262 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
taking action, or even aft er an action is completed. Th is veers from the purposive,
means-ends process Simon put at the heart of administration, but takes seriously
the ambiguity a satisfi cer has to face in reality. As a realistic description of how
universities and other public institutions actually operate, the organized anarchy
of the garbage can seems uncomfortably close to the truth.
Th e multidisciplinary nature of decision theory opens the fi eld to changes in
all directions. As we discussed in Chapter 7, the tenets of bounded rationality
have been seriously challenged on the basis of recent work in psychology, social
psychology, and even neuroscience. Whereas bounded rationality would predict
policy change owing to new information, the tenets of “predictable irrationality”
or nonrational behavior put forth by such scholars as Amos Tversky and Daniel
Kahneman suggest that biases in information processing can also prevent change
in such instances.
Decision theory has clearly succeeded in categorizing the confusing internal
processes that determine the behavior of public agencies into something ap-
proaching a coherent and understandable framework. Bits and pieces of decision
theory have also been graft ed onto management theory and employed as useful
heuristics to guide administrative action. Th us far, however, it has not fulfi lled
the positivist promise Simon saw in its initial development. Th e emerging fi eld
of predictable irrationality or “new decision theory” is reshaping the predictive
capacity and empirical warrant of decision theory as displayed in Table 10.1. Th e
explanatory capacity is also mixed to low given the limitations of bounded ratio-
nality as a framework for not only predicting human decisionmaking, but also
explaining the actual biological and cognitive processes involved in decisionmak-
ing. Th e source of this mixed performance can be traced to Waldo’s primary criti-
cism of Administrative Behavior: Th e theory it proposed relied on separating facts
from values. Th is, Waldo suggested, was a project doomed to repeat the failure of
the administration-politics dichotomy. Bounded rationality might be employed
to create a more realistic description and understanding of administrative behav-
ior, but its predictive power and its ability to generate universal axioms are always
going to be weakened by the caprice of human unpredictability. Th us far, even
though decision theory has struggled to prove Waldo incorrect, there is hope
pending in the ability of the fi eld to adopt a more interdisciplinary theoretical
approach, as well as greater use of experimental methodology.
Rational Choice Th eory and Irrational Behavior
Rational choice (also known as public choice) is premised on the belief that the
central behavioral assumption of neoclassical economics is universal, that is, that
rational self-interest is the primary motivator of purposive action. More specifi -
cally, rational choice has two central assumptions: (1) individual utility maximi-
zation, which assumes that individuals know their preferences, can rank those
preferences, and, where choices are available, will pick the option that fulfi lls