60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on Subsequent Research

Abstract

We provide an analytic and systematic review of the impact of March and Simon’s seminal Organizations on management research and discuss the book’s value for current research and propose future applications of it. Building on bibliometric and text‐mining approaches, our empirical analysis reveals that although Organizations was contextually based in the industrial milieu of the 1950s, its concepts have found ongoing resonance with scholars. Further, we find that much of this resonance appears to be driven by the ability of scholars in different ‘schools of thought’ to find useful insights from March and Simon’s generalized theoretical structure. However, we also observe that scholars have been selective in their usage of ideas from the book over the last 60 years. Based our analysis, we propose a particular set of future research areas, including a focus on new organizational forms and extending March and Simon’s ideas to multi‐level research, which can benefit from more holistically drawing on Organizations and connect its original ideas to address current management problems.

Employee voice: a knowledge map to provide conceptual clarity and future research directions

“…The year 1998 coincides with the publication of Van Dyne and LePine (1998), which is the most cited paper in our data set, and that several studies are considered as the foundation study for the field (Barnett, Henriques, & Husted, 2020;Danvila-del-Valle, Estévez-Mendoza, & Lara, 2019). Having identified the first turning point, we followed the established methodological prescription of dividing in equal timeframes of 10 years each (Barnett, Henriques, & Husted, 2020;Castillo-Vergara, Alvarez-Marin, & Placencio-Hidalgo, 2018;Wilden, Hohberger, Devinney, & Lumineau, 2019). The bibliometric analyses were then performed separately for each period with the software VOSviewer following Van Eck and Waltman (2014).…”

El doble rol de la inversión en recursos humanos en la desigualdad social

“…Dada su importancia, en este trabajo se realiza una explicación más detallada del mismo. Como subrayan Wilden et al (2019), March y Simon (1958) han tenido una influencia trascendental en el conocimiento académico y un número creciente de investigaciones está volviendo a sus conceptos centrales en busca de inspiración para facilitar y mejorar su propio trabajo en una gran variedad de disciplinas científicas, por ejemplo, la gestión de los RR. HH.…”

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

“…Wilden et al () use a text‐mining approach of the abstracts of peer‐reviewed articles identified as having cited Organizations . They address how the book influenced research during four time periods covering 1957 to 2017.…”