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Page 1: NUMBER 40 This Week’s Citation ClassicOCTOBER … · This Week’s Citation ClassicOCTOBER 1, 1979 March J G, Guetzkow H & Simon H. Organizations. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958

293

“In 1949 a new business school, theGraduate School of IndustrialAdministration, was created at CarnegieInstitute of Technology. The faculty of thenew school proposed to build businesseducation on a solid social sciencefoundation. Organization theory wasselected as a major focus of research, and aprogram of empirical studies of managerialdecision making processes was launched. Iwas a member of the original faculty of theschool, Guetzkow joined in 1950, and Marchin 1953.

“At this time, the Ford Foundation decidedto commission a series of ‘propositionalinventories’ in the behavioral sciences. Theidea was to ‘propositionalize’ the theory ofsome domain, and then to summarize theempirical evidence relevant to eachproposition. We agreed to take on such aninventory for the Foundation.

“The product of our undertaking,Organizations, does not really look very

Organizations provides a theoreticalframework for knowledge about humanbehavior in organizations, and reviewsthe empirical evidence for thepropositions that make up the theory. Thetheory emphasizes the motivations fororganizational participation and theprocesses of decision making withinorganizations. [The Science Citation Index®

(SCI®) and the Social Sciences CitationIndex™ (SSCI™) indicate that this bookhas been cited over 950 times since 1961.]

H. SimonDepartment of PsychologyCarnegie-Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

July 16, 1979

NUMBER 40OCTOBER 1, 1979This Week’s Citation Classic

March J G, Guetzkow H & Simon H. Organizations. New York: John Wiley & Sons,1958. 262 p.[Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology,Pittsburgh, PA]

much like a ‘propositional inventory,’although the first five chapters conform moreclosely to that model than the last two. Thedifficulties were numerous. A body ofscientific theory is not a set of isolatedpropositions, nor can particular pieces ofevidence be matched to particularpropositions. Moreover, much of theempirical work in organization theory takesthe form of case studies, which are difficult tohandle according to customary criteria ofobjectivity and encodability. We discussedalternative frameworks for organizationtheory in the opening chapters, then devotedthe remainder of the book to motivation anddecision-making theory.

“Organizations is still in print, withoutrevision, after twenty years. Its references arenow badly out of date, but its theoreticalstructure does not appear to have beensuperseded by any subsequent work, andindeed has obtained considerable newempirical support.

“Whether the book’s durability is a tribute toour foresight or to the slow development ofthe field, is best judged by others. The workwas simply one step along the route of theauthors’ continuing research inorganizational behavior. In the ensuingtwenty years, their work has taken divergentpaths. March went on, with R. Cyert, toproduce their equally ‘classic’ BehavioralTheory of the Firm.1 Guetzkow focussed moreand more upon the simulation of decisionmaking in international relations.2 My ownresearch has led me into the study ofproblem solving processes, and to the workwith A. Newell that is summarized in ourHuman Problem Solving.3

“Organizations and families are the mostimportant environment of human behavior.My greatest personal satisfaction from ourbook was the knowledge that it helped toestablish organizational behavior as a basicdomain of the social sciences.”

1. Cyert R M & March J G. A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.332 p.’

2. Guetzkow H, Alger C F, Brody R A, Noel R C & Snyder R C. Simulation in international relations;development for research and teaching. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1963. 248 p.

3. Newell A & Simon H A. Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. 920 p.

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