The researchers of administrative processes have paid little attention in making unstructured and

strategic decisions, preferring instead to concentrate on routine operating decisions, those more
accessible to precise description and quantitative analysis. As a result, the normative models of
management science have had a significant influence on routine work of lower and middle levels of
organizations and almost no influence on higher levels. Most of the empirical literature are classified
into three groups: research by cognitive psychologists on individual decision making in game situations,
research by social psychologists on group decision making in laboratory, and research by management
theorists and political scientists on organizational decision making. The characteristics of strategic
decision making are indicated by analyzing 25 decision processes. The 25 descriptions suggest that a
strategic decision process is characterized by novelty, complexity, and open endedness, by the fact that
the organization usually begins with little understanding of decision situation it faces or the route to its
solution, and only a vague idea of what that solution might be and how it will be evacuated when it is
solution might be and how it will be evacuated when it is developed. The identification phase in
decision making comprises two routines: Decision recognition and Diagnosis. The heart of decision
making is the set of activities that leads to development of one or more solutions to a problem or crisis
or to the elaboration of an opportunity. The development can be described in terms of two basic
routines, search and design. Search is evoked to find readymade solutions; design is used to develop
custom-made solutions or to modify readymade ones. Selection is logically considered to be the last
step in the decision process. However, because the development phase frequently involves factoring
one decision into a series of subdecisions, each requiring at least one selection step, one decision
process could involve a great number of selection steps, many of these intricately bound up with the
development phase. Studies of strategic decision processes suggest that three sets of routines support
three central phases, Decision control routines, communication routines and political routines. Faced
with a decision situation, not only does the decision maker execute the steps leading to a solution, but
he also plans his approach and allocates the organizational resources to get there. This metadecision
making, decision making about the decision process itself, is analogous to program control in a time-
shared computer system.