Theories of Choice

Theories about how problems are solved highlight certain aspects of organizational behavior and, by necessity, neglect others. In the simplest model, complete and valid information is passed through the organization to those at the top, who then choose one solution from several or many. In this model (the theory of rational choice), selection of alternatives is governed by demands of efficiency and the criteria of organizational effectiveness. The theory requires these criteria, as well as decision makers' preferences, to be well defined. Otherwise, enough uncertainty is introduced into the model that its predictive powers are considerably lessened. Obvious uses of

this overly rational model of decision making are elusive. The model is slippery because it is more often assumed than argued explicitly. No theorist of decision making (save perhaps the neo-classical economist) openly argues completely rational choice. Yet any given issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, a major scholarly journal on organizations, will contain an article that covertly adopts the tenets of rational choice theory. Most often, these tenets are found in works that do not directly address decision making, thus obscuring the authors' rationalist assumptions. But this should not lead us to think the theory of rational choice is chimerical.^[4]

Garbage can theory was developed to counter theories in which power and rationality drive decision making (Lutz 1982; Tasca 1983). In this view, the components of an organizational system—people, problems, solutions, choices—are only loosely coupled and often vary independently of one another (Weick 1976). In theories of rational choice, the power to command, hierarchically structured offices (each with a regulated amount of authority), and the demands of completing tasks are the keys to understanding how choices are made. March and Olsen (1979) argue, instead, that a choice results from the fortuitous coincidence of the components of an organizational system. James March (1978, 592) explains that the garbage can model emphasizes "the extent to which choice behavior is embedded in a complex of other claims on the attention of actors and other structures of social and cognitive relations." What is important in choice situations is not the interests of elites, but rather the constellation of competing demands on potential participants' time: the opportunity costs of making decisions. People cannot attend to many problems at once, do not have stable and ordered preferences, and often are unable to understand what their organizations are or should be doing. In this model, ends and means bear no obvious connection to each other, nor are action and intention always related. Instead, organizations act and produce goals only when they are chal-

[4] Even if it were impossible to find a theory of rational choice, there would still be value in creating one, if only to serve as a background against which alternative views could be compared.

lenged to render sensible accounts of their actions (Scott and Lyman 1968; March and Olsen 1979, 71–75).

The garbage can metaphor is useful because it provides a way of thinking about organizational processes that differs from deterministic models (Mohr 1982). It is especially useful for drawing attention to organizational behavior under ambiguous conditions, i.e., situations in which goals are unclear, technologies are ill defined, and rights to participate in major decisions are in flux. Rather than coordinating their behaviors so that organizations move toward well-understood ends, participants often behave in ways that reflect no plan. Situational rationality reigns in ambiguous contexts. Garbage can theory has caused us to research the conditions under which rationalist theories can explain organizational behavior and the conditions under which they cannot.

The model underestimates the importance of power in organizational life, however, and I doubt that the elements of an organizational system are as "randomly organized" as garbage can theory would have us believe. In universities (supposedly the ideal-typical organized anarchies), for example, power may be more widely dispersed than it is in an oil company, and departments may be more loosely linked than they are in an army, but it is still not usually the case that lower participants enjoy the same probability of influencing important decisions as do those at the top of the hierarchy. Although this is admittedly an oversimplification, single organizations are more accurately described as a division of labor based on legitimated authority, with the subunits designed to transform some raw material, than as a conglomeration of disjointed elements, randomly colliding in a system in which meaning is forever equivocal.

A group of organizations, however, is more like a garbage can (or a crowd), having neither an institutionalized structure to coordinate its members nor a centralized office that issues orders. Moreover, with an inter organizational garbage can, as in the first phase in Binghamton, entry and exit into decision opportunities are relatively easy, and there is no hierarchy that clearly delimits authority and power among organizations. The principles of garbage can theory are thus most applicable at the level of interorganizational analysis.

A variant of this nonrational model of decision making, specifically cast at the level of interagency relationships, has been suggested by Norton Long (1958), who analyzed organizations within communities and asserted that a local community should be conceived as "an ecology of games." Games are activities in which social players such as organizations, interest groups, and publics vie for participation. The rules of any single game are fixed and known, but the "social game," or the general creation of social order, is neither well structured nor understood by the players. A community is not a single structure of services and power; rather, organizations in a community pursue their own interests and in the process mesh their behaviors with that of others to produce social equilibrium. Because all these games (read "organizations") are relatively isolated from one another, there is scant formal coordination. Long's metaphor is problematic because it assumes, much as March and Olsen's does within organizations, that the lack of formal interagency coordination means that the distribution of power among a group of gamesters is inconsequential. Although the insights of March and Olsen and Long are most useful at the level of interorganizational analysis, their theories must be modified to accommodate the role of power in models of decision making.

The nature of power changed during the two phases in Binghamton. In the first phase, nodes of power often shifted from organization to organization in a relatively unpatterned, if not completely random, manner. Later, after most organizations had "exited" the garbage can, power became stabilized in state organizations. The kind of power in Binghamton was not the overwhelming, direct control of one actor by another (although there were significant examples of this). Instead, power was important in Binghamton because it helped to determine what would be considered the legitimate content of policies.

Gusfield (1981) studied how the popular image of the "killer drunk" was created. He found little objective evidence that drunken drivers are a major social problem. Among the most important factors that contributed to the "killer drunk" myth were the institutional interests that defined the terms of the drinking and driving debate. One consequence of the influence of various organizations on defining drinking and driving as a

social problem was that individuals are viewed as a major threat on our highways. Yet there is nothing inherent in traffic accidents that requires a focus on individual action (Gusfield 1981, 174). Other ways to name the problem might be "an unforgiving automotive design" or "a highway system that induces tragedy." Attributions of responsibility change when tragic choices (or any choices) are placed in a larger context that includes other factors.

Similarly, if control of the State Office Building's risks had been more broadly distributed, rather than the state assuming all decision opportunities, different solutions to cleanup and medical surveillance might have been applied.