Competition and Beyond: Problems and Attention Allocation in the Organizational Rulemaking Process

This study investigates how an organization allocates attention and generates solutions in response to new problems challenging existing routines, under the influences of different contexts surrounding problems and solutions. By examining the formation of airline safety rules by the Federal Aviation Administration, I show that although different types of problems compete for attention at the rule proposal stage when the organization searches for solutions to problems, at the rule finalization stage, attention is guided by “urgency” induced by the aggregate flow of new problems, which interacts with certain institutional factors and with an a priori “priority” given to different types of rules. The implications of the study on theories of organizational attention are discussed.