Conventionalism,coordination, and mental models: from Poincaré to Simon

This article focuses on the conventions that sustain social interaction and argues that they are central to Simon's decision-making theory. Simon clearly identifies two kinds of coordination by convention: behavioral mores that shape human actions, and shared mental models that govern human perceptions. This article argues that Poincaré–Carnap's conventionalism provides powerful support for Simon's theory; it contends that this theory offers a more convincing account of decision and coordination than Lewis' concept of convention. Simon's approach to applying conventionalist logic to social interaction emphasizes the normative role played by mental models in solving coordination problems and considers rationality in terms of both cognitive and moral considerations. By connecting conventional phenomena to social identifications, Simon stresses the resulting complexity of coordination problems     

The Challenges of March and Simon’s Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue

March and Simon pushed the study of organizations into the mainstream of academic writing about business. We outline central ideas discussed by the book and its pioneering role in studying cognitive processes underlying boundedly rational human beings. Through their representational approach, March and Simon defined and explicated key mechanisms of individual and organizational decision‐making. Organizations provided an empirically‐based understanding of human behavior and coordination, and set up core scientific criteria for creating the cumulative body of management and organization research. We summarize the papers presented in this special issue and point out contributions by Organizations that have been understated, forgotten or ignored in management studies.