170 7: Decision Th eory
To this, Waldo then replied (again in condensed form):Professor Simon charges me with profaning the sacred places of Logical Positiv-
ism, and I am afraid I have. I use this fi gure of speech because Professor Simon
seems to me that rare individual in our secular age, a man of deep faith. His con-
victions are monolithic and massive. His toleration of heresy and sin is nil. Th e
Road to Salvation is straight, narrow, one-way, and privately owned.
Even if we should be inclined to elect salvation by logical positivism, the
matter is not so simple as it is represented by Professor Simon.
May I state for the record, though I had hoped that I had made it clear, that
I am not opposed to positivism and empiricism as whole bodies of thought or
techniques of investigation or action.
Th e creative processes of the mind are still a mystery and at best are merely
aided by training in logic, Professor Simon must know. Perhaps Professor Simon
needs to examine whether the logical positivism of which he is enamored has
become an obstacle in his pursuit of the science to which he is dedicated. To me,
at least, logical positivism, empiricism, and science are far from being the nearly
or wholly congruent things which they seem to be to Professor Simon. (1953)Th ese diff ering theoretical perspectives still frame the two primary bodies of
scholarship in public administration. One public administration perspective is in
the tradition of Waldo. Th is scholarship is philosophical, logical, deductive; it is a
scholarship primarily associated with the tension between democratic values and
bureaucratic behavior (Goodsell 1983; Wamsley and Wolf 1996). Th e other im-
portant perspective in the fi eld is broadly represented by Simon’s perspective, un-
derstood to be the scientifi c study of public administration. Th is study, however,
has been signifi cantly infl uenced by philosophical perspectives tracing to Waldo
(Carroll and Frederickson 2001).
In the public sector, Simon argued, decisions are made in the context of or-
ganizations that tend to stability and equilibrium. In an organization, “the con-
trolling group, regardless of its personal values, will be opportunistic—will appear
to be motivated in large part at least by conservation objectives” (1947/1997, 119).
In decision theory, therefore, it is rational for organizations to minimize risk and
to regard collective institutional survival as an end or a value (Downs 1967). Si-
mon also argued that the relationship between organizations and the individuals
in them can be understood as an equilibrium between the personal goals and
preferences of individuals and organizational needs. Both the eff ective individual
and the rational organization will tend toward conserving effi ciency; that is, they
will make decisions that will achieve as much of extant organizational preferences
and values as possible given resources and other contingencies.
We see here an important theoretical distinction between private or commer-
cial organizations in markets and the concept of market equilibrium, on the one
hand, and nonmarket public organizations and the rational conserving effi ciency