Book Review on “Administrative Behavior – Herbert A. Simon”

Management

For the fourth edition, with 15 pages of front matter and 368 pages of body and back matter, the last word in the subtitle was changed from "Organization" to "Organizations."The fourth edition lacked Barnard's foreword which had been present in the first through third editions. Instead of the third edition's lengthy Introduction and Part II, in the fourth edition the Introduction was briefer and Simon's commentaries followed each chapter of the original text. While the book is fundamentally on decision making, Prof. Simon talks about a whole lot of other aspects that have relation to the decision making process. For example, he talks about the gap between theory and practice in administrative decision making. He also talks about the necessity of business schools having faculty drawn from the world of science as well as from the world of practice. He says that human decision making uses beliefs, or ‘factual premises’, which may or may not describe how the world really is or whether true or false. The book starts with a sarcastic criticism of classical administrative theory that has organized itself according to the schools and based mostly on principles. Simon demonstrates the limitations of principles-he calls these proverbs-offered by administrative theory scholars by illustrating how these principles contradict each other under specific circumstances. As an example, the author uses the conflict between unity of command and efficiency.

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