Conclusions 193
institutions, and in such institutions the logic of rational self-interest is a poor
guide for either power or fairness in decisionmaking.
We return to advice from Simon.
It is not too fanciful to think of writing a history of human civilization in terms
of progress in the means of human cooperation, that is, of organization. In that
history, hierarchical and nearly decomposable systems would play a central role.
Almost from the beginning, the division of work into component tasks and the
assembly of the components into a hierarchy were discovered to be powerful
means for achieving effi cient coordination of eff ort. . . .
Gradually, increases in the demands for, and in the advantages of, more
coordination in economic activity, together with the accumulation of skills of
orga nizing, brought into existence ever-larger corporations that begin to emu-
late in size the administrative organizations of the nation-states—and we were
launched into our modern world.
Both private and public organizations have played essential roles in these
modern developments, complementing each other’s functions, learning from
each other, and, at the same time, competing for power to steer and manage the
systems that have emerged. Th at process has not reached its end and political
science and economics must continue their mutual education, with each disci-
pline learning from the other. (2000, 756)Th e principal-agent model of the logic of appropriateness perspective is no
longer applicable. From the sense-making perspective, ambiguity and uncer-
tainty are reduced in part by the norms of the institution and the level of trust
between superiors and subordinates (Brehm and Gates 2004; Dirks and Skarlicki
2004). To accommodate this shift , decision theory will necessarily require a mul-
tidisciplinary approach (Pollitt 2010). However, the fi eld still has a ways to go
in terms of incorporating insights from other disciplines. A recent empirical in-
vestigation showed that public administration actually does a rather poor job
of incorporating insights from disciplines considered the most germane to the
fi eld, namely, law, management, and political science (Wright 2011). A multidis-
ciplinary approach will require a move away from traditional decision-theoretic
frameworks—for example, the logic of consequences and the logic of appropri-
ateness. To understand how cognitive structures aff ect information processing
necessarily requires a broader theoretical approach than currently exists. We
suggest that public administration scholars would be wise to engage both theo-
retically and empirically with other disciplines in order to gain a greater appreci-
ation and understanding of the fundamentals of human decisionmaking.
As a prescription for the fi eld, we believe more scholars should be engaged
in experimental research, both in the fi eld and in the lab. Th e greatest theoret-
ical advances in decision theory, in particular from behavioral economics and