying some aspects of the needed broader conceptualisation, particularly with respect to focuses (system, substance, procedure) and form (social, legal, political, and ecological). But unlike the classical Aristotelian conception of rationality, the goal‐blindness of contemporary rationality still distinguishes it from reasonableness. Rawls and Habermas suggest the recoupling of reasonableness and rationality through political discourse and pursuit of social action that requires reasoning about ends as well as means. The opportunities for deliberative democracy and for furthering environmental justice provided by environmental impact assessment illustrate how rationality, justice, and ecological sustainability can be integrated by breaking down distinctions between decision‐making processes and the substance of decisions. Administration can thus move beyond proverbs to proceed on the realization that the only ecologically rational organization is a broadly reasonable one.

Many decision rules are rational but opaque, and many others are irrational but transparent. This paper aims to propose a theoretical framework to operationalize opacity in decision-making – the degree to which a decision rule is intelligible to the decision maker.

The authors operationalize opacity and discuss the implication of opaque decision-making in organizational settings through a typology, where decision rules can be rational or irrational and opaque or transparent.

The authors show that opacity is asymmetric as different organizational actors possess different degrees of knowledge about how the decision rules work. Organizational actors often opacify the decision rules to increase their power (based on asymmetric knowledge). Opacity also presents a significant impact on organizational accountability, as transparent organizations are more reputable.

This contribution represents the first theoretical and methodological articulation of opacity in decision-making, within a bounded and ecological rationality framework; it also sheds new light on the role of cognitive biases in organizational settings.

This paper aims to investigate the performances of decision-making process of emergency department’s nurses involved in the triage level assessment.

The authors developed a case study in two public hospitals in the South of Italy. The authors administered 25 clinical cases to nurses responsible of priority code assignment in the triage station. The authors simulated the attribution of the priority levels, and through a semi-structured questionnaire, the authors collected data and information about the cognitive process adopted for the final choice.

The quantitative and qualitative data allowed the authors to verify that there is an impact of the organizational context on heuristics used in the decision-making process.

The research limitations are that empirical data have been collected only in two emergency departments.

The practical implications of this paper are that organizations for improving business performances must consider the judgements are often the results of heuristics embedded in a specific structure of social and physical environment, according with the “ecological view” of rationality.

The authors’ methodological approach contributes to analyze the performances of the triage process, verifying if the eventual errors are linked to individual or organizational factors, but above all how organizational constraints influence decision-making processes in organizations and, consequently, business performances.

This research uses the social science perspectives of institutions, ecological modernization and social movements to analyze the rationale used by the early-adopting universities of fossil fuel divestment in the USA.

Through analysis of qualitative data from interviews with key actors at the universities that divested their endowments from fossil fuels, the paper examines how institutions navigate competing logics and frame their rationale.

The results show that while many institutions relied on ecological values embedded in their missions to justify their decision to divest, many also continued to embrace an altered version of market logic.

This research is primarily limited by its small population size. If the number of adoptees increases in the future, quantitative analysis should look for statistically robust trends.

The implications of this research are that we can expect more universities to commit to divesting from fossil fuels if their mission statements provide them with cultural material to rationalize the decision, but also expect them to couch the decision in continued goals and concerns for fiduciary responsibility and the subsequent growth of their endowment.

Social actors engaged in the fossil fuel divestment campaign may take this research and conclude that they need to build their arguments around the existing institutional logics and cultural identity.

This paper contributes original primary data documenting how institutional actors confront dominant logics using both a mixture of internal cultural identity and the reframing of the legitimated market logics.

This study aims to focus on the analysis of the internal mechanism of farmers’ ecological cognition and the behaviour of Grain for Green Project (GGP), and the further relationship between ecological cognition and ecological aspiration, proposing climate change strategies and management from the perspective of farmers.

Theory of planned behaviour and social exchange theory were used to construct a theoretical framework and an ecological cognition under the influence of external factors, the aspiration and the behaviour of GGP, using ecological fragile areas in Bazhou and Changji, Xinjiang of 618 peasant households’ survey data. The structural equation model and Heckman two-step model were applied to analyse the relationship between ecological cognition and ecological aspiration of farmers, the impact of peasant households’ ecological cognition and aspiration to the behaviour of GGP and the influence factors of GGP behaviour.

This research’s results show that the three characterizations of ecological cognitive variables, attitude towards the behaviour (AB), subjective norms (SN) and perceived behaviour control (PBC), have significant positive impact on farmers’ GGP ecological aspiration. The comprehensive impact path coefficients of ecological cognition are PBC (0.498) > SN (0.223) > AB (0.177). Also, income change is a moderating variable, which has a significant moderating effect on the influence of AB and SN on ecological aspiration. Further, farmers’ ecological cognition has an influence on the behaviour of GGP, and the change of farmers’ income has a significant positive effect on farmers’ choice of returning farmland to forests.

The ecological protection policy suggestions and countermeasures can be drawn from the research conclusions, adapted to China’s ecologically fragile regions and even similar regions in the world to response the climate change.

Combining the theory of planning behaviour and social exchange, this paper empirically analyses the path of farmers’ ecological cognition and ecological aspiration, as well as the influencing factors.

The role of personal value systems as antecedents to risk has been largely ignored. Following Gigerenzer's view of ecological rationality, the authors argue an individual's personal value system serves as concrete motivations that guide risky choices and facilitate adaptation to one's environment.

The authors elicit risk attitudes using a satisficing-based risk elicitation method that exploits the idea of worst-case aspiration or minimum portfolio returns given a portfolio comprising a safe and risky prospect. The elicited worst-case aspiration allows for more descriptive and natural ways of characterizing attitudes to risk (i.e. satisficing measures of risk). Using the Schwartz Value Survey, the authors assess the relative importance individuals place on value systems, such as personal focus versus social focus. The authors argue that preference to value systems has linkages with the worst-case aspiration setting emphasized in the satisficing task.

This study’s findings suggest that individuals who are willing to give up higher potential returns to protect their downside risk (by setting higher worst-case aspiration) are positively associated with personal focus—concern about own outcomes than social focus—concern about the outcomes for others or established institutions.

Currently, the study’s setting is in the domain of financial decision-making. Going forward, milestones could be set for studying risky real-world choices by simply changing the risk measure in different contexts, such as job choices, education, health and social interactions.

This study contributes to the discussion on the psychometric structure of risk. Prescriptive benefits of satisficing as a positive heuristic, which is interpreted as setting achievable goals or aspiration levels, are extensive and recognized in various industries ranging from agriculture, airlines, insurance to financial advising. More recently, cognitive processes, such as emotions and personal value systems, are recognized as a type of social cognition that subserve heuristic functions that can guide behavior quickly and accurately.

This paper examines the relationship between marketing automation emergence and the marketers' use of heuristics in their decision-making processes. Heuristics play a role for the integration of human decision-making models and automation in augmentation processes, particularly in marketing where automation is widespread.

This study analyzes qualitative data about the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics in decision-making models, and it is based on evidence collected from interviews with twenty-two experienced marketers.

Marketers make extensive use of heuristics to manage their tasks. While the adoption of new automatic marketing tools modify the task environment and field of use of traditional decision-making models, the adoption of heuristics rules with a different scope is essential to defining inputs, interpreting/evaluating outputs and control the marketing automation system.

The paper makes a contribution to research on the relationship between marketing automation and decision-making models. In particular, it proposes the results of in-depth interviews with senior decision makers to assess the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics as decision-making models adopted by marketers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and expand the role of strategic ambiguity (SA) in the field of organizational communication. It treats the triple bottom line (TBL) as indicative of an emerging coalition. This coalition brings together three loosely coupled discourse communities each attempting to advance the notion of green business, corporate social responsibility and sustainability.

This case directs attention to how SA and equivocation built into TBL aids three loosely networked discourse communities – formulated around “profits”, “people” and “planet” – emerge, coalesce and diffuse despite being rooted in imprecise and loosely formulated measures.

The findings indicate that despite its imprecision, lack of specificity and operational indices the TBL provides its members with the belief that they are far better off joining the coalition than going it alone. TBL's openness to multiple interpretations enables each of the discourse communities in the emerging network to expect to win concessions from others and to protect its values from encroachment.

This treatment of TBL suggests that SA can be expanded beyond an intra‐organizational focus to one encompassing emergent coalitions. The expanded notion of SA helps explain the stickiness of knowledge transfer in the early stage of coalition formation and the propensity of critics to view new imprecise but inspiring ideas like TBL as nothing but a fad or passing enthusiasm.

This paper aims to introduce eristic decision-making in entrepreneurship. A decision is eristically made when it utilizes eristics, which are action-triggering short-cuts that draw on hedonic urges (e.g. sensation-seeking). Unlike heuristics, eristic decision-making is not intendedly rational as eristics lead to decision-making without calculating or even considering the consequences of actions. Eristics are adaptive when uncertainty is extreme. Completely novel strategies, nascent venturing, corporate venturing for radical innovation and adapting to shocks (e.g. pandemic) are typically subject to extreme uncertainties.

In light of the relevant debates in entrepreneurship, psychology and decision sciences, the paper builds new conceptual links to establish its theoretical claims through secondary research.

The paper posits that people adapt to extreme uncertainty by using eristic reasoning rather than heuristic reasoning. Heuristic reasoning allows boundedly rational decision-makers to use qualitative cues to estimate the consequences of actions and to make reasoned decisions. By contrast, eristic reasoning ignores realistic calculations and considerations about the future consequences of actions and produces decisions guided by hedonic urges.

Current entrepreneurial research on uncertainty usually focuses on moderate levels of uncertainty where heuristics and other intendedly rational decision-making approaches pay off. By contrast, this paper focuses on extreme uncertainty where eristics are adaptive. While not intendedly rational, the adaptiveness of eristic reasoning offers theoretically and psychologically grounded new explanations about action under extreme uncertainty.

Proposes to call for inclusion of alternative conceptual perspectives in decision making theory and practice.

Adopts a conceptual approach drawing on a diverse range of theories, and applying an illustrative example.

Finds that failure‐prone tactics and poor choice of leadership styles are minor causes of wrong decisions. Major causes are complexity and chaos in the environment, alternative psychological approaches, and political and ethical behaviours.

Decision science tools and leadership style do have applicability. However, their relevance and applicability are very much subjugated by the complexity, uncertainty and near unknowability of the decision‐making context. New conceptual perspectives are required.

Highlights the relevance of complex, chaotic environments and human behaviours to decision processes. Intends to encourage researchers to adopt new theoretical approaches and to help practitioners understand the reasons for decision failures.