ABSTRACT

James March notes four outstanding issues impeding the development of a coherent and robust learning theory: (1) “whether decisions are to be viewed as choicebased or rule-based;” (2) “whether decision making is typified more by clarity and consistency or by ambiguity and inconsistency;” (3) “whether decision making is an instrumental activity or an interpretive activity;” and (4) “whether outcomes of decision processes are seen as primarily attributable to the actions of autonomous actors or to the systematic properties of an interacting ecology.” He advises that each of these concerns is part of the learning process and decisionmaking that theorists should “weave…together in a way that allows each to illuminate the others” rather than choose among them.1