Rational decision making as performative praxis: Explaining rationality's éternel retour

Organization Science

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 573-586

  Cabantous, Laure ^a   Gond, Jean Pascal ^b  

^a NOTTINGHAM UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United Kingdom)

^b HEC MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

Decision making; Organization theory; Perfomativity; Practices; Rational choice theory; Rationality

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959232751     PISSN: 10477039     EISSN: 15265455     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0534     Document Type: Article

References (139)

1. Ahrens, T., C. Chapman. 2007. Management accounting as practice. Accounting, Organ. Soc. 32(1/2) 5-31.
2. Allison, G. T. 1971. The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Harper Collins, Longman, NY.
3. ASPEN. 2001. Where will they lead? MBA students' attitude about business and society. 2001 Student Attitudes Survey: ASPEN Institute. http://www.aspenebe.org.
4. Augier, M., J. G. March. 2007. The pursuit of relevance in management education. Calif. Management Rev. 49(3) 129-146.
5. Barnes, B. 1983. Social life as bootstrapped induction. Sociology 17(4) 524-545.
6. Battilana, J., B. Leca, E. Boxenbaum. 2009. How actors change institutions: Towards a theory of institutional entrepreneurship. Acad. Management Ann. 2 65-107.
7. Bazerman, M. 2005. Judgment in Managerial Decision-Making, 6th ed. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
8. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage, London.
9. Beunza, D., D. Stark. 2004. Tools of the trade: The socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street trading room. Indust. Corporate Change 13(2) 369-400.
10. Boland, R. J, R. V. Tenkasi, D. Te'eni. 1994. Designing information technology to support distributed cognition. Organ. Sci. 5(3) 456-475.
11. Boltanski, L., L. Thevenot. 2006. On Justification. Economies of Worth. Translated by C. Porter. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. [Orig. pub. 1991. De la Justification. Les economies de la grandeur, 1st ed. Gallimard, Paris.]
12. Bourgeois, L. J., K. M. Eisenhardt. 1988. Strategic decision process ini high velocity environments: Four cases in the microcomputer industry. Management Sci. 34(7) 816-835.
13. Brunsson, N. 1985. The Irrational Organization. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.
14. Brunsson, N. 1989. The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.
15. Butler, J. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, New York.
16. Callon, M. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. J. Law, ed. Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Routledge, Boston, 196-223.
17. Callon, M. 1998. The Laws of the Markets. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
18. Callon, M. 2007. What does it mean to say that economics is performative? D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, L. Siu, eds. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 311-357.
19. Callon, M. 2009. Civilizing markets: Carbon trading between in vitro and in vivo experiments. Accounting, Organ. Soc. 34(3-4) 535-548.
20. Chia, R. 1994. The concept of decision: A deconstructive analysis. J. Management Stud. 31(6) 781-806.
21. Clark, T., G. Salaman. 1998a. Creating the "right" impression: Towards a dramaturgy of management consultancy. Service Indust. J. 18(1) 18-38.
22. Clark, T., G. Salaman. 1998b. Telling tales: Management gurus' narratives and the construction of managerial identity. J. Management Stud. 35(2) 137-161.
23. Clemen, R. T., T. Reilly. 2001. Making Hard Decisions. Duxbury Thomson Learning, Belmont, CA.
24. Cochoy, F. 2008. Calculation, qualculation, calqulation: Shopping cart arithmetic, equipped cognition and the clustered consumer. Marketing Theory 8(1) 15-44.
25. Cohen, M. D., J. G. March, J. Olsen. 1972. A garbage can model of organizational choice. Admin. Sci. Quart. 17(1) 1-25.
26. Crozier, M., E. Friedberg. 1980. Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
27. Czarniawska, B. 2001. Is it possible to be a constructionist consultant? Management Learn. 32(2) 253-272.
28. Czarniawska, B. 2003. Forbidden knowledge: Organization theory in times of transition. Management Learn. 34(3) 353-365.
29. Dean, J. W., M. P. Sharfman. 1993a. The relationship between procedural rationality and political behavior in strategic decision making. Decision Sci. 24(6) 1069-1083.
30. Dean, J. W., M. P. Sharfman. 1993b. Procedural rationality in the strategic decision-making process. J. Management Stud. 30(4) 587-610.
31. Dean, J. W., M. P. Sharfman. 1996. Does decision process matter? A study of strategic decision-making effectiveness. Acad. Management J. 39(2) 368-396.
32. DiMaggio, P. J., W. W. Powell. 1983. The iron case revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. Amer. Sociol. Rev. 48(2) 147-160.
33. Dorado, S. 2005. Institutional entrepreneurship, partaking and convening. Organ. Stud. 26(4) 385-414.
34. Eisenhardt, K. M. 1989. Making fast strategic decisions in highvelocity environments. Acad. Management J. 32(3) 543-576.
35. Eisenhardt, K. M., M. J. Zbaracki. 1992. Strategic decision making. Strategic Management J. 13(8) 17-37.
36. Elbanna, S., J. Child. 2007. Influences on strategic decision effectiveness: Development and test of an integrative model. Strategic Management J. 28(4) 431-453.
37. Elster, J. 1986. Rational Choice. Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
38. Feldman, M. S. 2000. Organizational routines as a source of continuous change. Organ. Sci. 11(6) 611-629.
39. Feldman, M. S., J. G. March. 1981. Information in organizations as signal and symbol. Admin. Sci. Quart. 26(2) 171-186.
40. Feldman, M. S., B. T. Pentland. 2003. Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Admin. Sci. Quart. 48(1) 94-118.
41. Felin, T., N. Foss. 2009a. Performativity of theory, arbitrary conventions, and possible worlds: A reality check. Organ. Sci. 20(3) 676-678.
42. Felin, T., N. Foss. 2009b. Social reality, the boundaries of selffulfilling prophecy, and economics. Organ. Sci. 20(3) 654-668.
43. Ferraro, F., J. Pfeffer, R. Isutton. 2005. Economic language and assumptions: How theories can become self-fulfilling. Acad. Management Rev. 30(1) 8-24.
44. Ferraro, F., J. Pfeffer, R. I. Sutton. 2009. How and why theories matter: A comment on Felin and Foss. Organ. Sci. 20(3) 669-675.
45. Fredrickson, J. W. 1984. The comprehensiveness of strategic decision processes: Extension, observations, future directions. Acad. Management J. 27(3) 445-466.
46. Gabriel, Y. 2002. Essay: On paragrammatic uses of organizational theory: A provocation. Organ. Stud. 23(1) 133-151.
47. Garcia-Parpet, M.-F. 2007. The social construction of a perfect market: The strawberry auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne. D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, L. Siu, eds. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 20-53.
48. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
49. Ghoshal, S. 2005. Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad. Management Learn. Ed. 4(1) 75-91.
50. Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
51. Gordon, R. A., J. E. Howell. 1959. Higher Education in Business. Columbia University Press, New York.
52. Grant, R. 2008. Contemporary Strategy Analysis, 6th ed. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK.
53. Hendry, J. 2000. Strategic decision making, discourse, and strategy as social practice. J. Management Stud. 37(7) 955-977.
54. Hodgkinson, G. P., R. Whittington, G. Johnson, M. Schwarz. 2006. The role of strategy workshops in strategy development processes: Formality, communication, coordination and inclusion. Long Range Planning 35(5) 479-496.
55. Hodgkinson, G. P., N. J. Bown, A. J. Maule, K. W. Glaister, A. D. Pearman. 1999. Breaking the frame: An analysis of strategic cognition and decision making under uncertainty. Strategic Management J. 20(10) 977-985.
56. Howard, R. A. 1966. Decision analysis: Applied decision theory. Proc. 4th Internat. Conf. Oper. Res., Wiley-Interscience, New York, 55-71.
57. Howard, R. A. 1988. Decision analysis: Practice and promise. Management Sci. 34(6) 679-695.
58. Hutchins, E. 1995a. Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
59. Hutchins, E. 1995b. How a cockpit remembers its speed. Cognitive Sci. 19(3) 265-288.
60. Janis, I. L. 1972. Groupthink. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
61. Jarzabkowski, P. 2003. Strategic practices: An activity theory perspective on continuity and change. J. Management Stud. 40(1) 23-55.
62. Jarzabkowski, P. J. Balogun, D. Seidl. 2007. Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective. Human Relations 60(1) 5-27.
63. Jensen, M. C. 1988. Foundations of Organizational Strategy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
64. Jensen, M. C., W. H. Meckling. 1994. The nature of man. J. Appl. Corporate Finance 7(2) 4-19.
65. Jodelet, D. 1991. Les Représentations Sociales. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
66. Johnson, G., A. Langley, L. Melin, R. Whittington, eds. 2007. Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
67. Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, A. Tversky. 1982. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
68. Keeney, R. L. 1982. Decision analysis: An overview. Oper. Res. 30(5) 803-838.
69. Keeney, R. L., K. E. See, D. von Winterfeldt. 2006. Evaluating academic programs: With applications to US graduate decision science programs. Oper. Res. 54(5) 813-828.
70. Kieser, A., B. Wellstein. 2008. Do activities of consultants and management scientists affect decision making by managers? G. P. Hodgkinson, W. H. Starbuck, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Decision-Making. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 495-516.
71. Kipping, M. 1997. Consultancies, institutions and the diffusion of Taylorism in Britain, Germany and France, 1920s to 1950s. Bus. History 39(4) 67-83.
72. Kipping, M. 1999. American management consulting companies in Western Europe, 1920 to 1990: Products, reputation. Bus. History Rev. 73(2) 190.
73. Langley, A. 1989. In search of rationality: The purposes behind the use of formal analysis in organizations. Admin. Sci. Quart. 34(4) 598-631.
74. Langley, A., H. Mintzberg, P. Pitcher, E. Posada, J. Saint-Macary. 1995. Opening up decision-making: The view from the black stool. Organ. Sci. 6(3) 260-279.
75. Laroche, H. 1995. From decision to action in organizations: Decisionmaking as a social representation. Organ. Sci. 6(1) 62-75.
76. Latour, B. 1992. Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. W. E. Bijker, J. Law, eds. Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 225-258.
77. Latour, B. 1994. Une sociologie sans objet? Remarques sur l'interobjectivité. Sociologie du Travail 4 587-608.
78. Latour, B. 1996. Que peuvent apporter l'histoire et la sociologie des sciences aux sciences de la gestion? (The use of science studies to renew a few questions of organization theory). Paper read at XIII Journées nationales des IAE, Toulouse, France.
79. Latour, B. 2005. Re-Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
80. Lawrence, T. B., R. Suddaby. 2006. Institutions and institutional work. S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, W. R. Nord, eds. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies. Sage, London, 215-254.
81. Lawrence, T. B., R. Suddaby, B. Leca, eds. 2009. Institutions and Institutional Work. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
82. Leavitt, H. J. 1975. Beyond the analytic manager. Calif. Management Rev. 17(3) 5-12.
83. Leavitt, H. J. 1989. Educating our MBAs: On teaching what we haven't taught. Calif. Management Rev. 31(3) 38-50.
84. Liang, N., A. Wang. 2004. Implicite mental models in teaching cases: An empirical study of popular MBA cases in the United States and China. Acad. Management Learn. Ed. 3(4) 397-413.
85. Lounsbury, M. 2008. Institutional rationality and practice variation: New directions in the institutional analysis of practice. Accounting, Organ. Soc. 33(4-5) 349-361.
86. MacKenzie, D. 2004. The big, bad wolf and the rational market: Portfolio insurance, the 1987 crash and the performativity of economics. Econom. Soc. 33(3) 303-334.
87. MacKenzie, D. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
88. MacKenzie, D., Y. Millo. 2003. Constructing a market, performing a theory: The historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange. Amer. Rev. Sociol. 109(1) 107-145.
89. March, J. G. 1962. The business firm as a political coalition. J. Politics 24(4) 662-678.
90. March, J. G. 1978. Bounded rationality, ambiguity, and the engineering of choice. Bell J. Econom. 9(2) 587-608.
91. March, J. G. 1988. The Pursuit of Organizational Intelligence. Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
92. March, J. G. 1994. A Primer on Decision-Making: How Decisions Happen. Free Press, New York.
93. March, J. G. 1997. Understanding how decisions happen in organizations. Z. Shapira, ed. Organizational Decision Making. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 9-34.
94. March, J. G. 2006. Rationality, foolishness, and adaptive intelligence. Strategic Management J. 27(3) 201-214.
95. March, J. G., J. Olsen. 1976. Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Universitetsforlaget, Bergen, Norway.
96. March, J. G., J. Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions. Free Press, New York.
97. March, J. G., H. A. Simon. 1958. Organizations. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
98. Mas-Colell, A., M. D. Whinston, J. R. Green. 1995. Microeconomic Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
99. McKenna, C. 1995. The origins of modern management consulting. Bus. Econom. Hist. 24(1) 51-58.
100. Meyer, J. W., B. Rowan. 1977. Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. Amer. J. Sociol. 83(2) 340-363.
101. Miller, S. J., D. Wilson. 2006. Perspectives on organizational decision-making. S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, W. R. Nord, eds. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies. Sage, London, 469-484.
102. Mintzberg, H., J. Waters. 1985. Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management J. 6(3) 257-272.
103. Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
104. Molloy, S., C. R. Schwenk. 1995. The effects of information technology on strategic decision-making. J. Management Stud. 32(3) 283-311.
105. Moscovici, S. 1991. Des représentations collectives aux représentations sociales. D. Jodelet, ed. Les Représentations Sociales. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 62-86.
106. Muniesa, F., M. Callon. 2007. Economic experiments and the construction of markets. D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, L. Siu, eds. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 163-189.
107. Nutt, P. C. 1976. Model for decision making in organizations and some contextual variables which stipulate optimal use. Acad. Management Rev. 1(2) 84-98.
108. Oliver, D. 1991. Strategic responses to institutional processes. Acad. Management Rev. 16(1) 145-179.
109. Orlikowski, W. J. 2000. Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organ. Sci. 11(4) 404-428.
110. Orlikowski, W. J. 2007. Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organ. Stud. 28 1435-1448.
111. Orlikowski, W. J., S. Scott. 2008. Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. Acad. Management Ann. 2(1) 433-474.
112. Papadakis, V. M., S. Lioukas, D. Chambers. 1998. Strategic decisionmaking processes: The role of management and context. Strategic Management J. 19(2) 115-147.
113. Pettigrew, A. M. 1973. Politics of Organizational Decision-Making. Tavistock, London.
114. Pfeffer, J., G. R. Salancik. 1974. Organizational decision making as a political process: The case of a university budget. Admin. Sci. Quart. 19(2) 135-151.
115. Putnam, H. 2002. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
116. Reckwitz, A. 2002. Toward a theory of social practices: A development in cultural theorizing. Eur. J. Soc. Theory 5(2) 243-263.
117. Reed, M. 1991. Organizations and rationality: The odd couple? J. Management Stud. 28(5) 559-567.
118. Rigby, D. 2001. Management tools and techniques: A survey. Calif. Management Rev. 43(2) 139-160.
119. Royer, I., A. Langley. 2008. Linking rationality, politics, and routines in organizational decision-making. G. P. Hodgkinson, W. H. Starbuck, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Decision-Making. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 250-270.
120. Savage, L. J. 1954. The Foundations of Statistics. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
121. Schwarz, M. 2004. Knowing in practice: How consultants work with clients to create, share and apply knowledge? Academy of Management Best Conference Paper 2004 MC:D2, August 6-11, 2004, New Orleans.
122. Schwarz, M. 2006. Practices of consultants in strategy making. The Crafts of Strategy. Toulouse, France, 1-26.
123. Schwenk, C. R. 1984. Cognitive simplification processes in strategic decision making. Strategic Management J. 5(2) 111-128.
124. Scott, W. R. 1995. Institutions and Organizations. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
125. Sfez, L. 1973. Critique de la Décision. Presses de la Fondation des Sciences Politiques, Paris.
126. Simon, H. A. 1955. A behavioral model of rational choice. Quart. J. Econom. 69(1) 99-118.
127. Simon, H. A. 1978. Rationality as process and as product of a thought. Amer. Econom. Rev. 68(2) 1-16.
128. Star, S. L., J. R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional ecology, "translations" and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Soc. Stud. Sci. 19(3) 387-420.
129. Starbuck, W. H. 1983. Organizations as action generators. Amer. Sociol. Rev. 48(1) 91-102.
130. Stenfors, S., L. Tanner, M. Syrjänen, T. Seppala, I. Haapalinna. 2007. Executive views concerning decision support tools. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 181(2) 929-938.
131. Sugden, R. 1991. Rational choice: A survey of contributions from economics and philosophy. Econom. J. 101(407) 751-785.
132. Thiétart, R.-A., B. Forgues. 1995. Chaos theory and organization. Organ. Sci. 6(1) 19-31.
133. Thiétart, R.-A., B. Forgues. 1997. Action, structure and chaos. Organ. Stud. 18(1) 119-144.
134. Trigo, S., D. Angwin, D. C. Wilson. 2006. Strategic decision making and management consultants. Paper read at the 22nd EGOS Colloquium, July 6-8, Bergen, Norway.
135. von Neumann, J., O. Morgenstern. 1947. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
136. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society. J. Winckelmann, ed. University of California Press, Berkeley. [Orig. pub. 1921. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.]
137. Weick, K. E. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage, London.
138. Whittington, R. 2006. Learning more from failure: Practice and process. Organ. Stud. 27(12) 1903-1906.
139. Whittington, R., P. Jarzabkowski, M. Mayer, M. Mounoud, J. Nahapiet, L. Rouleau. 2003. Taking strategy seriously: Responsibility and reform for an important social practice. J. Management Inquiry 12(4) 396-410.