ABSTRACT

If a decision is really a commitment to action (see Mintzberg, Raisinghani, and Théorêt 1976), then the trace it leaves behind in an organization can range from a clear statement of intent — as in the recorded minute of a meeting — to nothing. To proceed with our research, based on the definition we were using, we made the implicit assumption that decisions inevitably preceded actions, that if an organization did something, then it must have previously decided to do so. As Barnard suggested, it was just a matter of tracking the decision down, but, on reflection, another interpretation is possible: that decisions are difficult to uncover because sometimes they don’t exist, in other words, that the relationship between decision and action can be far more tenuous than almost all the literature of organization theory suggests (Weick 1979, being one notable exception). To quote Nicolaides in his rarely cited dissertation on decision-making:

Let us consider some of the ambiguities associated with the concept of decision. For one thing, action can occur without commitment to act — as when a doctor strikes one’s knee. Even the law recognizes such a phenomenon. Section 214 of the Canadian Criminal Code states that ‘Murder is first degree when it is planned and deliberate,’ otherwise it is second degree. In other words, a person can murder without deciding. In a collective context, Swanson (1971) has described ‘commensal heteronomy,’ as a ‘set of legitimated procedures for collective action’ in which problems are informally talked over and talked around ‘until a kind of common view emerges [which becomes] the basis for action’:

For those who think this is a far cry from the behaviour of formal organizations, consider the comment by an executive of the largest corporation in the world, remarkably similar to Swanson’s words above:

But social systems can act even without censensus. The story circulated in Europe several years ago that the top management of another large automobile firm had hired consultants to find out who in their company had ‘decided’ to introduce a major new model. Perhaps someone really did decide, in a clandestine manner; the consultants would then track him or her down. But conceivably no one did. Perhaps someone merely sketched a new speculative design, someone else picked up on that to see what a mockup would look like, and, like a rolling snowball, these activities developed their own momentum: thousands of ‘decisions’ and actions later — concerning bumpers and assembly lines and advertising campaigns — a new model appeared. In effect, ‘decisions’, like strategies, can emerge inadvertently. To further complicate matters, the environment can sometimes ‘decide’ too, as we noted in our study of an architectural firm (Mintzberg et al. 1988). It was prepared to do a variety of projects, taking whatever work came along that was up to its standards. As it happens, what came along in disproportionate numbers, for a time, were performing art centres. The firm had received considerable publicity for the first one it did, and so the world of such centres beat a path to its door. In effect, the firm ceded those decisions to its clients, who chose for it by asking it to do this particular kind of work. From the firm’s point of view, its actions reflected its performance more than its decisions. One fundamental problem with decision is the difficulty of identifying commitment in the collective context of organization. Must there always be a clear point as well as a clear place of commitment? What, in effect, is commitment? Associating it with some specific document may simplify the problem of identification, but sometimes at the price of distortion. Consider the example of a company that announces the ‘decision’ to build a new factory. Tracing back, one might find the minute of a meeting in which the decision was ‘made’, which really means recorded. But perhaps the real commitment preceded that minute by six months, when the president visited the site and made up his mind. Here, then, commitment (i.e.,

decision) has to be traced back to someone’s mind, indeed perhaps even to that person’s subconscious, and that can become rather prob­ lematic. Shift this into the more complex organizational setting where the commitment must be collective, and the problem of identifying decision magnifies enormously. Given that an action was taken, and that broad support preceded it, we must find out when and where consensus emerged —for that must be the real ‘point’ of decision. Unfortunately, it may not be a point at all, but a gradually unfolding and subtle process, as the comment of the General Motors executive suggested earlier, and as Snyder and Paige (1958) noted about the United States decision in 1950 ‘to resist aggression in Korea’. The stages they identified in their research ‘do not reveal and cannot reveal when the individual decision-makers made up their minds. What is revealed is the time when group opinion coalesced and was made official . . (p. 369). In essence, commitment — and, by direct implication, decision — is an elusive concept, at the limit no more than some presumed psychological state, individual or collective. Another associated problem with decision in an organizational context is that it reinforces an undifferentiated, mechanistic image of one or few central decison-makers, thereby diverting attention from the fact that organizational actions do not always correspond directly to leadership intentions. For example, in a study of a film-making agency (Mintzberg and McHugh 1985), the formal decision was made to fund a short documentary film. But the film inadvertently ran long, and so had to be marketed as a feature. The organization ‘acted’ though the management never ‘decided’. There are other instances when a central decision is consciously subverted by others in the organization, so there is decision but no action. To explain this, conventional management theory falls back on the convenience of ‘implementation’. The ‘organization’ (meaning its top management) decided, but failed to implement its choice, but might it not be equally correct — indeed descriptively more illuminating — to say that the ‘organization’ (meaning the true collectivity) never really did ‘de­ cide’? A focus on decision can also mask the ways in which general commitments are reshaped, elaborated, and defined over time through complex processes within and without organizations. For example, a company may announce a decision to diversity its related businesses, but, over the years, based on the firms available for acquisition (and their prices) and the company’s own successes and failures with those it does buy, the result comes to look like conglomerate diversification. In effect, the pattern (the many actions, forming the realized strategy) subverted the original commitment (the single decision at the outset), indeed, ironically in this instance, probably at the management’s own hand. Thus, preoccupation with the decision runs the risk of imputing a direct relationship between the abstraction of mental intention at the individual or small group level and the concreteness of realized action at the organizational level. A great deal of real-world behaviour can get lost in between.