Logic of Appropriateness

Main Features and Key Concepts

The three main questions constituting the logic of appropriateness are the following:

• 1.
  First, what kind of situation am I actually facing as an actor (individually or institutionally)? This is a question of recognition.
• 2.
  Second, what is the main identity of my institution and what is my own main identity?
• 3.
  Third, what am I and my organization expected to do in a situation like this? That is, what are the rules connecting the situation and our identities?

A crucial question is how actors set about answering such questions in matching situations. One way is to learn from experience—experiential learning—either by looking at how the matching has been done recently or by finding out how the institution traditionally does this matching. A second way is to react cognitively or through categorization based on mental maps or else through what Karl Weick labels “sense-making.” A third way is to use the experience of others to match, either by stressing that the context is exactly the same as the one others have experienced (contextualization) or by arguing that the context belongs to a broad category that is typical for many organizations (decontextualization).

According to James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, the logic of appropriateness deals with [Page 1474]what is essential in a role, not with what is instrumentally or arbitrarily defined. Faced with different kinds of stimuli, actors respond in complex, standardized, and almost intuitive ways, without any immediate comprehensive analysis, problem solving, or discretion—the latter being features that become part of the logic over time. Appropriateness presupposes that actors have multiple identities or a repertoire of identities—and hence multiple rule options—and these become relevant according to the different situations actors face. One implicit assumption is that these identities and rules exist in relatively consistent sets to further systematic behavior.

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