Carnegie goes to California: Advancing and Celebrating the Work of James G. March

With work spanning management, political science, sociology, public administration and education, James G. March was a founder of organization theory. Honouring his exceptional ability to go beyond the models of rationality so prevalent in much of organizational scholarship, this edited collection builds on March’s imaginative, evocative ideas and encourages others to appreciate and explore them.

Jim March left his co-authors Herbert Simon and Richard Cyert at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where they had founded what is known as the Carnegie School and moved to California in the mid 1960s. This volume highlights and builds on many of the complements and alternatives to rationality that March articulated once settled at Stanford: a technology of foolishness, garbage can models of decision making, a logic of appropriateness, organizational learning, and a variety of models of chance and luck. Employing a variety of methodological tools including models, laboratory experiments and quantitative and qualitative analysis, the chapters seek to extend our understandings of how decisions happen, how actors behave, how organizations navigate the traps of exploration and exploitation, and how we might contemplate human action in terms of truth, beauty and justice. The volume is a celebration of Jim by his students and colleagues that gives readers a sense of this extraordinary person, poet, sage and scholar.