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Decision Making for Business
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Decision Making for Business
A Reader

First Edition
Edited by:

October 2001 | 278 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

Decision making is critical to organizational performance and central to any understanding of organizations. The decisions made by an organization to determine (or justify) actions taken, and reveal how organizations think. Students of business need to understand how decisions are made and what factors impinge on the processes and outputs of decision making.

Decision Making for Business gathers crucial contributions to our understanding of decision making and assembles them to form a coherent and sustained analysis of the key factors that influence the process. The selected articles are stimulating, provocative and analytical, resulting in a critical, comprehensive and innovative analysis of decision making.

The book includes theoretical insights into decision making. It provides empirical examples of decision making and explanations of decision making processes. The volume draws on classical contributions to decision making and more recent developments in the theory of organizational process and structure. Explanations are organized in four categories:

  • The anatomy of decision making
  • Understanding decision making
  • Thinking in organizations
  • Societal context of organizational decision making

Decision Making for Business is intended for students taking courses in strategy and decision making, organizational analysis, the sociology of work, at undergraduate and MBA levels, and will also be an excellent resource for masters and postgraduate students. The Reader is in a series of three (alongside Strategy for Business and Policy Issues for Business) which constitutes the main teaching texts of the Open University undergraduate course Business Behavior in a Changing World.


 
SECTION ONE: THE ANATOMY OF DECISION-MAKING
Irving L Janis
A Perfect Failure
The Bay of Pigs

 
Erhard K Valentin
Anatomy of a Fatal Business Strategy
Richard M Cyert and James G March
A Summary of Basic Concepts in the Behavioural Theory of the Firm
Susan Miller, David Hickson and David Wilson
Decision-Making in Organizations
 
SECTION TWO: UNDERSTANDING DECISION MAKING: UNDERSTANDING ORGANIZATIONS
Andrew M Pettigrew
Decision-Making as a Political Process
Nils Brunsson
The Irrationality of Action and Action Rationality
Ideologies and Organizational Actions

 
A Strauss, L Scatzman, D Ehrlich, R Bucher and M Sabsin
The Hospital and Its Negotiated Order
Don Zimmerman
The Practicalities of Rule Use
 
SECTION THREE: THINKING IN ORGANIZATIONS
Linda Smircich and Charles Stubbart
Strategic Management in an Enacted World
Theresa K Lant, Frances J Milliken and Bipin Batra
The Role of Managerial Learning and Interpretation in Strategic Persistence and Re-Orientation
An Empirical Exploration

 
Charles R Schwenk
The Cognitive Perspective on Strategic Decision-Making
Paul Bate
The Impact of Organizational Culture on Approaches to Organizational Problem-Solving
 
SECTION FOUR: THE SOCIETAL CONTEXT OF ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION-MAKING
Nils Brunsson and Johan P Olsen
Organizational Forms
Can We Choose Them?

 
Paul Du Gay and Graeme Salaman
The Cult(ure) of the Customer
Janet Newman
Managerialism and Social Welfare
Herv[ac]e Laroche
From Decision to Action in Organizations
Decision-Making as a Social Representation

 

excellent resource for qualitative aspects of decision making; would benefit by a more creative layout (i.e. colour, boxed examples/cases); would also be beneficial to include in future edition a concluding chapter which summarises the overarching themes of this reader

Mr Georgios Zifkos
Business Management, York St John University
May 20, 2015

Sample Materials & Chapters

PDF file of the Introduction