Bounded Decision Rationality and the Logic of Appropriateness 187
And, in fact, an overreliance on intuition rather than the fundamentals (or
observed and measured variables) of the situation can reduce predictability
(Dawes 1979).
Loose Coupling, Garbage Cans, and Attention
To deal with complex, confusing, inconsistent, and ambiguous environments,
complex organizations decentralize, delegate, and contract out. In the language
of decision theory, this is loose coupling. Under conditions of loose coupling,
institutions trade central control, comparability, and standardization for semiau-
tonomous groups of decisionmakers organized around specializations, clientele,
or geography. And loose coupling trades high levels of overall institutional ambi-
guity for lower levels of subunit ambiguity (Cohen and March 1986). Th e initial
description of loose coupling was based on a study of American universities and
can be summed up with a now-famous saying: Th e university faculty is a group
of people held together only by their shared need for parking. As the archetype
of loose coupling, universities are made up of semiautonomous departments that
control, within certain limits, departmental curriculum, hiring, promotion, and,
at the graduate level, student admissions. Each department has constructed its
own reality, its own usable history. It is far easier for departments to wrestle with
disciplinary ambiguities, although such wrestling matches can be bloody, than it
is for entire universities to sort through their ambiguities. Indeed, Michael Cohen
and James March state that “almost any educated person can deliver a lecture
entitled ‘Th e Goals of the University.’ Almost no one will listen to the lecture vol-
untarily” (1986, 195). Th e same could be written about the speeches of corporate
executives, mayors, governors, and leaders of other complex and decentralized
institutions.
Under conditions of loose coupling, each semiautonomous group has a range
of decision discretion that it will jealously guard. Th ink of the police or the US
Marines. As it sorts through decision ambiguities and makes decisions, a de-
partment will “discover preferences through action more oft en than it acts on
the basis of preferences” (Cohen and March 1986, 3). Under conditions of loose
coupling, semiautonomous subunits may appear to make decisions at odds with
stated overall preferences. Th e reason for this is because it is true that an agreed-
upon specifi c preference at the subunit level, sorted out through experience and
action, will oft en trump an abstract preference at the institutional level, a prefer-
ence fi lled with ambiguity and competing interpretations. In the words of Cohen,
March, and Olsen, the institution “appears to operate on a variety of inconsistent
and ill-defi ned preferences” (1972, 1).
Observations of decisionmaking in loosely coupled institutional settings
would lead one to the opinion that there is little order to it. Decisionmaking
appears to be chaos. Decision theorists working from the sense-making perspec-
tive suggest that conventional decision theories are able only to see chaos. Th is is