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With work spanning management, political science, sociology, public administration and education, James G. March was a founder of organization theory. Honouring his exceptional ability to go beyond the models of rationality so prevalent in much of organizational scholarship, this edited collection builds on March’s imaginative, evocative ideas and encourages others to appreciate and explore them.
Jim March left his co-authors Herbert Simon and Richard Cyert at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where they had founded what is known as the Carnegie School and moved to California in the mid 1960s. This volume highlights and builds on many of the complements and alternatives to rationality that March articulated once settled at Stanford: a technology of foolishness, garbage can models of decision making, a logic of appropriateness, organizational learning, and a variety of models of chance and luck. Employing a variety of methodological tools including models, laboratory experiments and quantitative and qualitative analysis, the chapters seek to extend our understandings of how decisions happen, how actors behave, how organizations navigate the traps of exploration and exploitation, and how we might contemplate human action in terms of truth, beauty and justice. The volume is a celebration of Jim by his students and colleagues that gives readers a sense of this extraordinary person, poet, sage and scholar.
Christine M. Beckman is Professor and The Price Family Chair in Social Innovation at the Price School of Public Policy and Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California and the current Editor in Chief at Administrative Science Quarterly. Professor Beckman is known for her research on organizational learning and networks, gender and inequality, and innovation and entrepreneurship, focusing on how collaborative relationships, diverse experiences, and social comparisons facilitate organizational change. She was fortunate to have Jim March as an inspiration and mentor throughout her academic career.
Introduction. Alternatives and Complements to Rationality; Christine M. Beckman
Section 1. Building on the post-1970 Legacy of James G. March
Chapter 1. Marching to the sea: Little ideas and small innovations in the evolution of amphibious operations; Mie Augier and Sean F.X. Barrett
Chapter 2. Management systems for exploration and exploitation; M. Diane Burton and Charles A. O’Reilly III
Chapter 3. Adaptive rationality, garbage cans, and the policy process; Scott C. Ganz
Chapter 4. “Fools” with impossible goals: Mobilizing March’s technology of foolishness to tackle grand challenges; Yanfei Hu and Claus Rerup
Chapter 5. The variance of variance; Chengwei Liu and Chia-Jung Tsay
Chapter 6. Truth, beauty and justice in models of social action; Mark Zbaracki, Lee Watkiss, Cameron McAlpine, and Julian Barg
Chapter 7. The Logic of Appropriateness – a Central Concept in Institutional Theory; Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid
Chapter 8. Bringing the logic of appropriateness into the lab: An experimental study of behavior and cognition; Daniel A. Newark and Markus C. Becker
Section 2. Reflections on Jim March as a Teacher and Educator
Chapter 9. James March’s lessons on teaching; Thierry Weil
Chapter 10. A few notes on Jim March as a mentor; Mie Augier
Chapter 11. A personal reflection on my long relationship with Jim March; Zur Shapira
Chapter 12. Learning about scholarship and being a scholar: The courage of foolishness; Sim B Sitkin
Conclusion. Pictures at an Exhibition; Daniel A. Newark