Giovanni Gavetti

Perspective---Neo-Carnegie: The Carnegie School's Past, Present, and Reconstructing for the Future

Cyert and Marchs (1963) A Behavioral Theory of the Firm and the broader Carnegie School form critical theoretical underpinnings for modern organization studies. Despite its impact, however, we suggest that researchers who rely on the Carnegie School have progressively lost touch with its defining commitment to a decision-centered view of organizations. Decision making has given way to learning, routines, and an increased focus on change and adaptation; the organizational level of analysis, although frequently invoked, has been largely supplanted by either a more micro or a more macro focus. In this paper, we argue for restoring the Schools original mission and perspective. Our proposal for how this overarching goal can be achieved encompasses three central points. First, we believe the School needs to resurrect a few select ideas that, despite their fundamental importance, have been neglected over time. Second, we believe there is a need for greater paradigmatic closure amongst the Schools central theoretical pillars. Loose coupling among such pillars might keep key insights on organizational decision making from emerging. Finally, there is the need to incorporate major developments that have been generated post-Carnegie School, both within organization theory and in the behavioral and social sciences more broadly. In particular, we point to the shift to more open systems perspectives on organizations, the conceptions of organizations being embedded in larger social contexts, and recent developments in the study of individual cognition.

The Behavioral Theory of the Firm: Assessment and Prospects

The Behavioral Theory of the Firm has had an enormous influence on organizational theory, strategic management, and neighboring fields of socio-scientific inquiry. Its central concepts have become ...

On the Origin of Strategy: Action and Cognition over Time

We develop a perspective on how managers search for a strategy. In the spirit of Cyert and March (1963), we aim for a perspective that reflects the reality of managerial behavior, that respects both the reasoning power of managers and the bounds on their rationality, and that permits organizations to change but within realistic limits. Our perspective employs the variable time to frame the question of strategys origins in a distinctive way. Over time, the cognitive and physical elements that make up a strategy become less plastic, while mechanisms to search rationally for a strategy become more available. This generates a fundamental tension in the origin of strategy: Managers struggle to understand their environment well enough to search rationally for an effective strategy before their firms lose the plasticity necessary to exploit that understanding. A focus on time allows us to synthesize and extend the evolutionary and positioning models of strategic search. Toward this end, we couple induction and deduction. The inductive part of the paper uses detailed observation of the search for a strategy at one firm to identify constructs that play a crucial role in strategic search. The deductive part steps beyond our focal firm and uses these constructs to derive theoretical propositions about the typical path of strategic search and the mortality associated with different approaches to search.

ANNIVERSARY ARTICLE: The Strategy Field from the Perspective of Management Science: Divergent Strands and Possible Integration

We reflect on the evolution of the strategy field as seen through the window ofManagement Science. Reflecting the diverse disciplinary roots of strategy research, we identify a broad-ranging body of work that varies with respect to the assumptions made regarding individual rationality and the level of analysis at which the research is carried out. We argue that recent developments begin to delineate a potentially unifying conceptual framework for treating the fields defining questions--the conceptual apparatus of evolutionary economics. We conclude by laying out important challenges for evolutionary economics if it is to serve as a foundation for both the positive and the normative research agendas of the strategy field.

Representing Is Not the Same Thing as Changing Organizations: Cyert and March Versus Simon

This book is about the business firm [modern representative firm] and the way it makes economic decisions. We propose to make detailed observations of the procedures by which firms make decisions and to use these observations as a basis for a theory of decision making within business organizations. Our articles of faith are simple. We believe that, in order to understand contemporary economic decision making, we need to supplement the study of market factors with an examination of the internal operations of the firm—to study the effects of organizational structure and conventional practice on the development of goals, the formation of expectations, and the execution of choices . . . [and] to link models of the firm as closely as possible to empirical observations of both the decision output and the process structure of actual business organization. The models were to be both explicitly based on observations of firms and subject to empirical test against the actual behavior of identifiable firms . . . The results of our efforts to develop an empirically relevant, process-oriented, general theory of economic decision making by a business firm are summarized in this book. (p. 1)