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Keywords Decision making, Decision theory, Business administration, History
Abstract Herbert Simon's major contribution to decision-making theory is the concept of "satisficing". This was first posited in Administrative Behavior, publishedin 1947, and the book, concerned as it was with establishing a scientific approach to administrative theory, puts forward an adjustment of then-current economic theory, which viewed administrative choice as a process of maximising. While, over the ensuing decades, Simon adjusted his definitions of both "economic man" and of "satisficing" in several subsequent publications, the original exposition of these was a major contribution to the area of administrative theory. An attempt has been made here to explore what circumstances might have led Simon into putting forward the concept of "satisficing".
Introduction
In what vacuum is personality formed? Is a man's language independent of the language of his fathers; his attitudes divorced from those of his associates and his teachers? Does a man live for months or years in a particular position in an organisation, exposed to some streams of communication, shielded from others, without the most profound effects on what he knows, believes, attends to, hopes, wishes, emphasises, fears and proposes? (Simon, 1957, p. xiv).
This research project originated in an attempt to answer an apparently uncomplicated question: "What led Simon to his idea that managers 'satisfice' rather than 'maximise'?" Initially, the answer seemed equally uncomplicated: Simon's personal world view (not his personality, but the attitudes and beliefs he held) plus his education at university plus his experience at work resulted in the idea of satisficing.
However, a fuller answer has required consideration of Simon's beliefs about the acquisition, content and purpose of scientific knowledge, rationality, functionalism and positivism, the relation of scientific theories to scientific discovery, the nature of the organisational aspect of society. It also necessitated looking at the intellectual and academic milieu of Chicago in the 1930s and at Simon's place in it. And it required thinking about whether an "archaeology of ideas" is possible, and what the best method for applying such an archaeology might be. The metaphor of archaeology is a useful one in that the method used to answer the question - "What led Simon to his idea that managers 'satisfice' rather than 'maximise?" - was a process of excavation,...