ABSTRACT
There is now a substantial body of research on the making of strategic decisions in organizations. From the early work of Simon (1947, 1960) and March and Simon (1958) to writers such as Braybrooke and Lind blom (1963); Pettigrew (1973); Mintzberg et al. (1976); Heller et al. (1983); Nutt (1984, 1993); Hickson et al. (1986); Eisenhardt (1989a) and Kriger and Barnes (1992), the emphasis has been on describing and explaining how decisions are arrived at. Though, to some extent, decision making and implementation are interwoven — some aspects of implementation may start before decision processes have been final ized and some sub-decisions may be taken thereafter — they can be distinguished for analytical purposes. Hickson et al. (1986), for example, used the point at which the decision was officially sanctioned (by the Board or CEO) to provide an empirically identifiable ‘cut-off’ point for their very extensive study of decision making which looked at the process through ‘gestation’ to ‘authorization’.
