Professional Documents
Culture Documents
making
Where formal organizations are the setting in which decisions are
made, the particular decisions or policies chosen by decision-makers
can often be explained through reference to the organization's
particular structure and procedural rules. Such explanations typically
involve looking at the distribution of responsibilities among
organizational sub-units, the activities of committees and ad hoc
coordinating groups, meeting schedules, rules of order etc. The
notion of fixed-in-advance standard operating procedures (SOPs)
typically plays an important role in such explanations of individual
decisions made.
Rational-comprehensive decision-making
A theoretical model of how public policy decisions are (or perhaps ought to be)
taken. All possible options or approaches to solving the problem under study
are identified and the costs and benefits of each option are assessed and
compared with each other. The option that promises to yield the greatest net
benefit is selected. The main problem with rational-comprehensive approaches
is that it is often very costly in terms of time and other resources that must be
devoted to gathering the relevant information. Often the costs and benefits of
the various options are very uncertain and difficult to quantify for rigorous
comparison. The costs of undertaking rational-comprehensive decision-making
may themselves exceed the benefits to be gained in improved quality of
decisions.