ABSTRACT
Selznick’s model oers useful stimuli for the study of Bose, but with some important provisos. It is based upon the ‘objectivist’ presumption that it is possible to distinguish clearly (from an external researcher’s perspective) between expected, desirable consequences and unexpected, undesirable ones, harbingers of the betrayal of the organization’s original aims. I object that this is not always possible because assessment of what is, and is not, predictable and desirable is rooted in people’s mental evaluation maps. More precisely, I argue that:
1.Expected and unexpected consequences are situated along a continuum which goes from maximum predictability to maximum unpredictability, with a huge grey area in between;
2. e continuum reects the variety of cognitive maps among the actors involved in the action, in the sense that to particularly farseeing subjects some consequences seem predictable well in advance and others do not;
3. Acquiring awareness is not always a gradual process developing in an even, linear way, but proceeding by spurts and leaps, so that people may have lightning intuitions or slowly-dawning understanding of the consequences of their actions and, as a result, reconrm their initial ideas or change them;
4.In view of the fact that consequences which are positive for one person may be negative for another, the greater or lesser desirability of consequences also depends on people’s evaluation maps.
