(MIS)UNDERSTANDING COGNITION IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES

PII: S0956-5221(98)00014-1

Scand. J. Mgmt. Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 309—329, 1998 ( 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain 0956—5221/98/$19.00#0.00

(MIS)UNDERSTANDING COGNITION IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ANTONIO STRATI Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, ºniversity of ¹rento, Italy

Abstract — The article assesses the contribution made by cognitivist studies to the renewal of organizational theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s and highlights a number of ambivalences in the cognitivist approach. On the one hand, the innovations wrought by the works of Simon, Cyert and March, and Weick have focused organizational analysis on organizational thought, which became a mainstay in the paradigmatic polemic against positivism and structuralism in organizational analysis. On the other hand, the criterion of scientificity, the measurement of the thoughts of organizational actors, and the importance assigned to strategic decision makers in organizations, tie this approach to the rationalist, positivist and structuralist conception that was characteristic of the dominant paradigm in organizational studies and theories until the 1970s. ( 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Key words: Organizational cognition, organizational cognitivism, organizational thinking.

INTRODUCTION The study of organizations in terms of the cognitive processes of the actors operating in them has recently been attracting particular interest. Consider, for instance, the 1989 and 1992 special issues of the Journal of Management Sciences, or of Organization Science of 1994. Previously, in 1986, Henry Sims Jr. and Dennis Gioia had edited a collected volume, ¹he ¹hinking Organization, which enjoyed considerable success. Other books are indicative of this concern, notably ¹hinking in Organizations (1979) by Colin Eden, Sue Jones and David Sims, and the anthology edited by Anne Huff Mapping Strategic ¹hought (1990). Surveys of the organizational cognitivist literature have been published in Organization Studies (Schneider and Angelmar, 1993), in Organization Science (Walsh, 1995) and in the Handbook of Organization Studies (Tenbrunsel, Galvin, Neale and Bazeman, 1996). What is it that has aroused so much interest? To be sure, cognitive elements and forms, the processes by which organizational actors think about the organization and organizing, are a central component of organizational analysis. But cognitivism has no monopoly in these matters. Other approaches to organizations, from organizational symbolism (Turner, 1990) to organizational learning (Gherardi, 1995; Weick and Westley, 1996) centre on organizational thought. What, therefore, gives cognitivist studies of the organization their specificity? To focus the topic more clearly, I present the following dilemma. It has been argued, and with good reason, that cognitivist studies are part of the symbolic and cultural approach (Smircich and Cala`s, 1987). But there are a number of important elements that symbolists (Jones, 1996) cannot share with cognitivists. First, there is cognitivism’s crucial linkage with the myth of rationality in organizational theories, a myth profoundly undermined by 309

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studies of emotions in organizational life (Putnam and Mumby, 1993), which are central to the symbolic and cultural approach. Second, the identification of organizational thinking as a theme central to the understanding of organizations has been disputed by analyses conducted on the level of pathos and aesthetics (Gagliardi, 1996; Strati, 1996a; White, 1996). Third, there are no privileged and predetermined subjects of study in the symbolic and cultural approach. The question posed above can be formulated in different terms. The investigation of mental representations of organizational phenomena has been discussed with great clarity by Richard Cyert and James March in A Behavioral ¹heory of the Firm (1963). Besides Cyert and March’s book, the cognitivist analysis of organizations originated in the writings of Herbert Simon (1947, 1956) and Karl Weick (1969). These authors exerted a profound influence on organization scholars, and helped to bring radical renewal to the contents and confines of organizational theories. In subsequent organizational analyses and theoretical debate there has been a mounting, albeit uneven and scattered, interest in organizational thought. However, although the qualitative analysis of the organization has managed to escape the marginal position into which it was forced by quantitative analysis, the same cannot be said of cognitivist analysis. The latter still relies crucially on measurement. And, around it, a debate has been conducted on the greater sophistication of measurement methods (Bougon, 1992), although scholars who attribute less importance to causal relationships have voiced their concern about measurement (Eden, 1988; Eden, Ackermann and Cropper, 1992; Fiol and Huff, 1992). Consequently, one may argue that cognitivist studies have directed their attention principally to the measurement of the thoughts of organizational actors (Strati, 1996b). These two examples show that cognitivist studies of the organization appear to be marked by ambivalence with regard to the rationalist, positivist and structuralist paradigms, and to the breakdown of these paradigms brought about by the shift in emphasis towards the ‘‘soft’’ analysis of organizational thinking. This ambivalence probably accounts for the fact that this current of study has not developed a full-fledged approach to the study of organizations, nor did it perform a major role in the renewal of organizational theories in the 1970s and 1980s, although it had the potential to do so. Is the situation any different today? Now, that the conflict over renewal of the methodology has abated, have cognitivist organizational studies acquired stability, and are there signs that an accredited approach to organization studies is emerging? The answer is probably ‘‘yes’’. Once again ambivalence works in favour of the cognitivist current, legitimizing it on both sides of the paradigmatic controversy. Its institutionalization, as reported by the publications mentioned earlier, apparently confirms this verdict. This process, however, does not seem to have given rise to profound renewal or innovation in organization studies. Instead, it seems that it is the paradigmatic fragmentation characteristic of organizational study in the 1980s and 1990s (Gherardi, 1989; Gherardi and Turner, 1987) that has helped the cognitivist approach to consolidate itself among the numerous approaches that constitute organizational theories and management studies. These, therefore, are the arguments that I shall put forward in this article. I shall do so by describing the stages in the organizational debate which seem to me to illustrate, in a meaningful way, the areas in which ambivalence has favoured the consolidation of cognitivism in organization studies. The first of these stages concerns the innovative impact of the shift towards cognitive processes as the core of organizational analysis, from the Second World War until the early 1970s. The other stages concern more recent writings.

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I shall seek to show that methods of measuring organizational thought have increased in sophistication. I shall also illustrate how the concept of cognition has been extended from organizational thinking to embrace feelings, the mind and the heart. I shall draw a number of parallels: regarding measurement and scientificity with the ‘‘ante litteram’’ cognitivism of Frederick Taylor, and regarding ‘‘hot’’ cognition and feelings in organizations with the symbolic and cultural approach to the study of organizations. My purpose will be to highlight the ambivalence of cognitivist studies vis-a% -vis both the rationalist, positivist and structuralist paradigm and the innovative proposals that contested its supremacy.

THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF COGNITIVISM IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES In this Section I shall examine the ideas set out in three books, namely Simon (1947), Cyert and March (1963) and Weick (1969). These ideas constitute the theoretical basis on which the introduction of cognitivism into organizational and managerial theory has rested. They aroused controversy, they produced innovations, they affected organizational theories. They exerted, that is to say, a wide and significant influence on organizational studies without giving rise to a cognitivist approach to organizational analysis. These three books, published over a period of 20 years, contain elements which underpin the cognitivist tradition in the study of organizations. They are widely known, and I shall cite the theoretical proposals set out in them which, in my view, may engender the possible affirmation of a cognitivist approach. The innovation brought by these three books in organizational theories was the placing of organizational thought, the mind, the subjective, at the centre of organizational analysis. What image of organizational thought emerges in these books? How is the concept of cognition defined? How does reference to it arise? With regard to what, and within what limits, is the notion of cognition in organizations delineated? Cognition as a concept to use in studying the area between the rational and the non-rational In the introduction to the second edition (1957) of his 1947 book, Herbert Simon, an outstanding polemicist, reconsiders some of the themes that were debated after the publication of the first edition. He writes that the organization is no longer viewed as a set of compartments ordered according to an abstract architectonic pattern, as propounded by Urwick and other representatives of the classical school. An organization should instead be defined as a complex system of communicative and other relations. This system arises among people, and provides them with information, premises, goals and attitudes which influence their decisions, as well as their expectations with regard to others. The core of this complex system is the decision-making process, wrote Simon in the introduction to the first edition. However, decisions cannot be used as the elementary units of organizational analysis. Decisions, in fact, stem from a process in which premises are posited and conclusions are drawn. It is the decision premise that Simon indicates as the unit of analysis, thereby assigning it a pre-eminent position in the study of the decision-making process. He emphasizes that decision premises may be extremely diverse and numerous, and it is this characteristic that gives complexity to decision making. He indicates the flow of decision

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premises and the way in which they combine to influence the decision-making process in organizations as the principal area of inquiry for organizational analysis. Now, Simon asks, are the flow of decision premises and their convergence on the decision process based on a conception of cognition reduced to affective states, as the Freudian tradition of social psychology suggests? Or are they based on an omniscient rational cognition which possesses a complete set of coherent preferences and is consequently able to choose among alternatives, which is capable of complex calculations and able to assess the likelihood that decisions will maximize outcomes, as the economic tradition contends? The answer is ‘‘no’’ in both cases. Herbert Simon asserts that another conception of cognition is required, one which views people as possessing bounded rationality only, and which allows for the study of the area between the rational and non-rational aspects of social behaviour in organizations. In this way, diversity among economic actors can be explained, as Simon stressed (Simon, Egidi, Marris and Viale, 1992) some 40 years later. Cognition as decision-relevant information Also Cyert and March (1963) propose a new and alternative approach to organizations. They begin by stressing their disagreement with the economic theory of the firm, observing after Papandreou (1952), that the main shortcoming of that theory is its failure to consider the firm as an organization. They draw on Gordon (1948) and Cyert, Simon and Trow (1956) to show the wide divergences between theory and reality in the economic treatment of the way in which firms deal with uncertainty and make their decisions. Referring to Machlup (1946), they note that, in the various arguments advanced in discussing the theory of the firm, costs, earnings and profits, i.e. the magnitudes treated by the marginal economic theory of the firm, are perceived and envisaged by entrepreneurs, i.e. by the people whose decisions and actions are to be understood and explained. These are therefore subjective and not objective magnitudes—the fruit of suppositions, of impressions and of subjective estimates. What is needed, Cyert and March argue (1963, p. 19), is the construction of a theory that takes (1) the firm as its basic unit, (2) the prediction of firm behavior with respect to such decisions as price, output, and resource allocation as its objective, and (3) an explicit emphasis on the actual process of organizational decision making as its basic research commitment.

In organizations, deciding means choosing among a set of alternatives formulated on a basis of the information available. And choosing means identifying goals. These impose a set of constraints on an organization through bargaining. The constraints denote the nature of an organization: a coalition of people with different demands and varying interests unable to examine all and every organizational problem in a coherent and orderly manner and incapable of ever wholly resolving their internal conflicts. Here, as Cyert and March point out in the epilogue to the second edition of their book (1992), one discerns the three ideas—already anticipated by Coase (1937), Simon (1947) and Marschack (1955)—that underpin their theory of the behaviour of firms: bounded rationality, unresolved conflict, and imperfect environmental matching. Moreover, following another innovation introduced by Simon into organizational studies, Cyert and March put particular emphasis on organizational communication. The decision process is influenced by the distortions that occur during the transmission of information—distortions due to the diverse perceptions of the various sub-units operating in the organization, or to deliberate intent, or to the counter-distortions and interpretative adjustments made by those parts of the organization that receive the information. An organization is a coalition of people wholly accustomed to

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communication, so that even if a complex organization contains major sources of distortion, communication is never impossible. Consequently, the prime focus of organizational studies should be on goal formation, on the development of strategies, and on the taking of decisions on a basis of these strategies. Profit maximization or any other single and universal goal is no longer tenable. Nor are strategies determined univocally by the market, or at any rate by the external environment. An organization seeks to cope with external conditions by means of observation and interpretation. It searches for information, processes it and communicates it. Analysis should therefore address the manner in which collective goals are defined, developed and adjusted, as well as the manner in which conflicts of interest within organizations engender change. Likewise, if one hypothesizes that the firm can influence the environment, then one must study how it elaborates decision rules or strategies, beginning with those that are taken as given and those which can be altered. Once goals and decision rules have been identified, the firm can be treated as a system in which information is processed and decisions are taken. This is the organization. As a consequence of this definition of the organization, research should investigate how organizations procure information, where they obtain it, how they transmit it internally, how they reach decisions, and how these decisions are implemented. Organizations generally collect much less information than is actually available. Selection processes are therefore extremely influential when it comes to the final decision. They are influential at the beginning of the decision process, and equally so as information is broadcast internally to the organization, by virtue of errors, conflicts of interest or urgency. Also, influential are the previous experience of the decision-makers, their expectations and reference groups, as well as the so-called ‘‘inertia’’ of organizations and their routine procedures for informationprocessing. Goals, expectations, choices and control are the cornerstones of the new and alternative theory of the behaviour of firms. Cognition does not entail the existence of an organizational mind Collective goals raise a central issue for organizational scholars: the relationship between individual and organization. It is individuals, not collectivities, that have goals. Goals are believed, rightly or wrongly, to arise in the minds of people. Must we therefore postulate that organizations have minds, if we are to talk about organizational goals? Certainly not, say Cyert and March, although it should be stressed that: (1) goals are the outcome of continuous processes of bargaining and learning which make them incoherent; (2) decision-makers agree on goals especially when they are highly ambiguous; (3) even in these cases one finds deep disagreement and much uncertainty when analysing the positions taken up by decision-makers on sub-goals; (4) most goals are not outright imperatives, but rather aspirations whose height depends on experience; (5) goals vary according to experience, and every form of experience gained in an organization is able to shift the focus of the decision makers’ attention onto particular goals; (6) the centre of attention highlights the ability of an organization to handle sharply contrasting goals; (7) goals are much more stable than they would be if they depended solely on constant bargaining among decision-makers; consequently, they constitute those precedents

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that make up the memory of organizations, which is binding on the people who belong to the coalition which decides the organization’s goals. Cognition as a concept to use in studying organizational learning An organization also learns. Once again, this process is not assumed to work in the same way as learning by human beings — which would be an unduly ingenuous view of organizational thought. An ‘‘organizational mind’’ is not postulated, nor is a mere parallel drawn with human learning. It is a question of the adaptation at the aggregate level of the organization’s goals, attention rules and search rules: ‘‘Just as adaptations at the individual level depend upon phenomena of the human physiology, organizational adaptation uses individual members of the organization as instruments’’, observe Cyert and March (1963, p. 123). Thus is formulated one of the key concepts in the theory of the behaviour of firms, one of the four major relational concepts in addition to the exhaustive variable categories that modify an organization’s goals, expectations and choices, namely organizational learning. Together with quasi-conflict resolution, uncertainty avoidance and problemistic search, this concept forms the nucleus of Cyert and March’s theory of decision making as the focal node of organizations. This nucleus comprises the central phenomena of organizational life, phenomena which are examined by theoretical models in terms of the language of a computer program. Organizations adjust their goals by learning from their previous experience of a given goal, and from the experience of other organizations with other goals. According to their abilities, it is this that induces them to revise their goals. Organizations learn what they should seek to achieve in the external environment. They also learn to concentrate on certain parts of the external environment and to ignore others. They assess their own performance, thereby learning to make certain choices rather than others. They moderate their sensitivity to outside comparisons, thereby learning to concentrate on comparable characteristics, on analogies with other ways of organizing, on compatibility with particular parts of the environment rather than others. Moreover, by altering their search rules — which are oriented by a certain problem and therefore liable to change — they learn the language with which to communicate information relative to alternatives and consequences. That is, they learn a code which is equally subject to constant modifications according to experience. Cognition as a process which reduces the ambiguity of information In the epilogue to the Italian edition of the second edition of his book ¹he Social Psychology of Organizing published in 1969, Karl Weick (1993a) emphasizes that he envisaged the psychology of organizations as a distinct and entirely new field of inquiry; a new area of organizational analysis which sought to demonstrate: (1) that people make sense of the events that happen to them in their organizational experience, and they do so by means of the individual activity of attributing meaning; but this activity, in organizations, becomes a collective activity of meaning construction; (2) that it is necessary to give meaning to some organizational events only and therefore to select one meaning among the numerous different versions of an event, while other events can be set aside for later examination, taken for granted, or, more simply, ignored; (3) that all this occurs in the minds of people and not elsewhere;

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(4) that one of the ways in which meaning is attributed to a situation is conversation with other people in order to develop an interpretation, or to articulate it, or to converge on an interpretation. This interpretation, however, is not ephemeral or occasional; rather, it is a stable interpretation of what has happened, and it is a constant topic of discourse. Consequently, on a basis of the fundamental hypotheses of social psychology and their emphasis on cognitive processes in the study of organizations, the focus of organizational analysis and conceptions of organization have shifted radically. Organizations operate on the basis of ambiguous and uncertain information about the materials to be processed, about the customers to do it for, about the tasks to perform, about trade union relations. This information establishes diverse rather than univocal frames of organizational action, and the members of an organization spend much of their time discussing which of these is the most acceptable and choosing among their possible meanings. The aim of organizing is to establish a certain degree of certainty, to reduce the range of possibilities, to reduce the amount of ambiguity to a level which people are accustomed to and which enables them to work. Moreover, organizations themselves are often the source of ambiguity and the cause of diverse interpretations. The point, writes Karl Weick (1979, p. 23), is that most collectivities and most objects on which collectivities work can be made sensible in a wide variety of ways. Furthermore, the various versions are relatively equivalent in their reasonableness. Organizations continuously make different kinds of sense of their inputs and of themselves.

The sequence of organizing is therefore the following: enigmatic raw data, attempts by people to transform these into information, the imposition of meaning onto these enigmas. This imposition is temporarily visible in what is done. Organizations constantly attribute meanings both to their inputs and to themselves. They thus handle some ambiguities, neglect others, and create further ones. They seek to handle the flow of experiences that traverses them, because ‘‘any organization is the way it runs through the processes of organizing’’ (Weick, 1969, p. 90). Organizations likewise also try to stabilize the currents of activity stemming from the management of these flows. This stability or organization exists in the minds of the organizational actors. Which means, says Weick (1979, pp. 11—12), that this imagery implies that there is not an underlying ‘‘reality’’ waiting to be discovered. Rather, organizations are viewed as the inventions of people, inventions superimposed on flows of experience and momentarily imposing some order on these streams.

Here one may note some distance from Herbert Simon’s concept of cognition, because his was more positivistic and realistic in character. The organizational ‘‘reality’’ is a social construction, says Weick according to Ball (1972), Berger and Luckmann (1967), Jones and Day (1977), and McLeod and Chaffe (1972). People construct, re-construct, and destruct the ‘‘objectivity’’ of their organizational life while managing organizations. This objectivity also applies, even if it lies only in their imagination, as suggested by Simmel (1959), and depends on the negotiation processes between them. Referring to Gruber and Vone`che (1977), Weick (ibid., pp. 165—166) stresses that organizational ‘‘knowledge is an activity in which the subject partly interacts with and constitutes the object’’: people’s surroundings are an objective, ‘‘material’’ output of their organizational activities, and not just specific and diverse definitions of an environmental input. Through this ‘‘reciprocal influence between subjects and objects’’, the organizational actors ‘‘enact’’ rather than ‘‘enthink’’ the environment. ‘‘Notice, however’’, advises Karl Weick (ibid., p. 12), ‘‘that many portions of the streams of experience will remain unorganized’’, and they will remain enigmatic.

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Cognition as the reflection that follows action Weick (1993a) stresses that a number of ideas that had been parts of chapters in the first edition of ¹he Social Psychology of Organizing were developed until they constituted chapters in their own right in the second. These were the concepts of enactment, selection and retention, and the dynamics between them that give rise to a complex and diversified set of frames, each designed to describe the structural complexity of the organization. Among these was also the concept of the causal map of cognitive processes. Referring to these ideas, I would stress that: f The unit of analysis of organizational research is the interaction among cognitive processes. These processes take place in the minds of individuals and they are determined by other people: people with whom one works in an organization or who, more simply, happen to be around, as well as that potential public which is not effectively present but which, nevertheless, influences the formation and evolution of organizational cognition. f Cognitive processes follow, rather than precede, action. It is, in fact, organizational action that creates opportunities for reflection, not the other way round, and cognition ‘‘may make sense of what has happened rather than what will happen’’, remarks Weick (1969, p. 30). Cognition in organization studies is therefore a concept based on individual retrospective reflection, which seeks not to uncover some order internal to acquired experience but to impose order upon it. f Order does not exist beyond the practices with which the members of an organization describe, justify and legitimate their experiences. It is established by means of soliloquy, for example, which is a monologue of action, since it is action that guides and defines cognition. But it is principally created by dialogue, since it is conversation that provides opportunities for cognitions to be defined and systematized: ‘‘the action of talking is the occasion for defining and articulating cognitions’’ (Weick, 1979, p. 165). f In this process, the attribution of meaning takes place in the mind of the individual, who draws on previous experiences and a quantity of possible reconstructions of them, all individual. However, the raw material which constitutes the enigmatic input into the organization, and which is processed, schematized and simplified by the individual’s mental processes, gives rise to rational interpretations of experience that are collective. Organizing resembles the activating of a series of trustworthy recipes (Schutz, 1964). These recipes serve as an interpretative scheme, automatically able to explain what people are doing and why. f Meaning is created in organizations by extracting sense from ambiguity. A group constructs an ambiguous discourse; this discourse is examined retrospectively; it is assigned a meaning from among those possible, and is then stored in the form of knowledge in the organizational memory. f When people try to give meaning to relations in an organization, they examine the interdependencies among diverse elements and causal cycles. These are the interpersonal ties that hold an organization together; the reciprocal influences among pairs of individuals which engender the forms of organizational control observable in larger aggregations; the self-regulated activities that have their own mechanisms of self-correction. They are the interdependencies that arise from causal chains and circuits which have implicit forms of control, since mediated interaction (Guetzkow, 1961), i.e. interaction that requires recourse to some type of mediation among dependence relations, is the distinctive feature of organizations. Causal links, circular patterns and chains of interdependence are the subject-matter of organizational analysis.

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The attribution of causality to one event rather than another in the interdependence relation is arbitrary, because no element in a causal cycle controls another without being controlled by this in turn. Consider, for example, power in organizations. It is not easy to establish whether such power attaches to those who occupy positions of command, or to those who decide whether or not it is to be effectively implemented (Barnard, 1938). The event posited as the cause in the causal cycle ends by being affected by the changes that it has engendered. Interconnected events, the events that occur within certain confines, their sequences, their paths, their time, are the patterns of organizational life. In combination with the interrelations among them, these give rise to the causal map. A map is a circular mode of thought. Meaning constructs are rarely put to the test. We need only consider one of the ambiguities that constitute the linking theme of Weick’s book: the way people overestimate the extent to which others agree with them. This is an illusion which is rarely dispelled because it is almost never put to the test.

The theoretical basis of the cognitivist study of the organization I shall summarize, now, the ideas of cognition that constitute the theoretical foundations of cognitivism in organizational and managerial theory. Cognition is accordingly a subjective activity which: 1. is mental and individual, but occurs in relation to the actions of other people in an organization and is determined by this interdependence (Simon; Cyert and March; Weick); 2. is connoted by a capacity for action rather than for reaction and adaptation, so that people are the true protagonists of organizational action (Simon; Cyert and March; Weick); 3. invents the organization through the construction of its meanings and through agreement, albeit momentary, on both these and the organization’s goals, its decision rules, expectations and memory (Cyert and March; Weick); 4. is the core of the decision-making process and therefore of the organizational life (Simon; Cyert and March); 5. handles information, reducing its ambiguity and transmitting it (Simon; Cyert and March; Weick); 6. occupies the area lying between the rational and the non-rational (Simon); 7. is retrospective with respect to organizational action and to dialogue with others (Weick); 8. generates recipes for organizational action, as well as the schemes and routines that become established via organizational action (Cyert and March; Weick); 9. enables the organization to learn (Cyert and March); 10. can be reconstructed into a causal circuit and represented as a causal map (Weick). These ideas lie at the basis of the cognitivist study of the organization and have generated the large body of empirical research and theoretical analysis that I shall consider in the following section, in which I will illustrate the paradigmatic ambivalences of the cognitive study of the organization, and highlight two new principal perspectives of organizational cognitivism: the perspective of the ‘‘cryptic glue’’ of organizational life, and the perspective related to the issue of the conscious and the unconscious.

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THE AMBIVALENCES OF ORGANIZATIONAL COGNITIVISM A number of surveys of current developments in the cognitivist strand of organizational analysis and possible future directions for research (Gioia, 1986; Meindl, Stubbart and Porac, 1994; Schneider and Angelmar, 1993; Strati and Nicolini, 1996; Walsh, 1995) have highlighted the following features: (a) the thematic breadth of the questions addressed by the cognitive approach to organizations. For example: cognitive maps (Axelrod, 1976; Weick and Bougon, 1986), cause maps (Bougon, Weick and Binkhorst, 1977; Fahey and Narayanan, 1989; Hall, 1984), scripts (Gioia and Poole, 1984), implicit theories (Brief and Downey, 1983), quasi theories (Hewitt and Hall, 1973), frames of references (Dunn and Ginsberg, 1986; Shrivastava and Mitroff, 1983; Shrivastava and Schneider, 1984), organizational ideologies (Beyer, 1981; Brunsson, 1982; Meyer, 1982), beliefs (Porac, Thomas and BadenFuller, 1989; Sproull, 1981; Walsh, 1988; Walsh and Fahey, 1986), and myths (Boje, Fedor and Rowland, 1982; Starbuck, 1982); (b) the large amount of empirical inquiry compared with theoretical analysis; (c) the priority given by empirical research to decision making in organizations, the focus of inquiry being on the organizational thinking of strategic decision makers, or at any rate of those who occupy key positions in organizations; (d) the predominance of the individual level of analysis compared with the levels of group, organization or industry; (e) the close attention paid not only to cognitive structures like causal maps, cognitive schemes or scripts, but also to processes like search, selection and retention (Weick, 1969) or learning (Hedberg, 1981; Levitt and March, 1988) and cognitive styles, i.e. the differences stemming from the cognitive structure or process which still persist in the units of analysis, such as the characteristic modes of perceiving and believing (Schein, 1985); (f ) the question of whether it is possible to study organizational thought without altering it, i.e. the levels of obtrusiveness in the methodologies used, which range from documental causal mapping (Axelrod, 1976; Narayan and Fahey, 1990; Huff, 1990) to the Repertory Grid based on Kelly’s personal construct theory (Fransella and Bannister, 1977), to the Self-Q Technique (Bougon, 1983; Bougon, Baird, Komocar and Ross, 1990; Weick and Bougon, 1986) where the interviewees themselves formulate questions about their organization; (g) the emphasis placed on the individual as the prime controller of the process of information acquisition and processing in the course of research. This controller is the organizational actor when self-report techniques like Repertory Grids, causal maps or implicit theories are used. The controller is the researcher when, as in imagery analysis (Sapienza, 1987), the inquiry is based on the researcher’s inferences. The controller is both the organizational actor and the researcher when methods based on interactive reports are employed, for instance, grounded theory ethnography (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991) or the strategic assumption surfacing technique (Mason and Mitroff, 1981); (h) the presumption that the knowledge acquired in the course of analysis constitutes an accurate description of organizational processes and dynamics or, conversely, that it serves as a sort of litmus paper to stimulate reflection on organizational life and on the organizational actions to be undertaken. If the latter is assumed, the researcher

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highlights the discrepancies between the strategy declared by the organization and the one effectively adopted (Bowman and Johnson, 1991), the orientation of action to the official nature of cognitive exposed maps or the quotidian nature of cognitive maps in use (Argyris and Schon, 1978). Alternatively, individually compiled cognitive maps are assembled and collectively discussed as nodes for ‘‘meta-maps’’ of the collectivity (Eden, 1988; Eden, Jones and Sims, 1983). Playing for both sides of the organizational paradigmatic controversy in the 1970s and the 1980s Although many of the changes brought about in organizational theory towards the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s were based on the growing attention paid by scholars to organizational thought, three issues highlight the ambivalence of cognitivist studies with regard to the rationalist tradition that characterized the dominant paradigm in organization theories until the end of the 1970s: the issue of the perimeter of study, that is, what cognition includes and what it excludes; the issue of the focus of study, which grants the managerial level the aura of being the mind of the organization; the issue of the scientificity of study obtained by measurements of the thoughts of the organizational actors. The first issue stresses that the themes addressed may have grown so disparate that they are no longer distinctively characteristic of the cognitivist strand of organizational study. Research now ranges from selective perception (Dearborn and Simon, 1958; Hambrick and Mason, 1984) to symbolic domains (Schultz, 1991), from organizational ideologies and even to myths. What has been left out? Not even the physical artifact, since, as Giovan Francesco Lanzara (1995) points out, even the physical-functional form of the city is a formative context (Unger, 1987; Ciborra and Lanzara, 1990; 1994) for individual and collective routines, endowing these with intelligibility, meaning, plausibility and naturalness. And yet myths, for example, distinguish aspects of organizational life, from beliefs to rituals, which match the criteria of the sacred and profane (Bolognini, 1986). The sociological understanding of organizational life that evokes mythical thinking does so by inviting us to abandon analytical investigation and to change the epistemological premises of traditional methods (Strati, 1992; 1995). Consequently, it is not possible to deduce the distinctive features of the cognitivist study of organizations from the themes studied, although it was possible at the time of the innovative work by Simon, Cyert and Marsh, and Weick discussed in the previous section. The second issue highlights the priority accorded to the managerial level. Focusing on the management of a firm rather than on its shop-floor workers is to enact a translation of meaning which has symbolic valency: the mind of the organization is not that of all its members but only of its upper levels, of its ‘‘head’’. Cognitivist research on organizations has studied first and foremost what happens at the level of strategic decision making, how managers think while they manage (Schneider and Angelmar, 1993). Most cognitivist research and debate has remained at this level. This may be due to an emphasis on cognition as the core of organizational decision making. But, even if one agrees with Simon and Cyert and March that the decision-making process comprises the central components of organizations, this does not mean that priority should be given to strategic decisions. On the contrary, cognitivist inquiry can be conducted at the level of the micro-decisions constantly taken at all the various levels of an organization (Gherardi, 1990). Here one discerns another continuity, that which connects cognitivism in organizations to the earliest

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tradition of organizational theory (Strati and Nicolini, 1997): namely the classical school of scientific management. Frederick W. Taylor (1911), in fact, invariably concentrated on forms of management, from strategic management to management by the foreman, although he based most of his analysis on workers’ performance. The third issue concerns the emphasis on measurement. Here too one discerns a continuity with Taylor and his view of organizational knowledge as knowledge based on measurement-generated scientificity. That fact that this view also predominates in cognitivist studies of organizations, despite theoretical opinions at variance with it (Fiol and Huff, 1992), highlights one of the principal ambivalences of this strand of inquiry vis-a% -vis the scientific, rationalist, positivist and structuralist tradition in organization theories. This, indeed, may be viewed as a paradox: innovation in the subject of analysis, conservation in the method of inquiry. Epistemological shortcomings I shall consider two epistemological shortcomings of the cognitivist study of organization. These specifically concern the concept of cognition and are represented by the diversity between thinking and saying, and by the presumed scientificity of the causal map. The first regards the researcher’s unawareness of the subjects’ thoughts concerning their organizational life; the researcher knows only what subjects say they think. The thoughts of organizational actors are, in fact, only knowable when they are expressed, whether verbally or in writing, in conversations, interviews, questionnaires, diagrams or simulations. These cannot give an exhaustive account of the personal and exclusive mental stock of an organizational actor’s mind. They reveal only a part of that stock, that part which the dynamics of heuristic and relational intent allow and elicit in relationships between the subjects of an organization and those who study them. This raises two points. First, that cognitivist studies of organizations pre-define their subject of study, i.e. organizational thought, as speech. They thus establish another improper equivalence as the basis for their analysis of organizations, like that of the mind and the manager. Second, this shift from thought to speech gives rise to contradictions which alter the concept of cognition. Cognition becomes a concept closer to that of the symbol, but always with the evident intent of making organizational symbolization into a rational process. Thus we can highlight two different intellectual paths, which although they frequently interweave are nevertheless quite distinct: one starts from the premise that thought is revealed through talk, without further discussion of its meaning; the other seeks to lift the limits imposed by this premise and to extend cognitivist research to include the unsaid and the unsayable. The second epistemological shortcoming concerns the measurement of the thoughts of organizational actors. Causal maps are the principal method for conducting such measurement; on the one hand, they represent a method of organizational analysis, while on the other they constitute the content of cognitive analysis. They have come to stand as the symbol of cognitivism in organizational studies, denoting both cognitivist study and its particular nature. Regardless of quantitative considerations, the causal map may be viewed as the dominant method for measuring the thoughts of organizational actors, although it is certainly not the only one and, as Marlene Fiol and Anne Huff (1992) point out, there are maps in the literature that are not explicitly causal, an example being the cognitive mapping of Colin Eden (1988). Karl Weick (1979) illustrated the essential features of the causal map. The members of an organization produce causal maps which use a set of variables, connected by causal links, to

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describe the meanings structure imposed on the flows traversing the organization. Each map is an approximation. It has to do with probabilities, not with certainties; but it nevertheless gives sense to past experience. Once the members of an organization are able to agree on the connections among the variables which are reasonable, important, or of little significance, they then verify whether these individual maps can be superimposed on one another. When people try collectively to reduce the number of meanings attributed to an enigmatic organizational event, they negotiate patterns and relations among their causal maps. They revise these maps and, if possible, make them more homogeneous. These consensual maps can be stored for use in future organizational situations where are apparently similar to the enigmatic organizational event thus processed. In the causal map, measurement of the cognitive processes of organizational action starts with the maps constructed by each individual and then moves to a map plotted for the entire organization. This is an aggregative procedure. The validity of using information created and collected at a lower level in order to generate measurements relative to higher ones, is questionable — as Susan Schneider and Reinhard Angelmar (1993) have pointed out. A procedure of this kind creates ambiguities, and it is not clear that higher-level phenomena are being measured. Referring to the work of Lazarsfeld and Menzel (1961), Schneider and Angelmar stress the difference between aggregate and global measurement: in the first, measurements are attributed to the individual member of the collective; in the second, this is not necessary and the measurements are attributed directly to the collective. As Marco Depolo (1988) observes, this reflects the improper equivalence whereby the researcher studying the subjective dimension of experience ends up by taking the individual as the unit of analysis. Causal mapping raises unresolved issues of measurement, unless we look no further than its arbitrary and momentary usefulness in stimulating organizational actors to reach some sort of agreement on their interpretations of organizational phenomena. If this were the purpose of measurement for cognitivist studies of organizations, however, the causal map would not be surrounded by the aura of scientificity that it currently enjoys; indeed, it would be regarded with the same perplexity as a pack of tarot cards. Cognition as the cryptic **glue++ of organizational life The question of what is being measured has been the subject of thoughtful analysis by a number of scholars, and by Michel Bougon in particular. This has given rise to a body of theory which I shall call ‘‘centripetal’’ with respect to mainstream cognitivist research into organizational knowledge, because the causal map stands out as ‘‘the’’ symbol able to connotate organizational cognitivism. Bougon (1992) argues that it is impossible to proceed any further with the aggregation and merger of individual maps into a purported representation of the collectivity. He proposes instead what he calls congregate cognitive maps, which are very different from aggregate maps because they comprise a minimal number of connections among individual cognitive maps. Indeed, these last remain substantially distinct and intact, and retain their idiosyncratic character. What holds them together? Not their superimposability, but the fact that they relate to the variables of the map of the organization. Consequently, however diversified individual maps may be, and oriented towards different ends, there is a single, underlying and collective cognitive structure which is activated and negotiated by those who compile such maps. This collective structure is the

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congregate cognitive map that governs the organization and strategy of a social system. The nodes of this map are cryptic congregating labels. The term ‘‘label’’, which Bougon prefers to ‘‘concept’’, serves to underline the non-correspondence between words and the meanings that attach to them in different occupational groups. The implication of the congregate map is the following: the members of an organization congregate on a basis not of shared meanings but of minimal connections constituted by a few albeit crucial labels, the meanings of which are largely private and personal, if not indeed unknown, to each individual subject. These labels are consequently the exact opposite of the shared meanings and values so central to the organizational symbolism approach, as Bougon polemically emphasises. Organizations are therefore cemented together by labels which should not be construed in terms of the meanings which they evoke, and which are idiosyncratic to the individuals that work in or for these organizations: a cryptic glue which explains the weak links that hold together the organizational life described by Karl Weick (1976). The congregate cognitive map is social reality. There is no other deeper-lying social reality, Bougon concludes, and organizational life is best described in terms of the labels shared by organizational actors, rather than in terms of the concepts associated with them. While the label does not constitute the concept that it evokes, the map by contrast becomes the territory; that is to say, the reality that the congregate map socially constructs on a basis of the cryptic labels is the organizational reality and has organizational consequences. Indeed, if the fundamental labels that describe the organization were these cryptic labels, the researcher could not claim to have grasped ‘‘true meanings’’ and ‘‘ultimate sense’’ by means of the interviews administered. Bougon suggests that interviews should first be conducted with those who are most cognizant of the principal issues, i.e. the issues which concern the majority of the organizational actors and which are most likely to approximate the cryptic nodes. These first interviews are special. They may reveal the organizational issues that transcend the specific setting in which the inquiry is being conducted. Use of the Self-Q Technique, which lets the interviewees formulate questions about the organization themselves, tends to reduce interference by the interviewer. Nevertheless, the problems of measurement remain. The congregate map, in fact, prioritizes certain organizational actors over others, and this casts doubt on the validity of the Self-Q Technique on which it is based (Nicolini and Fabbri, 1994). It becomes more of a device for stimulating discussion among informants, than an accurate description and explanation of some organizational process or other, and it identifies esoteric ‘‘glues’’ whose nature is unknowable because their meanings, as evoked or defined, cannot be comprehended. Cognition as a concept that extends from the mind to the heart If what we have just seen is a conception of cognition in organizations centripetal to the core of cognitivist studies, then the one that follows can be viewed as centrifugal to it, in that it occupies a position very close to the principal directions in which organizational symbolism, for instance, has moved, and is thus very much at odds with Bougon’s polemical stance. In the centrifugal conception, in fact, cognition no longer denotes solely the activity of deliberate thinking. Dennis Gioia (1986) has observed that one of the thematic patterns to emerge from the essays collected in the book ¹he ¹hinking Organization. Dynamics of Organizational Social Cognition which he edited together with Henry Sims, is the process of redefinition implicit in

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the concept of cognition. By cognition is meant something that comes about less intentionally and consciously, since the thought process underlying it extends to include ‘‘having thought’’. This means that the concept of cognition does not concern rational, logical and conscious processes alone, since it also comprises irrational and unconscious ones. Indeed, it is on the latter that cognitivist scholars have concentrated most, given that ‘‘having thought’’ influences, in principle, every organizational situation. Cognition, Gioia continues, is a concept that has been applied to the study of the conscious and the unconscious, of the rational and the irrational. Schemata, scripts, cognitive maps, implicit theories are the knowledge structures that incorporate the orderings and interrelations of the processes of cognitive structuring. They impose a structure on organizational experiences and provide the basis for organizational action, but they also encourage stereotypical thinking and inhibit creative thought and the revision of the cognitive structures in force. At any rate, the concept of cognition seem to have become inseparable from that of action. Whether action precedes cognition, or whether the reverse is the case, or whether the two processes are reciprocal, is matter of controversy among cognitivists, as well as marking the various stages in the theoretical evolution of some of them. Whatever the case may be, the separation between cognition and action is viewed solely as an artificial and misleading intellectual operation. An example of this process of redefinition implicit in cognition is provided by the problem of affect. Is affect part of cognition? Is it included in the concept? By ‘‘affect’’ is usually meant something quite distinct from cognition: it involves the heart, not the mind. Moreover, as Gioia points out, affect has been somewhat disregarded in organizational studies, which have accorded it much less importance than cognition. Some of the essays in his book, however, give importance to this aspect of mental experience, viewing it as something that influences cognitive processes, beginning with schemes and extending to communication or the management of impressions (Chatman, Bell and Staw, 1986; Donnellon, 1986; Lord and Foti, 1986; Mitchell, Rediker and Beach, 1986; Park, Sims and Motowidlo, 1986). Although thinking and feeling both play an important part in organization, the distinctions between them persist and raise considerable problems for the study of organizations, even though the descriptive capacity of the concept of ‘‘hot’’ cognition has been suggested (Abelson, 1963) as a term denoting affectively laden, motivationally driven, cognition tied to the heart, and thus different from the purely ideational processes of the mind (Lepper, 1994). The concept of cognition becomes a loose concept, with uncertain boundaries, tied to action, to emotion, to the unsaid. However, the literature on the subject of affection, heart and feelings is still scant. Of the concepts able to influence cognition, organizational cognitivists give most attention to the notion of action. However, in the same book in which Karl Weick defines cognition as the reflection which follows action, he stresses (1969, p. 15) that, according to Simmel, not only action but also ‘‘affect precedes cognition’’, that ‘‘feelings are the primary means by which members are linked’’ to their group, that ‘‘group members are persuaded more by emotional than by intellectual appeals’’. But the notion of cognition influenced by affect and emotion, in contrast to the notion of action, remains somewhat neglected even in Weick’s own writings. This has been pointed out by Stephen Fineman (1996, p. 551), who comments as follows on Weick’s recent refinement of the notion of cognitive process through his focus on commitments among organizational actors (1993b):

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Weick does not reveal what makes a commitment a commitment, or where the different strengths of commitment come from or feel like — such as being driven by fear, or by loyalty, pride or affection. Different commitments reflect different emotional contracts — with others and with self — and this determines the commitments’ potency.

Without considering the influence of emotion on cognition, maintains Fineman, this notion is unable to explain organizational life and organizational order, as noted by Jeffrey Pfeffer (1982). In this sense, the centrifugal conception of cognition highlights a promising perspective for the cognitivist study of organizations. At the same time, it also raises a question: What distinguishes the cognitive process from symbolization? What is it that separates the concept of cognition from that of the symbol or of organizational culture? Cognition as a concept for accessing tacit knowledge The subject of tacit knowledge can illustrate another direction of the centrifugal conception of cognition. As we saw in the first part of this article, the concept of cognition is related to organizational decision making, both in Simon and in Cyert and March. Information and knowledge are relevant to the process of decision making, and handling them is an important feature of the theoretical foundations of the cognitivist study of organizations. The point, however, is that information and knowledge have been assumed to be exclusively explicit, and that they continue to be so considered in the tradition of organizational cognitivism. Do we have to deduce that implicit or tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1962; 1966) is absolutely irrelevant to the decision-making process, and thus to organization? A step in the opposite direction has been taken in a more recent essay by Gioia, written jointly with Cameron Ford (1995). Tacit knowledge refers to all the abilities that enable people to do things without their being able to explain how they manage to do them. It also refers to capacities which do not generally derive from a theoretical understanding of the performance to be realized in an organization. Gioia and Ford note that it is widely believed in the cognitivist literature that there are two main forms of information processing: one which is controlled, active and conscious, another which is automatic, passive and unconscious. The latter is characteristic of cognitive schemata, given that schema-based information-processing takes place independently of conscious thought and is automatic. Information is implicitly compared with the abstract representations that encapsulate the main features of the knowledge comprised in the cognitive structure or schema. In this way, schematic processing affords access to tacit knowledge and to its structures, in the absence of awareness of the structures and processes thus activated. Indeed, it is probably this assumption that constitutes the dividing line between the centrifugal conception of cognition in organizations and the symbolic and cultural approach: the rational explanation at any price, in so far as the schema within which Gioia and Ford seek to enclose and explain the unsaid and the unsayable of tacit knowledge can be said to be rational.

CONCLUSIONS The main conclusion of this article is that the ambivalences in the cognitivist study of organizations are due to the manner in which cognition is conceived and defined.

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First of all, the term ‘‘cognition’’ denotes the activity of subjects as fully empowered actors in the dynamics and initiatives of an organization. This means that the actions of these subjects in and on behalf of the organization are not solely reactive to ongoing organizational processes, and not solely adaptive to them (Berger, Luckmann, 1966). This brings to mind the Cartesian maxim that constitutes the basis of European rationalist thought: ‘‘cogito ergo sum’’: I think, therefore I am. However, it also recalls the limitations inherent in Descartes’ assertion, most notably the priority inevitably given to thought, with the consequent neglect of all the other aspects of organizational experience: the physical experience of working in an organization, for example of breathing in not only its atmosphere but also its dust, and so on. In other words, organizational experience is too highly diversified and complex for the concept of cognition to be able to encompass and describe its entirety. There is a tendency, as I have emphasized above, to centre a wide range of nuances of meaning on the concept of cognition. Cognition is thus a concept that recounts the emotions in an organization, which describes irrationality, which illustrates tacit knowledge. In certain respects, this is an attempt to counterbalance the rationality that the term ‘‘cognition’’ denotes, and to undermine the predominant rationalism of cognitivist analyses of organizations and their unduly rationalist conception of these. However, this has generated, willy nilly, a series of illegitimate equivalences, principal among which is the equivalence drawn between subjective experience and cognition. The process is such that the cognitive approach has become inevitably omnicomprehensive: understanding organizational life by studying the experience of organizational actors means studying their organizational thought, given that this incorporates everything that it is possible to know about such experience. Further confirming the growing omnicomprehensiveness of the concept of cognition is the fusion envisaged between cognitivist studies and other traditions of organizational, sociological and psychological inquiry. For example, the fusion of cognitivism and phenomenology has been mooted by Roberto Ravagnani (1996), since both disciplines examine how individuals adopt a perceptive, interpretative and transformative stance toward an organization according to their subjective points of view. Consequently, references to cognitivist organizational studies in terms of a paradigm (Meindl, Stubbart and Porac, 1994; Schneider and Angelmar, 1993; Walsh, 1995) are misleading. Although it may serve to emphasise the change in epistemological perspective discussed earlier in this article, the notion of the paradigm refers to something that is both generic and excessively broad. It incorporates everything that constitutes the subjective experience of organizational life, from what is known beyond what can be expressed (the distinctive feature of tacit knowledge) to organizational myths, which are eminently nonrational forms of thought. As far as the study of maps is concerned the aim of this procedure is to expose the shared cognitive structures of organizational actors. And yet, as Colin Eden has noted (1992), maps have been used as if they were able to describe and predict organizational action, with the term ‘‘cognitive’’ allowed to imply the existence of a close resemblance between the thinking thus described and the organization studied. These are dilemmas that the metaphor of the brain (Morgan, 1986), on which the analysis of cognitive processes in organizations is based, cannot help to resolve (Strati, 1994) — particularly if, as Eden argues, taking his cue from Weick’s aphorism that you do not know what you think until you have heard what you say, the process of articulation significantly influences both present and future cognition.

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Finally, reference is required to the ‘‘ante litteram’’ cognitivism of Taylor’s scientific management (Strati and Nicolini, 1996). Evident in that organizational theory is the pervasiveness of cognition, the priority assigned to the managerial level as the principal focus of analysis, and the emphasis on measurement as the defining feature of scientific inquiry. All these are aspects which, as we have seen, are distinguishing features of cognitivist studies of the organization. Together with the ambiguities and, in particular, the ambivalences illustrated above, this has counterbalanced the more specifically innovative aspects of the analysis of organizational thought and has favoured the accreditation and consolidation of the strand of cognitivist analysis in organizational theories and management studies.

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