Reflections on descriptive and prescriptive issues in Administrative Behavior, the work for which Herbert Simon received the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

Herbert Simon was awarded the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for writing Administrative Behavior, a seminal work describing the way in which organizations are run. A key feature of Simon’s framework is the analysis of how organizations navigate what Simon calls “the boundary between the rational and the nonrational aspects of human and social behavior”. In this respect, Simon emphasizes that organizations can structure task environments in a way that leads organizational behavior to be much closer to being fully rational than the behavior of individuals acting on their own. Simon’s approach in Administrative Behavior is mainly descriptive, not prescriptive. In this chapter, I discuss how the experiences of organizations in the real world, in combination with Simon’s theoretical framework, provide prescriptive guidance for improving the way organizations are run in practice.