39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 - Organizational Choice (Part 1)

Please join us for the fourth episode in our series of podcasts focused on works from the Carnegie-Mellon School. For this episode, the podcasters tackle “The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, published in Adninistrative Science Quarterly in 1972. The article was a radical departure from conventional thinking about choice and decision making at the time, where leaders identified problems and applied solutions rationally. Instead, the authors asserted that an organization was “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”

Also see: Episode 4 on Organizational Routines, Episode 19 on Organizational Learning, Episode 29 on Business School Design, and our Series Introduction.