ABSTRACT
Research on managerial and organizational cognition has increased dramatically since the
1980s. The importance of cognition research to management theorists is indicated by the
increase in articles on cognition in the major management journals as well as the creation
and institutionalization of a cognition interest group in the major professional association
of management scholars, The Academy of Management. This increased interest in
cognitive phenomena might have been influenced by research in other fields such as
information systems and biology, in which the 1990s was called “the decade of the brain”
by former President George Bush. One may be tempted to think that this line of inquiry in
management is a recent phenomenon. However, research on cognition in management
goes back at least 50 years to the time Herbert Simon published the first edition of
Administrative Behavior (Simon, 1947). One of the most influential publications in the
field of management, March and Simon’s (1958) Organizations set the tone in arguing
that decision making is a major explanatory variable in organization theory. Reflecting on
some 35 years of research in the field, March and Simon (1993) commented:
The central unifying construct of the present book is not hierarchy but decision
making, and the flow of information within organizations that instructs,
informs, and supports decision making processes. The idea of “decision” can
also be elusive, of course. Defining what a decision is, when it is made, and
who makes it have all, at times, turned out to be problematic. Nevertheless, the
concept seems to have serves us reasonably well. (p. 3)
March and Simon (1958) viewed organizations as information processing systems
consisting of embedded routines through which information is stored and enacted. Some
researchers have taken this to mean that organizations are systems that process and code
information in a computational manner. That is, the problem that organizations face is
one of searching and processing relevant information when such search is costly and
decision makers are boundedly rational. Other researchers interpreted March and Simon
to mean that organizations are social entities that enact their world. Some see in these
words the elements of collective mind (Garud & Porac, 1999; Sandelands & Stablein,
1987). These two views separated in the last decade into two distinct branches of
cognition research in organizations: the computational approach and the interpretive
approach. The computational stream of research examines the processes by which
managers and organizations process information and make decisions. The interpretive
approach investigates how meaning is created around information in a social context.
