Organizational process models of decision-

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.

Incrementalism (incrementalist decision-making)

Because an exhaustive analysis of the costs and benefits of every conceivable
option for dealing with a problem in public policy is often unduly time-
consuming and expensive, large organizations (and often individuals) may
 resort to a practical shortcut in deciding on possible improvements of existing
programs. Only a few of the many possible options are seriously examined, and
these tend to be ones that involve only small changes in existing policies or
procedures rather than radical innovations. Changes are thus made only "at the
margin." An example of incrementalism often cited:

Congressional budget decision-making in the U.S., where the usual

questions considered about a given (existing) agency might typically
range from whether to cut 4 or 5 percent from its budget to whether to
tack on a 5 or 10% increase. Congress very seldom stops to think
seriously about whether the agency ought to be abolished entirely as
unnecessary or harmful to the public interest or whether its
responsibilities would be better performed in some entirely different
manner by another agency. Consequently, one of the best predictors of
an agency's budget in a given year is that same agency's budget for the
year before plus or minus a small increment representing the rate of
growth or shrinkage of total government revenues.

Systems theory models of decision-making

General systems theory emphasizes the way in which organized systems
(human and non-human) respond in an adaptive way to cope with significant
changes in their external environments so as to maintain their basic structures
intact. Systems theory models of decision-making in human groups and
organizations emphasize their interaction with "outside" actors and
organizations and concentrate on identifying the particular elements in the
environment of the group or organization that significantly affect the outcomes
of its decision-making. To understand what an organization did, try to find out
what threat or opportunity it was responding to and how its pre-existing
response mechanisms worked to do this.