International Relations

Image: detail from Family Portrait 2 1965  (Creative Commons license, Richard Rappaport) Herbert Simon made paradigm-changing contributions to the theory of rational behavior, including particularly his treatment of "satisficing" as an alternative to "maximizing" economic rationality ( link ). It is therefore worthwhile examining his views of organizations and organizational decision-making and action -- especially given how relevant those theories are to my current research interest in organizational dysfunction. His highly successful book Administrative Behavior  went through four editions between 1947 and 1997 -- more than fifty years of thinking about organizations and organizational behavior. The more recent editions consist of the original text and "commentary" chapters that Simon wrote to incorporate more recent thinking about the content of each of the chapters. Here I will pull out some of the highlights of Simon's approach to organizations. T...

I am currently thinking about the topic of "organizational actors", and Margaret Gilbert's arguments about social actors are plainly relevant to this topic. It seems worthwhile therefore to reproduce a review I wrote of Gilbert's book On Social Facts  (1989) in 1993. It is a tribute to the power of Gilbert's ideas that the book has much of the same power thirty years later that it had when it was first published. I also find it interesting that the concerns I had in the 1990s about "collective actors" and "plural subjects" expressed in this review have continued in my thinking about the social world through the current date. I continue to believe that constructs like collective actors require microfoundations that establish how they work at the level of individual "socially constituted, socially situated" individual human beings. I refer to this view as "methodological localism"; link . I also find it interesting that my own...

photo: Tianjin, China A group of philosophers of social science convened in Tianjin, China, at Nankai University in June to consider some of the ways that the social sciences can move forward in the twenty-first century. This was the Asian Conference on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences , and there were participants from Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. (It was timely for Nankai University to host such a meeting, since it is celebrating the centennial of its founding in 1919 this year.) The conference was highly productive for all participants, and it seems to have the potential of contributing to fruitful future thinking about philosophy and the social sciences in Chinese universities as well. Organized by Francesco Di Iorio and the School of Philosophy at Nankai University, the meeting was a highly productive international gathering of scholars with interests in all aspects of the philosophy of the social sciences. Topics that came in for discussion included the na...

Crucial to improving an organization's performance is being able to obtain honest and detailed assessments of its functioning, in normal times and in emergencies. FEMA has had a troubled reputation for faulty performance since the Katrina disaster in 2005, and its performance in response to Hurricane Maria in Louisiana and Puerto Rico was also criticized by observers and victims. So how can FEMA get better? The best avenue is careful, honest review of past performance, identifying specific areas of organizational failure and taking steps to improve in these areas. It is therefore enormously disturbing to read an investigative report in the Washington Post ((Lisa Rein and Kimberly Kindy,  Washington Post , June 6, 2019);  link ) documenting that investigation and audits by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security were watered down and sanitized at the direction of the audit bureau's acting director, John V. Kelly. Auditors in the Department of Homeland Secur...