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The logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness have long been central to understanding behavior in organizations. However, scholarly work on the logic of appropriateness has consisted mostly of conceptual clarification and ex post explanation of observed behavior. In an effort to facilitate the study of the logic of appropriateness through experimental methods, this paper introduces an experimental paradigm that allows for the manipulation of decision logic as an independent variable. Using this paradigm, 710 participants played four iconic behavioral games in which profitability and ethics are both at play and, sometimes, at odds: Prisoners’ Dilemma, Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, and Trust Game. The manipulation generated behavioral data, as well as qualitative data about participants’ considerations while deciding according to each logic. The behavioral data show that, compared to participants employing a logic of consequences, participants employing a logic of appropriateness rejected more unfair offers in an Ultimatum Game and were more generous when reciprocating trusting behavior in a Trust Game. In all other cases, behavior between the two logics was not significantly different. An analysis of the qualitative data suggests that a logic of consequences increased participants’ focus on monetary concerns, whereas a logic of appropriateness increased participants’ focus on moral concerns. Taken together, these data provide new insights into when, how, and why the two logics result in behavioral and cognitive differences. The authors conclude by considering directions for future research that they see as particularly amenable to study using the experimental manipulation presented here.

This paper honors the breadth of some of March’s key ideas on organizations by applying them to the development of amphibious operations in the United States. The development of amphibious operations highlights, in part, March’s appreciation for little ideas, the importance of ordinary actions as opposed to great men, and the larger societal trends in which evolutionary organizational change is nested. The persistence of ordinary men and a series of little ideas that accumulated for decades prior to the far more celebrated 1919–1939 interwar period established the intellectual and organizational foundation that made the interwar innovation period possible. We use this case not only as an example of how many of March’s ideas are relevant to a given case, but also to demonstrate how extending March’s ideas to different kinds of institutions and organizations might be useful for future scholars and for organizational scholarship.

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.

James March's highly influential article on organisational learning underpins the studies of exploration and exploitation collected in this issue. What is less well known is that March's article, which is based on a computer simulation of collective and individual learning, reflects a real-life experiment in exploration and exploitation that he, in large part, designed and conducted when he was the new ‘boy Dean’ of the School of Social Sciences in the University of California at Irvine between 1964 and 1969. This chapter tells this story and then uses it to critique March's original model. It argues that March's model, which was probably the first simulation of an organisation learning, worked to constitute rather than model the phenomenon of organisational learning. The Irvine story is also important because it provides the context for what constitutes knowledge in organisation theory, and because it highlights the personal trauma and distress that can accompany the creative play of exploration.

This paper is a theoretical review of the logic of appropriateness. First, it defines what is meant by a logic of appropriateness in the work of March and Olsen and then discusses the dynamics of the logics of appropriateness and consequence. Second, it examines how the rules of appropriateness have developed and changed and discusses the advantages of using the logic of appropriateness. Third, it illustrates some applications of the logic of appropriateness by focusing on studies of public sector reforms and suggests how the logic of appropriateness might be used to understand the handling of COVID-19. Fourth, some of the critiques and elaborations of the logic of appropriateness are discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn and needs for future research indicated.

This chapter conducts an event study of 30 quantitative easing (QE) announcements made by 21 central banks on daily government bond yields and bilateral US dollar exchange rates in March and April 2020, in the midst of the global financial turmoil triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak. The chapter also investigates the transmission of innovations to long-term interest rates in a standard GVAR model estimated with quarterly pre-COVID-19 data. The authors find that QE has not lost effectiveness in advanced economies and that its international transmission is consistent with the working of long-run uncovered interest rate parity and a large dollar shortage shock during the COVID-19 period. In emerging markets, the QE impact on bond yields is much stronger and its transmission to exchange rates is qualitatively different than in advanced economies. The GVAR evidence that the authors report illustrates the Fed’s pivotal role in the global transmission of long-term interest rate shocks, but also the ample scope for country-specific interventions to affect local financial market conditions, even after controlling for common factors and spillovers from other countries. The GVAR evidence also shows that QE interventions can have sizable real effects on output driven by a very persistent impact on long-term interest rates.

James March argued that irrational approaches to problem solving and foolishness can be useful for addressing complex problems. Grand challenges are complex problems that often involve “guarded societal institutions” – societal beliefs and practices guarded by political or commercial powers. To explain how organizations with impossible goals dismantle such institutions by mobilizing irrationality and foolishness, we develop a process model which is illustrated with the case of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Our main contribution is to expand James March’s ideas on logics of action and organizational intelligence to advance a novel perspective for tackling big societal problems. We argue that foolishness is not only a means for finding distant solutions to complex problems but also a means for generating sustained motivation, well-being, and ideas that spark debate and lead to the questioning of taken-for-granted societal beliefs.

James G. March rejected relevance as a criterion for social science research, but he was concerned about the social implications of social science models. He argued that a focus on truth alone as a criterion for evaluating models meant that social scientists miss the implications of their models for beauty and justice. Here, we explore all three criteria to see what they bring to the practice of building social science models and how they interact in the models and in the world. We argue that the choices that social scientists make about these three criteria shape what they select to study in the models, what they see in the world, and what they imagine for the world. We also argue that how social scientists approach truth, beauty, and justice has implications for how they understand and engage the world.