Garbage Can Model

Conceptual Overview

The 1972 article noted above tried to make sense of some recurring empirical observations by supplementing conventional ideas about choice in organizations. The article introduced both a conceptual characterization of garbage can processes and a computational model that was used to deduce implications of the nonstandard assumptions proposed. Not all organizations were seen as unstructured. Hierarchical and specialized structures were specified along with the open access to choices, and the various structures were expected to influence outcomes differently by affecting the time patterns of connection among problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities, thus determining the allocation of attention and energy and thereby the outcomes.

The conceptual argument is built on three properties that are frequently observed in organizations, but contravene standard notions of how organizations work, or ought to work. Those properties of an organized anarchy are as follows:

• 1.
  Problematic preferences—the goals are either vague, inconsistent, or unstable
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• 2.
  Unclear technology—the connection of means to ends is not well understood
• 3.
  Fluid participation—the attention to substantive decision domains by decision makers is unstable or indeterminate

To the extent these conditions are jointly present, organizational decision making, as commonly understood, becomes disconnected from its conventional grounds. Intentionally rational action rests on the projection and evaluation of consequences by stably participating actors. With unclear technology, projection of consequences becomes unreliable. With problematic preferences, evaluation of projected consequences breaks down. With fluid participation, the question of who shall decide becomes unresolved.

Since these conditions are frequently experienced in organizations, the article explored the consequences of a forthright reversal: What does one find if one assumes that the properties of organized anarchy hold?

This conceptual strategy is at once playful and serious. The former spirit is evident in the choice of terms such as organized anarchy and in the metaphorical suggestion that one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems, solutions, and participants are dumped, portraying an organization as a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. The perspective allows readers to imagine severing connections between problems and choices that are usually taken for granted.

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