Administrative Decision Making

THERE is no need, at this late date, to justify the study of organization and administration in terms of the decisionmaking process, for decision-making concepts and language have become highly popular in writing about administrations This paper will describe some of the progress that has been made over the past quarter century, employing this approach, toward deepening our scientific knowledge-what new facts have been learned about human behavior in organizations, what new scientific procedures for ascertaining facts, what new concepts for describing them, and what new generalizations for explaining them. This progress extends both to descriptive and normative matters: to the pure science of administration, and its application to the practical business of managing. To satisfy limits on this journal's space, your patience and my time, the account will be highly selective. Only a few notable and significant advances have been selected; others for which equally plausible claims might be made are ignored. A frequent practice in the social sciences is to bemoan our present ignorance while making optimistic predictions about future knowledge. It is a pleasure to survey an area of social science where, by contrast, we can speak without blushing about our present knowledge-indeed, where only a small sample of the gains in knowledge that have been achieved in the past quarter century can be presented.