Decision Th eory 261
organization’s means to its ends, and thus decisionmaking is the core administra-
tive activity and the appropriate explanatory target for any truly scientifi c theory
of administration.
Simon drew heavily from the concept of rationality to explain the process
of making choices that link means to ends. Crucially, however, he rejected the
orthodox concept of rationality and recognized that the human capability for
making rational decisions was limited, or bounded. Instead of utility maximiz-
ers, Simon described humans as satisfi cers—actors who adopt behaviors that
are “good enough” to have a reasonable probability of achieving a desired end.
Perfectly rational decisions would require information, attention, and other re-
sources that simply are not available to the average human being. A satisfi cer
needs just enough of these resources to make a reasonable connection between
action and the desired objectives.
Simon’s concept of bounded rationality presented a much more realistic
portrait of how administrators made decisions. Simon did not assume that
decisionmakers had perfect information or made decisions independent of
institutional context, historical experience, or individual values. Instead, he
portrayed administrators as decisionmakers dealing with ambiguity, the limits
of attention and time, the constraints of their own values, and any number of
the other elements that separate the messy reality of human behavior from the
cleanly logical cost-benefi t calculations of the purely rational utility maximizer.
Th e concept of bounded rationality allowed decision theory to escape the
confi ning orbit of traditional rational choice theory and move in directions that
clearly off ered more realistic descriptions of administrative behavior. Bounded
rationality underpins the “science of muddling through,” Charles Lindblom’s
(1959) description of bureaucracy’s pattern of incremental decisionmaking. In
muddling through, bureaucracy always starts with its immediate history as a
baseline for decisionmaking. Creating and justifying a budget from scratch every
year, for example, would be a very resource-intensive exercise. Beginning with
last year’s budget and making minor adjustments to fi t new priorities or altered
circumstances are considerably less resource intensive and make budgetary deci-
sionmaking a more manageable undertaking. Such incremental decisionmaking,
of course, means that some information is not gathered and some options are
not considered, so in one sense it is not a purely rational exercise. For one thing,
means and ends tend to get mixed up. In practice, however, incrementalism is
usually good enough to ensure that means are indeed connected to ends and,
most of the time, provides a reasonable description of what bureaucracies actu-
ally do.
Garbage can theory (March and Olsen 1986) also owes a considerable debt
to the concept of bounded rationality, even though in some sense it reverses the
causal assumptions embraced by Simon. Th e “organized anarchy” is the context
in which ends and means are not tightly coupled and decisionmaking is oft en
ad hoc. In organized anarchy, goals can be discovered during the process of