Search results

We develop an experimental setting where the assumptions and predictions of the garbage can model can be tested. A careful reconstruction of the original simulation model let us select parameters that leave room for potential variations in individual behavior. Our experimental design replicates these parameters and thereby facilitates comparison of human behavior with the original model. We find that the majority strategy of human subjects is consistent with the original model, but exhibits some behavioral diversity. Human subjects exhibit fluid diverse behaviors that improve coordination in the face of uncertainty, but hinder collective learning that can improve group performance.

Three rival internal change theories of budgeting have characterized the twentieth century. Internal change theories consider the importance of change made inside governments; exogenous factors do not have a significant bearing on outcomes in these approaches. The century started out with the rational/scientific, then moved to incrementalism by mid to latecentury. The century ended with the garbage can model. This paper tests the descriptive power of each of these models on budget outcome data. The methods used in this study were time series modeling of monthly U.S. national government budget outcomes from 1968 to 1999. The results provide support for both incrementalism and rational/scientific budgeting. There was no support found in this study for the anarchical tendencies associated with the garbage can theory of budgeting. These results suggest that the garbage can model may not deserve its reputation as the dominant budgeting paradigm at the close of the twentieth century.

It is important to understand the organizational structures and decision making processes in the university and their relationship to the CWIS. This article describes, reviews and summarizes March and Cohens’ theories on the university as a structured anarchy. It also raises a list of questions that CWISs struggle with regularly which may be best answered by this theory. A second part of the article describes the companion theory of garbage can decision making proposed by March, Cohen and Olsen. Besides proposing the decision making model, March and Cohen even offer tactics to use in a structured anarchy that can enhance chances of success. Although CWIS problems seem dominated by management of technical questions, the authors feel that the ability to understand the organizational model of an institution and to manage the decision making process may be equally important to success as technical expertise is.

Chance models – mechanisms that explain empirical regularities through unsystematic variance – have a long tradition in the sciences but have been historically marginalized in management scholarship, relative to an agentic worldview about the role of managers and organizations. An exception is the work of James G. March and his coauthors, who proposed a variety of chance models that explain important management phenomena, including the careers of top executives, managerial risk taking, and organizational anarchy, learning, and adaptation. This paper serves as a tribute to the beauty of these “little ideas” and demonstrates how they can be recombined to generate novel implications. In particular, we focus on the example of an inverted V-shaped performance association centering around the year when executives were featured in a prominent listing, Barron’s annual list of Top 30 chief executive officers. Our recombination of several chance models developed by March and his coauthors provides a novel explanation for why many of the executives’ exceptional performances did not persist. In contrast to the common accounts of complacency, hubris, and statistical regression, the results show that declines from high performance may result from the way luck interacts with these executives’ slow adaptation, incompetence, and self-reinforced risk taking. We conclude by elaborating on the normative implications of chance models, which address many current management and societal challenges. We further encourage the continued development of chance models to help explain performance differences, shifting from accounts that favor heroic stories of corporate leaders toward accounts that favor their changing fortunes.

Transformations in the context of higher education urge educational institutions to (re)position and (re)organize themselves to counter the challenges these transformations bring. Especially regarding universities and business schools, organizations that encompass a broad range of communities, operations, and activities, these transformations result in the radicalization of what Kerr has called the multiversity. The rationale of this radicalization is to be found in the trends and developments in the contemporary context of higher education. This article presents the networked business school as a response to this radicalization within the field of management education and management learning, since network organization seems to offer a lot of possibilities and benefits to the organization of business schools.

To determine the key aspects of writing as a disciplinary literacy evident in videotaped peer talk during the writing process.

Sixth-grade students talk with peers during the writing process, the peer talk is videotaped and played back to the participants, and students reflect on the impact of peer talk on their writing.

This study gains sixth-grade students’ perspectives on how they experience talk in the disciplinary literacy of writing. Students use the content knowledge of writing and discuss habits of thinking specific to the disciplinary literacy of writing.

These findings are from a sixth-grade classroom, under the guidance of an exemplary English language arts teacher who encouraged daily writing and peer talk. Without these instructional routines and classroom talk, alternate findings may emerge.

This chapter makes a significant contribution to the field of writing as disciplinary literacy and the use of video as a mediational tool. The chapter foregrounds the voices and perspectives of sixth-grade students to understand how students themselves experience and view talk in the context of disciplinary literacy of writing.

The measurement of non-financial assets that are held for their service potential rather than for a financial return can be challenging in the public sector. In some cases, the information is not available about the historical cost for the initial measurement and there is not an active market neither that could allow inferring a value for those non-financial assets. In response to this problem, this chapter analyses the newly developed measurement base current operational value (COV) to measure assets in the public sector. This measurement base is part of the proposals in Exposure Draft (ED) 76 – Conceptual Framework Update: Chapter 7, Measurement of Assets and Liabilities in Financial Statements, and ED 77 – Measurement. This chapter was developed using evidence obtained through participant observation to the IPSASB meetings from the authors and the desk analysis of the comment letters (CLs) to the ED 76 and ED 77. The findings from this study reveal that comparability is a major concern of the stakeholders. The CLs also highlighted the need for further guidance on a number of issues and suggested the way forward for the future standard-setting process that address the concerns identified in the proposed COV.

This chapter first examines the role of attention in the garbage can model of decision making and compares it both to prior approaches in the Carnegie School tradition and the attention-based view of the firm. Both the garbage can model and the attention-based view rely on the same assumption, one that is rarely recognized nor understood – that organizational decision making is characterized by situated attention, where organizational participants vary across time and place in what they attend to. In the garbage can model, decision opportunities are the temporal contexts for situated attention; in the attention-based view, attention is situated in both time and place within the organization's communication channels. In the garbage can, situated attention is also shaped by the ecology of problems and opportunities competing for attention. The final part examines the determinants and consequences of tight versus loose coupling of channels in organizations and its effects on participants’ situated attention. Attention structures external to channels and the architecture of channel structures shape the degree of coupling found in organizations. In viewing coupling as a variable, the chapter suggests that a modified garbage can model, combined with an increased focus on situated attention, provides the foundations for a more general theory of nonroutine decision making.