Jim March was and remains a giant in the field of Organization studies, at least for those of us that are looking. With all of my academic training being at Carnegie Mellon, I was aware of Herb Simon and (to a lesser extent) Jim March from the atmosphere and the infrastructure. I stumbled upon the Herb Simon outdoor classroom or the intramural field dedicated to Simon, March, and Cyert. Several of my undergraduate courses (Psychology and CS primarily) brought up their ideas even before I made my way into actually studying organizations. The campus has so many artifacts of these massive figures, including a few named buildings and classrooms.
Mark Fichman taught a PhD course that I took in Spring 2011 on the Carnegie School of Organizational Thought. This course served as an introduction to the contributions of Jim March and Herb Simon to Organization Theory. And what are those ideas? Across a number of books, models, and papers, these researchers proposed that people don’t always act with full knowledge or perfectly rationally. That ‘satisficing’ occurs where individuals try and make a ‘good enough’ decision. Much of these contributions are based on mathematical models, eloquent prose, and (occasionally) experiments. These ideas won Herb Simon a Nobel prize, but did not make a huge impact on Economics until Kahnemann (in some ways) “re-discovered” many of these ideas and called it Behavioral Economics. Jim, in some ways, rejected laboratory experiments, which, unfortunately, made his ideas less palatable to the public than Behavioral Econ where the focus is really on the data.
Jim March died in September of 2018. This last weekend (October 4-5, 2019) a conference in honor of Jim March was held at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Jim spent the majority of his academic career at Stanford, but his papers will be archived alongside Simon’s at CMU so many see this as a sign that he thought fondly of his time there from 1953-1964. The conference was unique and familiar all at the same time. There were 6 panels where 3-4 presenters talked about the relevance / importance of some of March’s ideas on themselves or shared stories about their time with March. Some were free-wheeling, some emotional rages against the status quo in sociology/economics, some repetitive, but all were interesting. One point of view that was raised at the dinner the first night was that Jim’s ideas about organizations were like poetry: broad, subject to interpretation, not easily accepted by some, but full of important and inspired wisdom. Some in the community of scholars that align with the Carnegie Tradition therefore see their job as to translate that poetry into prose (i.e. experiments / simulations / or analyses). There was a flavor from some that all Jim’s ideas are sacrosanct and we are his disciples, but I think that view was only held by a minority of people there. Jim and Herb gave us lenses to look at the world, but, not to diminish their contributions, they certainly weren’t right about everything.
I found this conference very motivating and useful. I think its impossible for me not to have been influenced by the Carnegie Tradition. At the conference, there was less rage than I thought there might be. There were less emotionally difficult moments than I feared (besides a touching and important presentation by one of Jim’s daughters). I was deeply moved by the goodness of Jim as a person, an academic, a colleague, and a mentor; and I feel deeply grateful to have been invited to attend.