Integrating cognition, evolution, and design: Extending Simonian perspectives to strategic organization

Several streams of research in strategic management and organizational theory build upon the early work of Herbert Simon, in particular, and the ideas of James March, Richard Cyert and the behavioral model developed by the Carnegie School in general. Yet, as we show in this paper through a variety of citation and content analyses of articles published in leading management journals, key ideas developed by Simon in his later years are for the most part either neglected (e.g. his work on docility), or misinterpreted (e.g. his work on near-decomposability). We bring to strategic organization three constructs from his later work – namely, docility, near-decomposability and artifact – and make a case for their use in future research in strategic management and entrepreneurship. The primary appeal of these constructs lies in the fact that each embodies a uniquely Simonian integration of evolution, cognition, and design, enabling us to conceptualize empirical phenomena as thick three-dimensional reality rather than thin abstractions entailed by any one of these perspectives alone.