The study of cognition in organizations has burgeoned in recent years. Top-down information processing theory suggests that individuals create knowledge structures to help them process information and make decisions. While the benefits of employing such knowledge structures are widely noted, there is a growing concern that they can limit decision makers' abilities to understand their information environments and thus, compromise their decision making. This issue has captured the imagination of managerial and organizational cognition researchers. To date, their inquiry has been eclectic in focus and method. To order and advance this work, the author reviews extant research on the developmental origins and decision consequences of both the content and structure of knowledge structures at multiple levels of analysis. A host of research challenges are identified to help develop a better understanding of knowledge structure representation, development, and use in organizations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2635252.pdf

Managerial and Organizational Cognition: Notes from a Trip Down Memory Lane

1. Engaged Scholarship in a Professional School 2. Philosophy of Science Underlying Engaged Scholarship 3. Formulating the Research Problem 4. Building a Theory 5. Process and Variance Models 6. Designing Variance Studies 7. Designing Process Studies 8. Communicating and Using Research Knowledge 9. Practicing Engaged Scholarship

Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research

Team Mental Model: Construct or Metaphor?

Organizational renewal requires that a firm's top managers make timely adjustments in their mental models following significant changes in the environment. Our initial propositions about the difference between renewal and decline focused on whether similar organizations in similar contexts differ in their ability to recognize significant changes in their environments. Analysis of longitudinal data from a matched pair of U.S. railroads suggested, however, that renewal hinges not so much on noticing new conditions, but on being able to link environmental change to corporate strategy and to modify that linkage over time. In the successful company we studied organizational renewal is a continuous process of first and second order changes in cognitive maps.

/pdf/cognitive-change-strategic-action-and-organizational-renewal-1vzl5xgsh3.pdf

Cognitive change, strategic action, and organizational renewal

Change is accelerating, and as the complexity of the systems in which we live grows, so do the unanticipated side effects of human actions, further increasing complexity. Many scholars call for the development of systems thinking to improve our ability to manage wisely. But how do people learn in and about complex dynamic systems? Learning is a feedback process in which our decisions alter the real world, we receive information feedback about the

/pdf/learning-in-and-about-complex-systems-59iuqj6a45.pdf

Learning in and about complex systems

Messing about in problems

Thinking in organizations

Messing About in Problems: An Informal Structured Approach to Their Identification and Management

This paper describes research concerned with assisting groups in organizations handle their complex, ill-structured policy issues in ways which we believe are significantly different from many typical policy analysis projects. It is our belief that many systems research, operational research and management science projects have concentrated on ‘objective’, usually quantitative data at the expense of losing their clients' interest and commitment. Our work is concerned with taking account of intersubjectivity in policy analysis and evaluation. It is orientated to the construction of models that will be owned by our clients because they recognize as legitimate, and explicitly take account of, the subjective and particular knowledge of individuals within organizations. They also explicitly take account of the interaction of shared and individual knowledge as a group comes to define an intersubjective group issue.

The intersubjectivity of issues and issues of intersubjectivity

In the last couple of years, O.R. workers have expressed interest in the use of repertory grids as a part of their armoury for tackling messy problems in organizations. This paper is designed to describe some of our experiences of using grids to aid the process of problem construction. It will also express some of our views of the theoretical and technical aspects of their use for working on problems. The principles behind the use of grids invite the design of other methods for managing qualitative problem data. The paper will briefly introduce some we have found helpful.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fjors.1984.160.pdf

Sue Jones

Papers

Messing about in problems

Thinking in organizations

Messing About in Problems: An Informal Structured Approach to Their Identification and Management

The intersubjectivity of issues and issues of intersubjectivity

Using Repertory Grids for Problem Construction