Research Notes and Comments

A Bibliographical Essay on Decision Making

IT has been said that administration is the critical organizational process, making possible production, procurement, and the rest; that leadership is the heart of administration; and that decision making is the key to leadership. Inherent in these statements are some remarkably accurate characterizations of current administrative theory. One thing they seem to imply is a coherence and a unity in administrative theory which do not seem to exist. When one attempts to assay the literature dealing with a concrete administrative process such as decision making, he discovers this. Divergent approaches to the study of decision making show that there are conflicting conceptions of its nature and function. And these probably are symptoms of a more fundamental conflict in contemporary administrative theory. Administration and leadership as foci for study have traditionally been the concern of historians, occasional novelists, and students of management, public and private. A generation ago these people had articulated a consistent, rather comprehensive conception of leadership, and especially administration. The Papers of Gulick and Urwick, for example, were regarded by many of us as a major conceptual achievement setting forth a twentieth-century theory of organization. Even as these ideas were gaining acceptance, however, the concepts that would replace them were emerging. After World War I, even before the
'The authors wish to express their appreciation to Professor Paul Wasserman for access to Decision-Making: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 1958 by the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration, Cornell University, and to Dr. Martin Shubik for his helpful criticisms.

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ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY

appearance of the Papers, industrial sociologists,