Chapter I: Decision-Making and Administrative Organization, Value and Fact in Decision, p 5 “The Relative Element in Decision. In an important sense, all decision is a matter of compromise. The alternative that is finally selected never permits a complete or perfect achievement of objectives, but is merely the best solution that is available under the circumstances. The environmental situation inevitably limits the alternatives that are available, and hence sets a maximum to the level of attainment of purpose that is possible.”
Chapter I: Decision-Making and Administrative Organization, Decision-Making in the Administrative Process, p 7 “The organization, then, takes from the individual some of his decisional autonomy, and substitutes for it an organization decision-making process. The decisions which the organization makes for the individual ordinarily (1) specify his function, that is, the general scope and nature of his duties; (2) allocate authority, that is, determine who in the organization is to have power to make further decisions for the individual; and (3) set such other limits to his choice as are needed to coordinate the activities of several individuals in the organization.”
Chapter I: Decision-Making and Administrative Organization, Modes of Organizational Influence, p 10 – 11 “It is a prevalent characteristic of human behavior that members of an organized group tend to identify with that group. […] This phenomenon of identification, or organizational loyalty, performs one very important function in administration. If an administrator, each time he is faced with a decision, must perforce evaluate that decision in terms of the whole range of human values, rationality in administration is impossible. […] Organizational loyalties lead also, however, to certain difficulties which should not be underestimated. The principal undesirable effect of identification is that it prevents the institutionalized individual from making correct decisions in cases where the restricted area of values with which he identifies himself must be weighed against other values outside that area.”
Commentary on Chapter I: Decision-Making and Administrative Organization, Organizations and Markets, p 19 – 20 “markets only work effectively in the presence of a healthy infrastructure, and in particular, in an environment of efficiently managed business firms and other organizations. Markets complement organizations: they do not replace them.”
Commentary on Chapter I: Decision-Making and Administrative Organization, Decision-Making and the Computer, p 22 – 23 “the central lesson that the computer should teach is that information is no longer scarce or in dire need of enhanced distribution. In contrast with past ages, we now live in an information-rich world.
In our enthusiasm for global networks of unlimited information, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that a new scarcity has been created: the scarcity of human time for attending to the information that flows in on us. […] The main requirement in the design of organizational communication systems is not to reduce scarcity of information but to combat the glut of information, so that we may find time to attend to that information which is most relevant to our tasks—something that is possible only if we can find our way expeditiously through the morass of irrelevancies that our information systems contain.”
Chapter II: Some Problems of Administrative Theory, Some Accepted Administrative Principles, Organization by Purpose, Process, Clientele, Place, p 39 “There is, then, no essential difference between a “purpose” and a “process”, but only a distinction of degree. A “process” is an activity whose immediate purpose is at a low level in the hierarchy of means and ends, while a “purpose” is a collection of activities whose orienting value or aim is at a high level in the means-end hierarchy.”
Chapter II: Some Problems of Administrative Theory, Some Accepted Administrative Principles, The Impasse of Administrative Theory, p 42 “difficulty has arisen from treating as “principles of administration” what are really only criteria for describing and diagnosing administrative situations.”
Chapter II: Some Problems of Administrative Theory, Some Accepted Administrative Principles, The Impasse of Administrative Theory, p 43 “A valid approach to the study of administration requires that all the relevant diagnostic criteria be identified; that each administrative situation be analyzed in terms of the entire set of criteria; and that research be instituted to determine how weights can be assigned to the several criteria when they are, as they usually will be, mutually incompatible.”
Chapter III: Fact and Value in Decision-Making, Policy and Administration, Legislator and Administrator, p 65 “the fact that pressure of legislative work forbids the review of more than a few administrative decisions does not destroy the usefulness of sanctions that permit the legislative body to hold the administrator answerable for any of his decisions. The anticipation of possible legislative investigation and review will have a powerful controlling effect on the administrator, even if this potential review can be actualized only in a few cases.”
Chapter III: Fact and Value in Decision-Making, Policy and Administration, Legislator and Administrator, p 66 “[The administrator] may (and usually will) have his own very definite set of personal values that he would like to see implemented by his administrative organization, and he may resist attempts by the legislature to assume completely the function of policy determination, or he may sabotage their decisions by his manner of executing them.”
Commentary on Chapter III: Fact and Value in Decision-Making, “Is’s” and “Oughts”, p 68 – 69 “you can’t get an “ought,” by any manner of careful reasoning, solely from a set of pure “is’s.” To reach an “ought” in the conclusions, at least some “ought” must be lurking in the initial premises. No amassing of knowledge about how the world really is can, entirely by itself, tell us how the world ought to be. For the latter, we must be willing to say what kind of a world we would like to have; we must posit some values that go beyond the facts.”
Chapter IV: Rationality in Administrative Behavior, Alternatives and Consequences, Time and Behavior, p 77 – 78 “the individual or organization can be committed to a particular line of action from the fact that, having once initiated it, it appears preferable to continue with it rather than to relinquish completely the portion which has already been carried out.
This time-binding character of strategies deserves the greatest emphasis, for it makes possible at least a modicum of rationality in behavior, where, without it, this would be inconceivable.”
Chapter IV: Rationality in Administrative Behavior, Alternatives and Consequences, Group Behavior, p 81 “cooperation will usually be ineffective—will not reach its goal, whatever the intentions of the participants—in the absence of coordination.”
Chapter IV: Rationality in Administrative Behavior, Alternatives and Consequences, Group Behavior, p 82 “In cooperative systems, even though all participants are agreed on the objectives to be attained, they cannot ordinarily be left to themselves in selecting the strategies that will lead to these objectives; for the selection of a correct strategy involves a knowledge of each as to the strategies selected by the others. […] This is the fundamental criticism that the theory of anarchism has always failed to meet. That theory appears to posit that, given common goals, participants in a social scheme will automatically select for themselves their own most effective roles.”
Commentary on Chapter IV: Rationality in Administrative Behavior, Rational Behavior and Administration, p 88 “it is precisely in the real world where human behavior is intendedly rational, but only boundedly so, that there is room for a genuine theory of organization and administration.”
Commentary on Chapter IV: Rationality in Administrative Behavior, Deliberate and Habitual Rationality, p 91 “There is no intrinsic opposition between emotion and reason: emotion is a principal source of motivation, focusing us toward particular goals; and it can direct great powers of thought on the goals it evokes. […] Perhaps the most useful way to think about emotion in relation to administration and to decision-making in organizations is to think of it as a force that helps direct actions towards particular goals by holding attention on them and the means of their realization.”
Chapter V: The Psychology of Administrative Decisions, The Integration of Behavior, The Function of Social Organization, p 111 “The rational individual is, and must be, an organized and institutionalized individual. If the severe limits imposed by human psychology upon deliberation are to be relaxed, the individual must in his decisions be subject to the influence of the organized group in which he participates. His decisions must not only be the product of his own mental processes, but also reflect the broader considerations to which it is the function of the organized group to give effect.”
Chapter V: The Psychology of Administrative Decisions, The Integration of Behavior, Mechanisms of Organization Influence, p 116 “No step in the administrative process is more generally ignored, or more poorly performed, than the task of communicating decisions. All too often, plans are “ordered” into effect without any consideration of the manner in which they can be brought to influence the behavior of the individual members of the group. Procedural manuals are promulgated without follow-up to determine whether the contents of the manuals are used by the individuals to guide their decisions. Organization plans are drawn on paper, although the members of the organization are ignorant of the plan that purports to describe their relationships.
Failures in communication result whenever it is forgotten that the behavior of individuals is the tool with which organization achieves its purposes. The question to be asked of any administrative process is: How does it influence the decisions of these individuals? Without communication, the answer must always be: It does not influence them at all.”
Chapter V: The Psychology of Administrative Decisions, Summary, p 117 “Human rationality operates, then, within the limits of a psychological environment. […] The deliberate control of the environment of decision permits not only the integration of choice, but its socialization as well. Social institutions may be viewed as regularizations of the behavior of individuals through subjection of their behavior to stimulus-patterns socially imposed on them. It is in these patterns that an understanding of the meaning and function of organization is to be found.”
Commentary on Chapter V: The Psychology of Administrative Decisions, p 118 “The central concern of administrative theory is with the boundary between the rational and the nonrational aspects of human social behavior. Administrative theory is peculiarly the theory of intended and bounded rationality—of the behavior of human beings who satisfice because they have not the wits to maximize.”
Commentary on Chapter V: The Psychology of Administrative Decisions, p 119 “(1) Whereas economic man supposedly maximizes—selects the best alternative from among all those available to him—his cousin, the administrator, satisfices—looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or “good enough.” Examples of satisficing criteria, familiar enough to business people, if unfamiliar to most economists, are “share of market,” “reasonable profit,” “fair price.”
(2) Economic man purports to deal with the “real world” in all its complexity. The administrator recognizes that the perceived world is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. The administrator treats situations as only loosely connected with each other—most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any single situation and the most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple. One can leave out of account those aspects of reality—and that means most aspects—that appear irrelevant at a given time. Administrators (and everyone else, for that matter) take into account just a few of the factors of the situation regarded as most relevant and crucial. In particular, they deal with one or a few problems at a time, because the limits on attention simply don’t permit everything to be attended to at once.”
Commentary on Chapter V: The Psychology of Administrative Decisions, p 119 “Simplification may lead to error, but there is no realistic alternative in the face of the limits on human knowledge and reasoning.”
Commentary on Chapter VI: The Equilibrium of the Organization, On the Concept of Organization Goal, Inducements and Contributions, and Organizational Behavior, p 162 “organizations sometimes fail to survive, and their demise can often be attributed to failure to incorporate all the important motivational concerns of participants among the constraints in the organizational decision-making system.
For example, a major cause of small business failure is working capital shortage, a result of failure to constrain actions to those that are consistent with creditors’ demands for prompt payment. Similarly, new products often fail because incorrect assumptions about the inducements important to consumers shaped the constraints that guided product design. (Some of the major troubles of the Chrysler Corporation in the post-World War II period stemmed from the design premise that car purchasers were primarily interested in buying a good piece of machinery.)”
Commentary on Chapter VI: The Equilibrium of the Organization, On the Concept of Organization Goal, Inducements and Contributions, and Organizational Behavior, p 162 “the organizations we usually observe—those that have survived for some time—are precisely those that have developed organizational decision-making systems whose constraints guarantee that their actions maintain a favorable balance of inducements to contributions for their participants.”
Commentary on Chapter VI: The Equilibrium of the Organization, On the Concept of Organization Goal, Conclusions, p 163 “decisions are concerned with discovering courses of action that satisfy a whole set of constraints. It is this set, and not any one of its members, that is most accurately viewed as the goal of the action. Sometimes we select a constraint for special attention because of its relation to the motivations of the decision-maker, or because of its relation to the search process that is generating or designing particular courses of action.”
Commentary on Chapter VI: The Equilibrium of the Organization, The Organization as Workplace: Satisfaction, The Work of the Executive, p 166 “activities can hold people’s interest and attention only if they are sufficiently complex to continue to present elements of novelty, but sufficiently simple to be understandable, so that pattern can be discerned in them.”
Commentary on Chapter VI: The Equilibrium of the Organization, The Organization as Workplace: Satisfaction, Conclusion, p 176 “Some degree of alienation is probably an integral part of the human condition.”
Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Authority, The Sanctions of Authority, p 183 “The “institutions” of a society may be regarded as rules specifying the roles that particular persons will assume in relation to one another under certain circumstances. The range of possible roles and possible behaviors is as broad as the ingenuity of man for dramatic invention.”
Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Authority, The Limits of Authority, p 186 “A voluntary organization with poorly defined objectives has perhaps the narrowest range of acceptance. An army, where the sanctions as well as the customs are of extreme severity, has the broadest area of acceptance.”
Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Authority, The Limits of Authority, p 186 “How broad is the area of indifference within which a group will continue to follow its leadership? In a very real sense, the leader, or superior, is merely a bus driver whose passengers will leave him unless he takes them in the direction they wish to go. They leave him only minor discretion as to the road to be followed.”
Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Unity of Command, Concluding Comments, p 197 “In almost all organizations, authority is also zoned by subject matter; and the subject-matter allocation will sometimes conflict with the hierarchical allocation. In these cases the hierarchy is used as a mechanism for resolving jurisdictional disputes. These disputes afford the top administrator an important source of information as to what is going on at lower levels, and he will not be inclined to try to eliminate them entirely, even if he could, by a watertight allocation of authority. The distribution of the power to apply sanctions, and the use of this power, will have a considerable influence on the sharpness of the lines of authority and on the relative importance of hierarchical and subject-matter authority.”
Commentary on Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Authority and Alienation, p 203 “It is a myth—widely believed but not less mythical for that—that people are most creative when they are most free. All of the psychological evidence suggests instead that people are most creative, and most capable of self-actualization, when their environment provides them with an appropriate amount of structure, not too much and not too little.”
Commentary on Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Authority and Alienation, p 203 “The contemporary challenge to authority in organizations may well be a symptom of a more general shift in our society from concerns with achievement and affiliation to concerns with power. Certainly the same challenge to authority has affected institutions like the family, including parent-child relations. There is narrower and more reluctant acceptance of authority than in the past in all our social institutions, and not just in formal organizations. Most of us would, I think, regard the muting of authority that has taken place in our lifetimes as desirable. It does not follow that an indefinite continuation of the same trend would be equally desirable, particularly if it is motivated by a preoccupation with the distribution of power rather than the effectiveness of organizations as instruments toward personal and social goals.”
Commentary on Chapter VII: The Role of Authority, Attraction to Power, p 207 “What corrupts is not power, but the need for power; and it corrupts both the powerful and the powerless.”
Chapter VIII: Communication, Formal and Informal Communication, Informal Communications, p 215 “in addition to transmitting information that no one has thought to transmit formally, the grapevine is valuable as a barometer of “public opinion” in the organization.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Is there an Information Revolution?, Attending to the Information That Is There, p 226 “The bottleneck is no longer the capacity of the electronic channels but the capacity of the human users.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Is there an Information Revolution?, Attending Selectively, p 227 “We are laying the foundations for a science of information processing that we can expect will greatly increase our effectiveness in handling the information around us. […] The design must encompass far more than the computer hardware and software; it must handle with equal care the information-processing characteristics and capabilities of the human members of organizations who constitute the other half of the systems.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Organizational Learning, Organizational Learning and Innovation, The Problem of Sustaining Distinctiveness, p 232 “Among the costs of being first—whether in products, in methods of marketing, in organizational procedures, or what not—are the costs of instilling in members of the organization the knowledge, beliefs, and values that are necessary for implementing the new goals.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Applying Information Technology to Organization Design, Factorization of Decisions and Allocation of Attention, p 240 “From the information processing point of view, division of labor means factoring the total system of decisions that need to be made into relatively independent subsystems, each of which can be designed with only minimal concern for its interactions with the others.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Applying Information Technology to Organization Design, Factorization of Decisions and Allocation of Attention, p 241 “the inherent capacity limits of information-processing systems impose two requirements on organizational design: that the totality of decision problems be factored in such a way as to minimize the interdependence of the components; and that the entire system be so structured as to conserve the scare resource, attention.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Applying Information Technology to Organization Design, Factorization of Decisions and Allocation of Attention, p 242 “There is no magic in comprehensiveness. There mere existence of a mass of data is not a sufficient reason for collecting it into a single, comprehensive information system. Indeed, the problem is quite the opposite: of finding a way of factoring decision problems in order to relate the several components to their respective relevant data sources. Analysis of the decision-making system and its data requirements must come first; only then can a reasonable approach be made to defining the data systems that will support the decision-making process.”
Commentary on Chapter VIII: Communication, Applying Information Technology to Organization Design, Conclusion, p 249 “Today, we can trace minute and indirect effects of our behavior: the relation of smoking to cancer, the relation of the brittleness of eagles’ eggs to the presence of DDT in the environment. With this new ability to trace effects, we feel responsible for them in a way we previously did not. The intellectual awakening is also a moral awakening.
The new problems created (or made visible) by our new scientific knowledge are symptoms of progress, not omens of doom. They demonstrate that we now possess the analytic tools that are basic to understanding our problems—basic to understanding the human condition. Of course, to understand problems is not necessarily to solve them. But it is the essential first step. The new information technology that we are creating enables us to take that step.”
Chapter IX: The Criterion of Efficiency, The Nature of Efficiency, The Cost Element in Decision, p 252 “when a private business employs an unemployed person his wage is an ordinary cost; while when the government employs such a person it makes use of a resource that would otherwise not be utilized, and hence the wages of those employed do not involve any real cost from the standpoint of the community. […] In the language of the economist, the problem of efficiency in the public agency must be approached from the standpoint of the general, rather than the partial, equilibrium.”
Chapter IX: The Criterion of Efficiency, The Nature of Efficiency, Positive Values in Decision, Definition of Objectives, p 253 – 254 “The definition of objectives for public services is far from a simple task. In the first place, it is desirable to state the objectives so far as possible in terms of values. That is, only if they are expressions of relatively final ends are they suitable value-indices. When objectives are stated in terms of intermediate goals, there is a serious danger that decisions governed by the intermediate end will continue to persist even when that end is no longer appropriate to the realization of value. The proliferation of forms and records in an administrative agency, for instance, frequently evidences a failure to reconsider activities which are aimed at some concrete end in terms of the broader values which that end is supposed to further.
On the other hand, however, the values which public services seek to realize are seldom expressible in concrete terms. Aims, such as those of a recreation department—to “improve health,” “provide recreation,” “develop good citizens”—must be stated in tangible and objective terms before results can be observed and measured. A serious dilemma is posed here. The values toward which these services should be directed do not provide sufficiently concrete criteria to be applied to specific decisional problems. However, if value-indices are employed as criteria in lieu of the values themselves, the “ends” are likely to be sacrificed for the more tangible means—the substance for the form.
Further difficulty arises in the lack of a common denominator of value. An activity may realize two or more values, as in the case of the recreation department mentioned above. What is the relative importance of the various values in guiding the department’s activities? The health department provides an illustration of the same problem. Shall the department next year redistribute its funds to decrease infant mortality or to increase the facilities of the venereal disease clinic? Observations of results, measured in terms of value-indices, can merely tell the extent to which the several objectives are realized if one or the other course of action is taken. Unless both activities are directed toward exactly the same value, measurement of results cannot tell which course of action is preferable. Rationality can be applied in administrative decisions only after the relative weights of conflicting values have been fixed.”
Chapter IX: The Criterion of Efficiency, The Nature of Efficiency, Positive Values in Decision, Definition of Objectives, p 254 “somewhere, sometime in the administrative process weights actually are assigned to values. If this is not done consciously and deliberately, then it is achieved by implication in the decisions which are actually reached. It is not possible to avoid the problem by hiding it among the unexpressed premises of choice.”
Chapter IX: The Criterion of Efficiency, The Nature of Efficiency, Positive Values in Decision, Accomplishment a Matter of Degree, p 254 “extension of policy determination to [questions of value as a matter of degree] is of fundamental importance for the maintenance of democratic control over the value elements in decision.”
Chapter IX: The Criterion of Efficiency, Efficiency and the Budget, The Long-Term Budget, p 269 “Too often, under current practice, the basic decisions of policy are reached by technicians in the agency entrusted with budget review, without any opportunity for review of that policy by the legislature. That this condition is tolerated results partly from general failure to recognize the relative element in governmental objectives. Since most legislative declarations of policy state objectives of governmental activity without stating the level of adequacy which the service is to reach, it is impossible for an “expert” to reach on factual grounds a conclusion as to the adequacy of a departmental appropriation. Hence, present procedures would not seem to safeguard sufficiently democratic control over the determination of policy.”
Commentary on Chapter IX: The Criterion of Efficiency, Measuring Results in Business Firms, Evaluating Intermediate Outputs, p 274 – 275 “it is obvious that one can always eliminate research activities without any effect whatsoever upon this week’s or this month’s—or perhaps this year’s—sales.
Whenever a job is eliminated whose product has no immediate effect upon output or sales effort, short-run profits, as recorded in financial statements, can be expected to increase. What the effect will be on long-run profits is more problematic, and the answer will not be known for some time, if it is ever known.”
Chapter X: Loyalties and Organizational Identification, Organizational Identification, Identification and Adequacy, p 291 “That is the universal administrative plaint. “The budget is inadequate.” Now, between the white of adequacy and the black of inadequacy lie all the shades of gray which represent degrees of adequacy. Further, human wants are insatiable in relation to human resources. From these two facts we may conclude that the fundamental criterion of administrative decision must be a criterion of efficiency rather than a criterion of adequacy. The task of the administrator is to maximize social values relative to limited resources.”
Chapter X: Loyalties and Organizational Identification, Organizational Identification, Allocation of the Decision-Making Function, p 292 “each decision should be located at a point where it will be of necessity approached as a question of efficiency rather than a question of adequacy. That is, it is unsound to entrust to the administrator responsible for a function the responsibility for weighing the importance of that function against the importance of other functions.”
Chapter X: Loyalties and Organizational Identification, Summary p 295 “If identification is highly useful in depersonalizing choice within an organization and enforcing social responsibility, it may be equally harmful if it colors and distorts the decisions that precede the establishment of the organizational structure itself.”
Commentary on Chapter X: Loyalties and Organizational Identification, Cognitive Bases for Identification, p 297 “Not only do their subgoals cause decision-makers to attend selectively to their environments, but the administrative structures and communication channels they erect to attain these goals expose them to particular kinds of information and shield them from others. Yet, because of the complexity of the information that does reach them, even this selected information is analyzed only partially and incompletely.”
Commentary on Chapter X: Loyalties and Organizational Identification, Cognitive Bases for Identification, p 297 “Presented with a complex stimulus, a person perceives in it what he or she is “ready” to perceive; the more complex or ambiguous the stimulus, the more the perception is determined by what is already “in” the subject and the less by what is “in” the stimulus.”
Commentary on Chapter X: Loyalties and Organizational Identification, Altruism in Organizational Behavior, How Natural Selection Sustains Altruism, p 303 “The argument is not that people are totally docile, nor that they are totally selfish, but that fitness calls for a measured but substantial responsiveness to social influence. […] Once docility is present, society may exploit it by teaching values that benefit the society but are truly altruistic for the individual who accepts them: that is, that contribute to the society’s fitness but not to the individual’s. The only requirement is that on balance and on average the docile individual must be fitter than the one who is not docile.”
Chapter XI: The Anatomy of Organization, p 305 “The anatomy of the organization is to be found in the distribution and allocation of decision-making functions. The physiology of the organization is to be found in the processes whereby the organization influences the decisions of each of its members—supplying these decisions with their premises.”
Chapter XI: The Anatomy of Organization, The Process of Composite Decision, The Degrees of Influence, p 308 “Influence, then, is exercised through control over the premises of decision.”
Chapter XI: The Anatomy of Organization, Lessons for Administrative Theory, Individual and Group Rationality, p 325 “the basic task of administration—to provide each “operative” employee with an environment of decision of such a kind that behavior which is rational from the standpoint of this environment is also rational from the standpoint of the group values and the group situation.”