Abstract
This chapter is concerned with exploring the ontology of organisational cognition (OC) through conceptual mapping in order to recognise and understand what OC really is about. The objective is not to provide a comprehensive literature review of this area, but to map the concept so that both meaning and extent of its reach can be better defined. In so doing, the article considers several perspectives under which the domain of “organisation” interacts with or relate to “cognition” (or it does not do so). A table that summarises similarities and differences among approaches is presented. Finally, the table is then used as a tool to demonstrate overlaps, gaps, and define possible directions for future research in the OC field.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Here is our list: Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Administrative Science Quarterly, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Personnel Psychology. A mainstream journal is one that usually covers research topics that are commonly accepted as being part of a field or discipline. Its articles attract, on average, more citations than others and can be identified by bibliometric indices (e.g., Davis and Eisemon 1989; Nagpaul and Sharma 1994—both in Scientometrics). In the context of this research, a mainstream journal is one that ranks atop the latest Journal Citation Report by ISI Thomson for the discipline ‘management’. We excluded journals unlikely to cover cognition because their aim seemed far from the topic (e.g., Journal of Information Technology, Omega) and those with too limited issues per year (e.g., Academy of Management Annals). We compared the 2014 ranking to previous years and the journals meeting these excluding criteria are also those that do not appear permanently in top positions. We also tried to include journals that traditionally cover cognition and have a high impact factor although they are not in the top ten (e.g., Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior).
- 2.
In this chapter the attention is limited to these four approaches, but the various combinations among the two diagrams in Fig. 15.3 can also include: (e)—organisation, an approach that uses the organisation as a conscious or unconscious benchmark to define cognition; (f)—organisation U organisation, this approach considers everything that is not organisation to define cognition but it then includes it back in; (g)—cognition, OC can be defined by everything but cognition and this is a way to define organisations as not affected by anything that can be related to cognition.
- 3.
We refer to the circumstance that sees the work of these scholars as a study of how a not better specified ‘information’ is used by the decision maker. Under this angle, it makes not difference whether the information is coming from another human being, from a computer, or any other social media. Instead, we claim this is exactly what makes organisations interesting. From a cognitive (and psychological) perspective, information coming from a social source makes the world of difference. Although partially inspired by Kahneman, Tversky and others, studies on advice giving and taking have started to unveils some of these aspects, at least from a psychological perspective (for a review, see Bonaccio and Dalal 2006).
- 4.
Menary (2010) leaves the ‘ecological’ out and substitutes it with the ‘extended’; although the extended is also very important, we believe it is rather a constituent allowing distributed system to work rather than one of the characteristics of its processes. Magnani (2007) for example, characterises two basic constituents as ‘externalising’ and ‘re-projecting’ to describe the ‘smart interplay’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998). As it is apparent in the text above, we are not discarding the extended features of cognition, rather emphasising those processes that would be particularly important to take into consideration with OC.
- 5.
This is, for example, a computer-generated message or an automatic production process that follows a routine that once required human intervention but it is currently independent from it. That would characterise the process as mostly organisational and probably only indirectly related to cognition. Vice versa, there are purely cognitive processes that cannot be related to the organisation.
- 6.
A complete coverage of the model of organisational cognition through a radical systemic perspective is out of the scope of this chapter but it can be retrieved from a paper that was recently presented at the European Academy of Management conference by Secchi and Cowley (2016).
References
Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247–271.
Artinger, F., Petersen, M., Gigerenzer, G., & Weibler, J. (2015). Heuristics as adaptive decision strategies in management. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36, S33–S52.
Augier, M. (2004). March’ing towards ‘a behavioral theory of the firm’ James G. March and the early evolution of behavioral organization theory. Management Decision, 42(10), 1257–1268.
Bardone, E. (2011). Seeking chances. From biased rationality to distributed cognition, volume 13 of Cognitive Systems Monographs. New York: Springer.
Bazerman, M. H. (1994). Judgement in managerial decision making (3rd ed.). New York: Wiley.
Bonaccio, S., & Dalal, R. S. (2006). Advice taking and decision-making: An integrative literature review, and implications for the organizational sciences. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 101(2), 127–151.
Burnes, B. (2005). Complexity theories and organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7(2), 73–90.
Cannon-Bowers, J. A., & Salas, E. (2001). Reflections on shared cognition. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22, 195–202.
Cannon-Bowers, J. A., Salas, E., & Converse, S. (1993). Shared mental models in expert team decision making. In N. J. Castellan (Ed.), Individual and Group Decision Making (pp. 221–246). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Clark, A. (1998). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7–19.
Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, H. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25.
Conte, R. (1999). Social intelligence among autonomous agents. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 5(3), 203–228.
Cowley, S. J. (2016). Cognition beyond the body: Using ABM to explore cultural ecosystems. In D. Secchi & M. Neumann (Eds.), Agent-Based Simulation of Organizational Behavior. New Frontiers of Social Science Research (pp. 43–60). New York: Springer.
Cyert, R. M. & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Davis, C. H., & Eisemon, T. O. (1989). Mainstream and non mainstream scientific literature in four peripheral Asian scientific communities. Scientometrics, 15(3–4), 215–239.
DeChurch, L. A., & Mesmer-Magnus, J. R. (2010). The cognitive underpinnings of effective teamwork: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 32–53.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. The problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gavetti, G., Greve, H. R., Levinthal, D. A., & Ocasio, W. (2012). The behavioral theory of the rm: Assessment and prospects. Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 1–40.
Gavetti, G., Levinthal, D., & Ocasio, W. (2007). Neocarnegie: The carnegie school’s past, present, and reconstructing for the future. Organization Science, 18(3), 523–536.
Gigerenzer, G. & Goldstein, D. (1996). Mind as a computer: Birth of a metaphor. Creativity Research Journal, 9(2–3), 131–144.
Gigerenzer, G., & Selten, R. (2001). Bounded rationality. The adaptive toolbox. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gioia, D. A. (2006). On Weick: An appreciation. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1709–1721.
Gioia, D. A., Thomas, J. B., Clark, S. M., & Chittipeddi, K. (1994). Symbolism and strategic change in academia: The dynamics of sensemaking and influence. Organization Science, 5, 363–383.
Healey, M. P., Vuori, T., & Hodgkinson, G. P. (2015). When teams agree while disagreeing: Reflexion and reflection in shared cognition. Academy of Management Review, 40(3), 399–422.
Hiller, N. J., DeChurch, L. A., Murase, T., & Doty, D. (2011). Searching for outcomes of leadership: A 25-year review. Journal of Management, 37, 1137–1177.
Hodgkinson, G. P., & Healey, M. P. (2008). Cognition in organizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 59, 387–417.
Hollan, J., Hutchins, E., & Kirsh, D. (2000). Distributed cognition: Toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research. In Proceedings of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) (Vol. 7 pp. 174–196). New York: ACM Digital Library.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutchins, E. (2013). The cultural ecosystem of human cognition. Philosophical Psychology, 27(1), 34–49.
Ilgen, D. R., Major, D. A., & Spencer, L. (1994). The cognitive revolution in organizational behavior. In J. Greenberg (Ed.), Organizational behavior: The state of the science (pp. 1–22). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective of judgement and choice. Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58(9), 697–721.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
Klaes, M., & Sent, E.-M. (2005). A conceptual history of the emergence of bounded rationality. History of Political Economy, 37, 27–59.
Kliger, D., & Tsur, I. (2011). Prospect theory and risk-seeking behavior by troubled firms. Journal of Behavioral Finance, 12(1), 29–40.
Klimoski, R., & Mohammed, S. (1994). Team mental model: Construct or metaphor? Journal of Management, 20, 403–437.
Latham, G. P., & Pinder, C. C. (2005). Work motivation theory and research at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 485–516.
Lemmergaard, J., & Muhr, S. L. (2013). Critical perspectives on leadership: Emotion, toxicity, and dysfunction. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
Lord, R. G., & Emrich, C. G. (2001). Thinking outside the box by looking inside the box: Extending the cognitive revolution in leadership research. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(4), 551–579.
Magnani, L. (2007). Morality in a technological world. Knowledge as a duty. New York: Cambridge University Press.
March, J. G. (1978). Bounded rationality, ambiguity and the engineering of choice. Bell Journal of Economics, 9, 587–608.
March, J. G. (1981). Footnotes on organizational change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 563–577.
March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87.
March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley.
McKinley, W., Latham, S., & Braun, M. (2014). Organizational decline and innovation: Turnarounds and downwards spirals. Academy of Management Review, 39(1), 88–110.
Menary, R. (2010). Introduction to the special issue on 4E cognition. Phenomenological Cognitive Science, 9, 459–463.
Milkowski, M. (2012). Limits of computational explanation of cognition. In V. C. Muller (Ed.), Philosophy and theory of artificial intelligence (pp. 69–84). Heidelberg: Springer.
Miller, K. D., & Lin, S.-J. (2010). Different truths in different worlds. Organization Science, 21(1), 97–114.
Mumford, M. D., Watts, L. L., & Partlow, P. J. (2015). Leader cognition: Approaches and findings. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(3), 301–306.
Nagpaul, P., & Sharma, L. (1994). Research output and transnational cooperation in physics subfields: A multidimensional analysis. Scientometrics, 31(1), 97–122.
Neale, M. A., & Bazerman, M. H. (1991). Cognition and rationality in negotiation. New York: Free Press.
Neumann, M., & Cowley, S. J. (2016). Modelling social agency using diachronic cognition: Learning from the Mafia. In D. Secchi & M. Neumann (eds.), Agent-Based Simulation of Organisational Behavior. New Frontiers of Social Science Research (pp. 289–310). New York: Springer.
Neumann, M., & Secchi, D. (2016). Exploring the new frontier: Computational studies of organizational behavior. In D. Secchi & M. Neumann (Eds.), Agent-Based Simulation of Organizational Behavior. New Frontiers of Social Science Research (pp. 1–16). New York: Springer.
Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Powell, T. C., Lovallo, D., & Fox, C. R. (2011). Behavioral strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 32, 1369–1386.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic denitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67.
Scott, W. R. (1995). Symbols and organizations: From Barnard to the institutionalists. In O. E. Williamson (Ed.), Organization theory. From Chester Barnard to the present and beyond (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Scott, W. R. (2003). Organizations. Rational, natural, and open systems (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Secchi, D. (2007). Utilitarian, managerial, and relational theories of corporate social responsibility. International Journal of Management Reviews, 9(4), 347–373.
Secchi, D. (2011). Extendable rationality. Understanding decision making in organizations. New York: Springer.
Secchi, D., & Bardone, E. (2009). Super-docility in organizations. An evolutionary model. International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, 12(3), 339–379.
Secchi, D., & Bardone, E., (2013). Socially distributed cognition and intra-organisational bandwagons: Theoretical framework, model, and simulation. International Journal of Organisation Theory and Behavior, 16(4), 521–572.
Secchi, D., & Cowley, S. J. (2016). Organisational cognition: What it is and how it works. In European Academy of Management Annual Conference, Paris, France.
Secchi, D., & Gullekson, N. (2016). Individual and organizational conditions for the emergence and evolution of bandwagons. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 22(1), 88–133.
Simon, H. A. (1955). A behavioral theory of rational choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99–118.
Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), 467–482.
Simon, H. A. (1976). How complex are complex systems. In PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, volume Two (pp. 507–522).
Simon, H. A. (1979). Rational decision making in business organizations. American Economic Review, 69(4), 493–513.
Simon, H. A. (1993). Altruism and economics. American Economic Review, 83(2), 156–161.
Simon, H. A. (1997). Administrative behavior (4th ed.). New York: The Free Press.
Vallee-Tourangeau, F., & Cowley, S. J. (2013). Human thinking beyond the brain. In S. J. Cowley & F. Vallee-Tourangeau (Eds.), Cognition beyond the brain. Computation, interactivity and human artifice. London: Springer.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vessey, W. B., Barrett, J., & Mumford, M. D. (2011). Leader cognition under threat: “just the facts’’. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(4), 710–728.
Walsh, J. P. (1995). Managerial and organizational cognition: Notes from a trip down memory lane. Organization Science, 6(3), 280–321.
Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628–652.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (1st ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Weick, K. E., & Roberts, K. H. (1993). Collective mind and organizational reliability: The case of flight operations on an aircraft carrier deck. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 357–381.
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421.
Whiteman, G., & Cooper, W. H. (2011). Ecological sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5), 889–911.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Secchi, D., Adamsen, B. (2017). Organisational Cognition: A Critical Look at the Theories in Use. In: Cowley, S., Vallée-Tourangeau, F. (eds) Cognition Beyond the Brain. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49115-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49115-8_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49114-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49115-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)