Herbert Simon's Decision-Making Theory
Simon's critique of administrative proverbs, bounded rationality, satisficing, and administrative man.
Herbert Simon, "The Proverbs of Administration" (1946) and "Administrative Behavior" (1947) -- shifted Public Administration's unit of analysis from the organisation to the individual decision.
Simon argued the classical principles of administration (specialisation, unity of command, narrow span of control, and so on) work like contradictory proverbs -- untestable and offering no way to decide which should win when two of them conflict. His remedy was to make decision-making itself the proper object of study, put on a more scientific footing.
Fact-value dichotomy
- Every decision rests on factual premises (statements about the observable world, which can be tested true or false) and value premises (statements of what ought to be, which cannot be empirically validated).
- Simon held a science of administration could only be built on the factual component -- a position Dwight Waldo challenged, arguing the means-ends chain makes a clean separation untenable, since every end is also a means to some further end.
Bounded rationality and satisficing
- Real decision-makers are only intendedly rational -- bounded by limited skills and habits, limited values, limited knowledge, and limited time.
- Because exhaustive search costs more than it gains, decision-makers typically satisfice -- accept the first alternative that clears an aspiration level -- rather than maximise by evaluating every option for the true optimum.
- The aspiration level itself adapts -- rising after success, falling after failure.
Administrative man vs economic man
- Economic man is a theoretical construct with complete information and consistent preferences, able to maximise.
- Administrative man is the realistic decision-maker, pursuing genuine goals but limited by cognition and information, so he satisfices -- the bridge between purely rational and purely psychological views of human behaviour.
Answer-writing cue: "satisficing, not maximising" is the single most quotable line from Simon -- anchor any answer on decision-making or on the limits of rationality in administration around that phrase, then build outward to bounded rationality and the fact-value split.
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