Blackwell Reference Online

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March and Simon (1958) proposed that organizations can be understood as cognitive phenomena that derive from, and in turn influence, the mental models, frames-of-reference, and routinized knowledge structures of their participants. In its emphasis on knowledge representations as the basis for organizing, the Carnegie School preceded by almost twenty years a general cognitive turn that has been evident across the social sciences as a whole. Although this cognitive perspective has been elaborated and debated, it has remained fundamental to organizational theory for the past half century and has triggered robust research literatures on such topics as administrative decision-making, strategy formulation, organizational learning, and organization-environment relationships. Indeed, fueled by the growth of cognitive science, the cognitive perspective on organizations has become one generative root of modern organizational theory. Cognitive organizational theorists assume that an individual's behavior toward external stimuli is mediated by his or her cognitive representations of those stimuli. At least since Dill (1958) , scholars have recognized that this core assumption implies that how organizations respond to their environments is contingent on the environmental interpretations of key participants who are responsible for monitoring, sensing, and interacting with external constituents ... log in or subscribe to read full text