Managing Garbage Can Hierarchies

Abstract

Thanks are due to Robert Axelrod, James G. March, Steven A. Marglin, Harrison C. White, and especially to Michael D. Cohen for their helpful comments. Support has been provided by NSF Grant SOC7624394. This article operationalizes garbage can theory into a stochastic process model for the case of a traditional Weberian bureaucracy. The purposes of the model are two: (1) to illustrate how ambiguity may impinge on decision making within a structural setting more familiar to classical organization theorists, and (2) to derive the managerial implications of garbage can theory.