Here, at Talking About Organizations, we pay homage to a great intellectual tradition by bringing you a dedicated series of episodes on the pioneering works and ideas that came out of the Carnegie Mellon School.

The Carnegie Mellon School refers to a group of scholars that have worked/studied/were associated with the Graduate School of Administration (GSIA) of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in the of 1950’s and 1960’s. Its main exponents (but not the only ones!) are James March (‘the’ star in organization theory still alive); Herbert Simon (Nobel laureate for the work on decision making / boundary rationality); and Richard Cyert (not only a great academic but also the Dean and person behind the transformation of Carnegie from a technical school to a major university as it is today).

The work of these authors is clearly important to organization and management issues but it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries having had an impact in economics, public policy, computer science, psychology and others. As a matter of fact, the school was founded on the idea that “to explain organizations, it was necessary to have an integrative understanding of how psychology, economics, sociology, and political science all shape organizational decisions and outcomes”.

Listen below for more information about the Carnegie-Mellon School from Miranda:

Current episodes in this series:

4: Carnegie Mellon Series #1 – Organizational Routines - In our first episode on the Carnegie-Mellon School, we examine selected passages from March & Simon's book Organizations and Cyert & March's book A Behavioral Theory of the Firm to address the rise of scholarly thought on matters of organizational routines Continue Reading

19: Carnegie Mellon Series #2 – Exploration and Exploitation of Knowledge - In this episode, we read James March's widely cited article, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” published in 1991 in the journal Organization Science. In the paper, March considered the relationships between exploration of new ways of doing things and the exploitation of accepted, standard practices for organizational learning. Continue Reading

29: Carnegie Mellon Series #3 – Designing Business Schools — Herb Simon - We discuss Herbert Simon’s article “The Business School: A Problem in Organizational Design,” published in 1967. This was written at a time when the business school enterprise was facing difficulties and wrestling over its identity. The paper framed these challenges as a design problem relating to a business school's purpose, what the business school should teach to its students, and what type of faculty would be needed to fulfill the purpose. Continue Reading

39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 – Organizational Choice - The podcasters discuss a fascinating article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” published in Administrative Science Quarterly back in 1972 by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen. This is another episode from the Carnegie-Mellon University tradition, alongside Episode 4 on Organizational Routines and Episode 19 on Organizational Learning. This installment addresses organizational decision making and choice and, like the others in this series, it changed the way people think about organizations and organizational behavior. Continue Reading

42: Carnegie Mellon Series #5 – Organizational Learning - We discuss Barbara Levitt and James G. March’s article “Organizational Learning,” published in the 1988 edition of the Annual Review of Sociology. Although the authors hailed from Stanford University in California, we have included this episode in our Carnegie-Mellon Series because of James March’s involvement and perspectives on organization that clearly influenced the article. This work was a literature review across various streams in organizational learning up through the 1980s. Topics include learning from experience,… Continue Reading

85: Carnegie-Mellon Series #6 — Organizations - In this episode, we discuss the second edition of James March and Herbert Simon’s classic text 'Organizations.' In addition to the well-known concepts such as bounded rationality and satisficing, the book introduces an important critique of the mechanistic view that “classic” organization theory to that point approached organizations and its members. How do decisions get made? What causes individuals or join, stay in, or leave organizations? What about the causes and effects of conflict? We… Continue Reading