Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, “A Garbage Can
Model of Organizational Choice”
Oxford Handbooks Online
Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen,
“A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice”
Werner Jann
The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Public Policy and Administration
Edited by Martin Lodge, Edward C. Page, and Steven J. Balla
Print Publication Date: Mar 2015
Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Public Administration
Online Publication Date: Jul 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199646135.013.4
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” a paper
authored by Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen. It first discusses the
assumptions of the garbage can model about decision-making in organizations, paying
particular attention its three main elements: problematic preferences, unclear
technologies, and fluid participation. It then considers four “relatively independent
streams” and their interrelations: problems, solutions, participants, and choice
opportunities. The chapter also assesses the paper’s main impact by focusing on
organization theory and the original formal model before turning to the more specific
areas of policy-making, administrative reform, and institutional theory.
Keywords: Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, Johan P. Olsen, garbage can model, decision-making, organization
theory, formal model, policy-making, administrative reform, institutional theory
The main task of scholars is to help good ideas forged by their predecessors find a
new life in the imaginations of their successors.
(Cohen et al. 2012)
Inventing the Garbage Can: The Accidental
Origins
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“CONSIDER organized anarchies”—any serious student of organization theory, policymaking or administration will recognize this opening, and if there were a list of “famous
first words,” this would probably be among the top ten. The original article (Cohen et al.
1972) appeared more than 40 years ago, and according to the Web of Science its citation
frequency has been on a steady rise ever since. Obviously it is, in the words of the
original authors, “a solution that still attracts problems” (Cohen et al. 2012).
Like many of the classics in this volume, the article and its successive impact does not fit
into the neat disciplinary boundaries which still dominate most of our universities,
teaching, and journals. It was published in Administrative Science Quarterly, but
according to the Web of Knowledge it has been quoted and used in the fields of
Management and Business, in Public Administration, Political Science, Education (p. 301)
and Sociology—and these are only the top six of all in all more than 100 science and
research categories identified. It has been applied in Economics, Law, Computer Science,
Psychology, Accounting, and Geography, and of course in all kinds of policy fields, from
health, urban planning, and environmental studies, to engineering, forestry, social work,
and the internet. According to JSTOR the article is still amongst the three most quoted
and accessed from ASQ.
The garbage can model (GCM) does not only defy ordinary disciplinary borders, it is also
the result of an early and unconventional interdisciplinary undertaking, or, in other
words, of the chance encounter of participants from different backgrounds looking for
problems to try out new ideas about organizational theory and decision-making. The
three authors met in the late 1960s at the newly founded School of Social Sciences of the
University of California, Irvine. Cohen and Olsen were doctoral students, doing research
on institutions of higher education, Cohen together with March on the choice of American
college presidents, Olsen, visiting from Norway, on the choice of a dean at a Norwegian
university. All were interested in the development of social institutions and theoretical
ideas about them, and in combining different approaches, from sociology, organization
theory, political science, formal modeling, and simulation. When March moved to
Stanford and the different case studies and ideas were ripening, a choice about what do
with them had to be made. The group which also included other doctoral students from
Scandinavia and the US, met for several weeks in Denmark and Norway in 1970, and the
result of all this was not only the Garbage Can article, but also three well-known books,
Leadership and Ambiguity: The American College President (Cohen and March 1974) and
Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (March and Olsen 1976), mainly about
organizations of higher education, and Ambiguity and Command, about decision-making
in the military (March and Weissinger-Baylon 1986), not to forget the two dissertations of
Olsen (1971) and Cohen (1972), and finally, last but not least, a lifelong close personal
and professional cooperation between March and Olsen, which eventually produced some
more social science classics of the last century (March and Olsen 1984, 1989).
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Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, “A Garbage Can
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Opening the Garbage Can: The Core
Ingredients
The basic ideas of the original article are at the same time simple and, at least for most
experienced students and practitioners of organizational decision-making, immediately
recognizable and plausible. But they are also contrary to dominant and well-established
theories of problem-solving and rational choice. From many years of teaching my
experience is that especially veteran practitioners instantly grasp the concept, its
explanation, and justification, and they like it, while academic students have problems in
understanding what is described, and quite often loathe the concept, (p. 302) because it
goes against their deeply held normative ideas about how decisions should be made, and
also how orderly social science should argue.
The basic observation and the main conceptual argument is that decision-making in
organizations quite often can be characterized by three main properties (Cohen et al.
1972), by
1. problematic preferences, i.e. goals are either vague, inconsistent, contested, or
unstable;
2. unclear technologies, i.e. the connection between means and ends is not well
understood; and
3. fluid participation, i.e. the attention and involvement of decision makers is
unstable or uncertain.
Organizations in which these properties can be observed are called “organized
anarchies,” they discover their preferences through action and interaction more than
they act on the basis of clear goals, and these organizations can therefore, “for some
purposes,” be described as “collections 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 an answer, and decision makers looking for work” (p. 1).
The main point is that the classical view of decision-making, where “choice opportunities
lead first to the generation of decision alternatives, then to an examination of their
consequences, then to an evaluation of those consequences in terms of objectives, and
finally to a decision” (p. 2) is quite often a poor description of what actually happens.
Instead, in the garbage can model a decision is an outcome of several “relatively
independent streams” and their interrelations:
1. problems–concerns inside and outside the organizations which require attention;
2. solutions–answers actively looking for problems to which they may be applied;
3. participants–actors which want to participate in choices and decisions; and
4. choice opportunities–occasions when an organization is expected to produce
behavior that can be called a decision, some of these arise regularly (budgets have to
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Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, “A Garbage Can
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passed, contracts must be signed, etc.), while others are more unpredictable (crises
within or outside the organization).
The garbage cans of the model are thus the choice opportunities into which various kinds
of problems and solutions are dumped by various participants. The mix of garbage in a
single can, i.e. a specific choice opportunity, depends on the mix of cans or opportunities
available, on the labels attached to the alternative cans or opportunities, on what
garbage, i.e. solutions and problems, are currently being produced, and on the speed with
which these are collected and removed from the scene.
These assumptions again lead to the conclusion that decisions, at least in these kind of
organizations and circumstances, to a large extent are much more the result (p. 303) of
temporal linkages, the arrival and departure time of independent and exogenous streams
of problems, solutions, decision-makers, and choice opportunities, than the consequences
of careful analysis and deliberate choices.
In the original article these basic ideas, the “verbal model,” are then translated into a
computer simulation model of a garbage can decision process, the “formal model,” which
is written in Fortran, at that time the most common computer language. In this model
some new assumptions, e.g. about decision styles (by resolution, oversight, or flight) and
properties of organizations (energy load, energy distribution, decision structure, and
problem access structure) are added, and the formal model is thus at the same time more
complicated and more simple. It is used on decision-making in US universities, where
some additional parameters are introduced (organizational slack via large, small, rich,
and poor universities), and even some predictions about future developments are made
(“among large rich schools decision by resolution triples,” etc.), but it is fair to say that it
was not the computerized model and its predictions but the verbal formulation of its
findings that caught the attention and the inspiration of most researchers.
Before addressing the question how these ideas have inspired—or provoked—different
scholars from different fields in the last 40 years, it is useful to sketch what was really
new in the GCM and the original article. Where did it differ from previous models and
observations, why did it attract so much attention and why—and this may be a slightly
different question—did the model become such a well-known concept?
Most of the basic observations of the GCM and their conceptual treatment were not really
new at all. Bounded rationality, i.e. imperfect understanding of events and their causes,
had been introduced by Simon and was gradually recognized in decision-making theory,
as was the general idea of a behavioral theory of decision-making and organizations in
general. So in many ways the article was an extension and broadening of ideas
formulated by Cyert, March, and Simon at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the
1950s, the so-called Carnegie school (Cyert and March 1963). Also the observation of
conflicting goals and preferences within organizations was not revolutionary, this and the
idea of bargaining and partisan mutual adjustment had been the main point of Lindblom’s
theory of muddling through (Lindblom 1959). Also the combination of unclear goals and
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Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, “A Garbage Can
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means, leading to different forms of decision-making, had been suggested before
(Thompson and Tuden 1959).
What was new was the extension and sharpening of these observations and concepts.
New were the observations of fluid participation, the multiple and unpredictable decision
points, and the integration of these observations into a coherent model. Not only
preferences and technologies were uncertain, but also participants and decision
opportunities. And new was also the specific use of the terms “ambiguity” and “choice,”
which were even more highlighted in the title and the contributions of the subsequent
book, summarizing the findings of the research group (March and Olsen 1976).
Ambiguity is usually understood as the ability to express more than one interpretation of
a given event or fact. Ambiguous circumstances are therefore situations in (p. 304) which
goals, technologies, and participants are not only unclear, unknown, or vague, but where
specific and distinct but contradictory interpretations are possible and probably present.
Choice on the other hand is different from decision-making, it is not an event, but a
stream with many tributaries and inputs, and it is highly contextual. New was certainly
also the extension to a temporal understanding of choices, in contrast to the usual
intentional or consequential one. Organizations might not necessarily be, as we are used
to and were told to believe, primarily tools for substantive, rational problem-solving, but
there are quite plausible alternatives to means-end rational interpretations of
organizational behavior.
Finally, the provocative wording of the model may have helped. Ambiguity and choice are
fine, but garbage cans and organized anarchies are better. The original article fulfilled at
least two of the fundamentals of classical rhetoric which have been associated with
scientific success (McCloskey 1985; Hood 1999): metaphor and irony. In this it aligns
itself with some of the classics in this volume and in organizational theory (muddling
through, bowling alone, street-level bureaucrats, organized hypocrisy). As the authors
suggest themselves, the unusual label has performed a useful role: “It seems to help each
new reader who comes to the ideas to take them in the playfully serious spirit we hope
they deserve” (Cohen et al. 2012: 22). But most of all the article became legendary,
because it made sense of observations, which many practitioners and informed students
of organizational decision-making had made before, but which did not fit into the
prevailing concepts and explanations of traditional decision-making theory. With the
advent of garbage cans in organization theory it was possible to talk about experiences,
observations, and frustrations which were quite common, but until now were only seen as
pathologies, and thus very often were not really talked about at all. GCM offered a
theoretical interpretation, namely unforeseen and unpredictable decision outcomes as
results of quite common and systematic characteristics of organizations.
Recycling the Garbage Can: The Various Uses
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There can be no doubt that “ideas from the original article have flowed in many different
directions” (Cohen et al. 2007: 536). Like many other important and well-known works
that have had a major impact over a long time, the influence sometimes is often “more
noteworthy in terms of breadth rather than depth” (Argote and Greve 2007). I will try to
track the main impact by looking briefly at the more conventional fields of organization
theory and the original formal model before concentrating on the more specific areas of
policy-making, administrative reform, and finally the broad area of institutional theory.
(p. 305)
Organization Theory: Making Sense of Everyday Life
The most obvious and imminent impact of the garbage can model was in organization
theory. As Charles Perrow put it in one of the earliest reviews of Ambiguity and Choice,
“one does not have to be a close observer of organizations to find daily events that would
have to be labeled as pathological from the point of view of the theories of organizations
which we espouse and laboriously test” (Perrow 1977: 295). He admits that “none of us
should be surprised” by the fascinating case studies presented in the book, “but the point
is that our theories should be surprised, and our favored research techniques do not
accommodate it!” (p. 297). Before the advent of garbage can, power theories, or
conspiracy theories, or leadership theories, or pure irrational behavior were invented in
order to explain what ordinary organizational theories could not explain, but now there
was a genuine organizational theory to make sense of everyday observations.
The central assumption of “bounded rationality,” the obvious constraints on optimizing or
predicting solutions to problems, were extended to the other decision elements, i.e.
problems, participation, and choice opportunities were assumed to be severely
constrained. Not only the classical demand “find the best solution” is thus problematic,
but so are “solve all problems,” “let everybody participate,” and “use every opportunity to
make a decision” (Heimer and Stinchcombe 1999).
The well-known theories of bounded rationality and conflicting goals and preferences in
organizations were taken a step further by suggesting a coherent understanding of
organizational processes that is not founded on the assumption of forward-looking
consequentialism (Cohen et al. 2007: 535). At the same time concepts like “myths” and
“loose coupling” were introduced and illustrated. Even more provocatively it was
suggested that beliefs and preferences are more results than explanation of behavior.
Finally, the symbolic role of choice situations was highlighted, i.e. the primary purpose of
a certain decision process was no longer necessarily to produce a specific outcome, but
rather, through the airing or “exercising” of problems, participants, and solutions, to
maintain, legitimize, or change the organization as a social unit.
All these elements of a more radical “behavioral” decision theory were taken up by some
of the most influential scholars of organization theory (Weick 1974; DiMaggio and Powell
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1983; Brunnsson 1982) and were further elaborated and explored, most eloquently and
comprehensively in the writings of James March:
Organizations have many features that move them toward coordinated action,
particularly hierarchical control structures and standard operating procedures.
Nevertheless they do not reliably display consistent decision coherence. Rather
than have decision processes that proceed from consistent intentions, identities,
and expectation to coordinated decisions and actions, organizations exhibit
numerous symptoms of incoherence. Decisions seem unconnected to actions,
yesterday’s actions unconnected to today’s actions, justifications unconnected to
decisions. Beliefs are often unconnected to choices, solutions unconnected to
problems, and processes unconnected to outcomes. Organizations frequently
(p. 306) have ambiguous preferences and identities, ambiguous experiences and
history, ambiguous technologies, and fluid participation. They are loosely coupled.
(March 1994: 192–3).
The Formal Model: Few Followers and Fierce Critics
Even the fiercest critics of the GCM acknowledge that the computer simulation which is
part of the original article is one of the most famous simulations in all of the social
sciences (Bendor et al. 2001: 169). But it has only attracted very few followers and
adherents, and for that sake critics. The reasons why there are so few expansions and
developments of the formal model are unclear, but it is obvious that “mainstream
organization theorists have overlooked technical challenges and new simulations,
attending instead to Cohen, March, and Olsen’s own verbal account of their
simulations” (Bendor et al. 2001: 183).
Still, nearly 30 years after its publication the GCM received the unusual honor that the
APSR published a lengthy article devoted exclusively to a thorough and devastating
critique of the original publication, together with a rejoinder from Olsen (Bendor et al.
2001; Olsen 2001). The authors replicated the original simulation, and their central
assertion is that the verbal and the formal model are incompatible, the computer model is
supposed to represent the disorderly world of garbage can decision processes, but even
in the prototypical case it generates an incredible degree of order. Furthermore, the
formulations of the verbal model are overly complex, the arguments unclear, it is a
conceptual morass and impossible to test. Also the application to universities is faulty, the
assumptions and implications are largely unwarranted and questionable, are unrelated to
the theory, and offered with scant justification, and so on. All in all, in the view of these
critics, the GCM is not an extension, but an alternative to bounded rationality, though an
unattractive and confusing one. In order to rescue and revitalize it, standard assumptions
of organizational theory, like at least intentional rational actors and the consequences of
structural characteristics and choice, should be included.
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In his rejoinder Olsen stressed that the original formal model is “one illustrative set of
simulations.” The intention was never to establish one decisive theory of organizational
choice, but the claim was more modest, to present “a” not “the” model. So from the
beginning it should have been obvious that there are other models and explanations
which can be specified at several levels of precision. There exist a number of garbage can
models, and these modify most of the key assumptions of the “pure model.” For example,
the possibilities for intelligent actions and management in garbage can situations have
been explored (Cohen and March 1974: 205–15), and indeed also the relevance of
structural features of organizations in garbage can situations have been investigated and
modeled.
This has been done in one of the most well-known further simulations of the GCM by John
Padgett (1980). He starts from the obvious observation that garbage can processes
(p. 307) seem curiously divorced from the familiar structural phenomena of concern to
classical organization theorists. He then proceeds to modify the model to embed garbage
can flows explicitly within the classical bureaucratic constraints of hierarchical
differentiation, standard operating procedures, and centralized control. In the end the
elaborate simulation comes up with some remarkable results, most prominently that the
heads of organizations maximize control over organizational decision outcomes the most
by making no substantive decisions whatsoever: “The thrust of the managerial
recommendations to be deduced from the model emphasize unobtrusive structural
design, rather than active tactical maneuvering” (p. 584). These are remarkable findings
and prescriptions which seem to fit very well with more idiosyncratic observations of
successful heads of governments and other leaders, at least much more than standard
managerial literature.
Also the formal model has over the years thus seen some interesting enlargements and
modifications, but obviously much less than the verbal model. The original formal model
was, seen with hindsight, not very sophisticated, and no doubt it could be improved. That
this has not happened cannot be blamed on the original authors who went to great
lengths to document their simulation, but more on the apparent limitations of formal
modeling in decision theory.
Policy-Making: Windows of Opportunities, Networks, and Governance
Even though the garbage can model was very early on recognized in political science (the
second citation ever appeared in the APSR, Mohr 1973; the first, by the way, was in The
Lancet, in a piece about the NHS, still today a good example for garbage can decisionmaking), it took some time until it became part of mainstream policy analysis and public
administration. This is quite surprising, since it aims to explain organizational outcomes
or at least outputs. In one of the first reviews of Ambiguity and Choice Mohr observed:
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many of the examples in the book are not truly instances of organizational
behavior, but rather of the common sort of multi-organizational behavior that goes
into the making of public policy. Remarkably similar examples can be found over
and over again in the case-study literature on public administration and policy. It
is small wonder that public policy making tends to be full of garbage cans.
(Mohr 1978: 1035)
After a while, garbage can became a well-known metaphor, but mainly as a descriptive
term. To many “garbage can processes” became just a catch-all expression for some kind
of disorder, which was hard to describe and even harder to explain. The metaphor of the
“organized anarchies” may have contributed to this misconception, because it suggested
not ordinary, but highly decoupled and unorthodox organizations and decision processes.
The slow impact on policy studies and political science in general is surprising,
since Johan Olsen, one of the co-authors, was a political scientist by training, and very
early on sketched the relevance of GCM for our understanding of political and
administrative decision-making. In an article about “Public Policy-Making and Theories of
Organizational Choice” he argued already in 1972 against the prevailing assumption of
policy-making “in terms of decision-makers’ choosing on behalf of themselves,
organizations, nations, or mankind in general” and asserted that the “polity may, under
certain conditions, operate as a ceremonial apparatus providing rationalizations of the
events taking place” (Olsen 1972: 45, 46).
(p. 308)
He already pointed out that, even though the GCM was developed mainly through
empirical studies of organizational choice, the major contribution of garbage-can ideas
may be related to our understanding of political choices at the macro level. He stressed
that policy-making should be seen as a product of processes having dynamics of their own
which by their interaction generate outcomes which are not intended by anyone and that
“decision” in this model is mostly a post factum construct produced by participants
because of their need to find consistent patterns in what they are doing and observing.
Finally, he pointed out that accepting a garbage-can view of public policy-making means
focusing attention on the ways the “meaning” of a choice changes over time, an
observation which in recent years has become known as the “framing” of policy issues.
Still, probably because these ideas did not appear in a mainstream Anglo-Saxon journal, it
took more than ten years before they gradually entered conventional policy studies. The
ultimate breakthrough was John Kingdon’s study about Agendas, Alternatives and Public
Policies (Kingdon 1984), which uses the GCM in an original and highly instructive way to
understand how new policies get on the political agenda, and how more than gradual
political change is possible at all. Kingdon distinguishes, in the tradition of GCM, the
independent streams of problems, policies, and politics, and introduces the new and
strong metaphors of “political entrepreneurs” and “windows of opportunity.” Since this
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seminal work merits its own chapter in this volume, its major impact need not be
discussed here.
Mostly through Kingdon’s work, garbage can finally found its way into public policy
textbooks. And the more policy studies became disillusioned with traditional models of
the policy process which were unable to explain policy choices (Jann and Wegrich 2007),
and at the same time became even more interested in the possibilities and prerequisites
of policy change and policy learning, the more GCM became integrated into new
theoretical concepts, like the new concern with ideas, policy learning, and transfer
(Sabatier 1988; Hall 1993; Dolowitz and Marsh 1996) or network analysis (Klijn 1996).
But it is quite surprising that the ubiquitous governance discourse of recent decades,
stressing amongst others the declining importance of top–down hierarchical steering, the
co-production of public goods, network management, decentralized or even stateless
problem-solving, and so on, has not really been confronted with the basic assumptions
and findings of the GCM. Obviously there are still important developments where the
concept could be usefully employed.
Public Administration: Symbols and Myths in Administrative
Reform
(p. 309)
Also in the narrower field of public administration as a discipline, or at least as an
academic field, the GCM needed some time before it entered mainstream teaching and
research, and in many areas of New Public Management and public sector reform
discourses it seems it never arrived. Already in 1976 Olsen had described
“Reorganization as a Garbage Can” (Olsen 1976), using a major reorganization in a
Norwegian university as example, and some years later March and Olsen used GCM to
analyze 12 major reorganization efforts by President and Congress in the United States in
the twentieth century (March and Olsen 1983).
Their main conclusion was that short-run outcomes had been meager, to say the least,
and that these high-level reforms accounted only for an insignificant share of the total
administrative changes that occurred, were seldom followed by any systematic efforts to
assess their effects, and were “a source of frustration and an object of ridicule … and yet
are persistently resurrected by the political system” (p. 282). Observations and
experiences which again any veteran in any administrative system will immediately
recognize.
They observed that reorganization efforts have difficulties in sustaining the attention of
important political actors, and as a result, “reorganization efforts often operate in an
attention vacuum with respect to those political figures who are likely to be most
supportive, and improbable promises of economies are made in an effort to secure
attention.” In the end “reorganizations tend to become collections of solutions looking for
problems, ideologies looking for soapboxes, pet projects looking for supporters, and
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people looking for jobs, reputations, or entertainment. … administrative reform becomes
associated with issues, symbols, and projects that sometimes seem remote from the initial
impetus behind the effort” (p. 286).
In any reorganization effort “change comes to mean many different things to different
participants,” but not every effort is bound to fail. There are “short-run failures and longrun successes,” since “persistent repetition of similar ideas and similar arguments over a
relatively long period of time appear to make some difference.” This is because
reorganizations and reforms have to be viewed as “a form of civic education,” they cannot
be only understood in instrumental terms, but are expressions of social values.
Reorganizations can thus become alternatives to action or even a tactic to creating an
illusion of progress where none exists. All in all reorganizations are “a domain of rhetoric,
trading, problematic attention, and symbolic action” (p. 291). They are characterized by
problematic attention, incremental adaptation to changing problems, and have to be
understood as contests about legitimate values and institutions.
These ideas were further elaborated together with Nils Brunsson (Brunsson and Olsen
1993), and if they had been taken into consideration by administrative reformers
propagating New Public Management reforms all over Europe and the world, probably
some disappointments and surprises could have been avoided. At (p. 310) least in Europe
public administration as an academic endeavor is very much associated with
administrative reforms, it is essentially a “reform science.” But even in this core of
administrative science one can observe the widespread mutual disregard of mainstream
public management prescriptions and organizational theory. Only in Norway did garbage
can ideas inform discussions of public sector reform early on (Christensen and Lægreid
1998), and only after they had been integrated into the more comprehensive new
institutionalism did they gradually become common knowledge in administrative
sciences.
Institutional Theory: Organizational Factors in Political Life
In its original formulation the pure garbage can model is basically institution free, i.e.
structure is treated as exogenous (Olsen 2001, 1993). But from the beginning it was
obvious that the way organizations are structured influences the emergence of decision
opportunities and garbage cans, i.e. how, when, and which solution, actors, and problems
have the opportunity to meet. Starting from this observation GCM finally became also one
of the important inspirations to what is known as “the new institutionalism” in political
science, and which investigates the origins, dynamics, and possible impacts of the
structures that are treated as givens in the GCM.
This direction of theorizing was strictly influenced by the, again, accidental event that in
Norway, under the persuasive influence of Olsen, organization theory was developed in
departments of political science rather than in business schools. Starting from the
assumption of bounded rationality, political models describing and explaining
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organizations as conflict systems, coalitions, or negotiated orders were put up against the
traditional view that organizations are rational structures established to maximize agreed
upon purposes.
The unique combination of organizational theory and empirical political science, using
organization and decision theory on democracy, bureaucracy, pluralism, and corporatism,
was effectively enhanced by a major empirical study of the Norwegian political system,
commissioned by the Norwegian parliament and known as the first “power
study” (Magtutredningen), of which Olsen became one of the two leaders. The study was
supposed to investigate problems and appearances of political inequality in the
Norwegian welfare state, and from the beginning Olsen argued that political inequality is
shaped by and has to be explained through the organizational factors of political life.
Furthermore, he argued that a political-administrative system can be seen as the attempt
to reduce contextual dependency and to avoid accidental, surprising, and unwanted
couplings of solutions, actors, opportunities, and problems. The more ambiguous
preferences, goals, and means-ends assumptions are, he argued, the more important it is
to study choice opportunities, interpretation, and learning from a perspective of
influence, democracy, and organization.
Thus not only traditional hierarchically organized political-administrative
systems, but also segmented systems, as observed in the modern Norwegian corporatist
state, have to be understood as alternatives of organized anarchies, and there are
probably other alternatives. Olsen directed a number of empirical studies, focused on
how and to what degree organizational behavior and political outcomes are shaped by
political institutions, and he argued, organization theory should look for “a middle way
between the formal-legal tradition of political science and an environmental-deterministic
view” (in Olsen 1983 a number of these empirical studies are summarized, but
unfortunately the main results of the power study have only appeared in Norwegian;
Olsen 1978).
(p. 311)
The overall argument for this kind of theorizing and empirical exploration was sketched
in March and Olsen 1984, which became a perhaps even more famous political science
classic than the GCM (the article is still one of the 10 most quoted in the whole history of
the APSR). Here, and in the further elaboration of this approach (March and Olsen 1989,
2006) the authors took up, systematized, and sharpened some of the observations of the
original GCM. They stressed that actors cannot attend to all issues at the same time, that
political institutions create choice situations, that they have a highly symbolic
importance, create legitimacy and myths about how and why choices are made, and that
beliefs and preferences of actors are shaped by roles, duties, and obligations—they are
not exogenous to decision-making processes.
Furthermore they argued that political and administrative systems cope with ambiguity,
diversity, and inconsistencies in a variety of ways, amongst others by specialization,
separation, autonomy, sequential attention, local rationality, and conflict avoidance
(March and Olsen 2006: 15). Institutions are thus important to create order and
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predictability, they fashion, enable, and constrain political actors as they act within a
logic of appropriate action, and legitimacy therefore depends not only on showing that
actions accomplish appropriate objectives, but also, and perhaps even more so, that
actors behave in accordance with legitimate procedures.
The “new institutionalism” in turn inspired some “institutionalist” reinterpretation of the
original model, using the assumption that institutions distribute decision power by rules
and routines and coin actor identities and their interpretations and situations. Just like
Padgett in his adoption of the formal model, Sager and Rielle demonstrate that the
organized anarchy paradigm can be usefully applied to “fairly traditional and
bureaucratic structures.” By doing a comparative case study of the adoption of new
alcohol policy programs in Swiss cantons they show that most of the assumptions of the
original model hold (especially the contention of independent streams) and that a more
institutionalist form of the garbage can model is thus in order (Sager and Rielle 2013:
18). In the same vain Heimer and Stinchcombe argued that the organization of attention,
negotiation, and closure (i.e. institutional processes) supplies the history, legitimacy, and
network affiliations for different items in decision streams. Elements in streams have
histories and varying amounts of legitimacy and charisma, some items are more likely to
get put into and pulled out of the garbage can than others, thus order in garbage can
processes comes largely from the identities and institutional histories of (p. 312) the
items in decision streams. Garbage comes from somewhere and belongs to someone
(Heimer and Stinchcombe 1999: 42).
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Summary: Developing Garbage Cans
“Garbage Can” is one of the most well-known metaphors of policy analysis and
administration. There can be no doubt that the garbage can model of organizational
choice has been an extremely successful inspiration for all kinds and fields of the social
sciences since its appearance more than 40 years ago. Garbage cans are found and used
in all kinds of disciplines and studies, from management and political science to
economics, law, and accounting, and in all kinds of societal and policy sectors. At the
same time, as with many other successful concepts, the impact is in many ways broader
than deep.
But this is very much in line with the original intentions of the authors who have always
insisted that they suggested “a” model of organizational choice, not “the” model, since
“the complexity of decision making in an organization is unlikely to be captured by a
single model, any more than by reports of a single participant or historian” (Olsen 2001:
191). They have always stressed the playful character of the original paper and that “the
spirit has always been to encourage colleagues to play with the basic ideas, rather than
defend them endlessly” (p. 192). The amazing success of the concept stems from its
plausible assumptions, because it made sense of observations which had been made many
times before, but which did not fit into the prevailing explanations of organizational
theory. With the advent of the GCM what until now could only be pathologies and
blunders of organizational decision-making became the logical consequences of
ambiguous goals, technologies, participants, and decision opportunities.
For behavioral organizational theory the GCM became thus an important component,
encouraging more systematic and comprehensive rejections of the prevailing rational
model of decision-making, and also of their more unreflected uses in policy-making and
administration (Brunsson 1982). It forms an important part of the criticism and
substitution of forward-looking consequentialism with other forms of explanations, like
the logic of appropriateness, myths, hypocrisy, loose coupling, and so on. Compared with
the success of this “verbal model,” the impact of the formal model has been much more
limited. It has only inspired few applications and enlargements, but has triggered some of
the fiercest criticism, arguing that the GCM is marked by “pervasive confusion,” is
impossible to test, and has moved from “model to metaphor,” not the other way round, as
should be the case in proper science (Bendor et al. 2001). But even this opinionated and
somewhat dogmatic critique did not stop the ever-growing success of the concept, since it
ignored the central message of the original article, that the model is an attempt to
enlarge rather than replace other interpretations of organizational life.
(p. 313)
Despite its obvious relevance for policy-making and administration, it took some
years before the theoretical implications and potentials of the GCM became apparent.
The breakthrough came with Kingdon, and since then the concept has been an integral
part both of criticisms of established approaches (like comprehensive planning or the
policy cycle) as well as the development of new causal and explanatory models (like
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policy transfer and learning, network theory and punctuated equilibrium). Surprisingly,
the overwhelming “new public governance” discourse of recent decades mostly ignored
the implications of garbage can decision-making for the more decentralized, less
hierarchical, more horizontal, and open decision-making structures of “modern
governance.”
Finally, the GCM has been an important inspiration for the new institutionalism in
political science. Here, one of the key assumptions of the original model was reversed, i.e.
instead of the “institution free” premise, where structures and rules were treated as
exogenous, the overriding question now became how the organizational features of
political life influence decision processes and outcomes. Also here many of the theoretical
and empirical implications are still open. We know that modern democracies have limited
capacities for institutional design and reform, but the important issue whether and how
institutional arrangements can be influenced and shaped, and how that in turn will
influence the structure and outcomes of garbage can processes, deserves our theoretical
and empirical attention. Institutional policies are highly complex and uncertain, but if we
expect political administrations and institutions to constrain or enable processes and
outcomes, we should try to learn more about how they influence the temporal and
structural coupling of solutions, actors, opportunities, and problems.
The GCM has certainly enhanced our understanding of public policy-making and
administrative behavior. Both have become much more realistic and also more fun to
watch. At the same time it has improved our possibilities to act purposely and to influence
policy processes and outcomes. Only if we understand organizational choice and
institutional arrangements can we try to use and to change them. We will always be a
long way from the orderly world of clear preferences, fixed participants, and
consequential actions, but we can at least no longer pretend to be the naïve and innocent
victims of pathological and irrational processes. And finally, as for example the current
discussions about “wicked problems” tell us, there is ample evidence of ever more, more
fluid, and more ambiguous actors, technologies, and goals in modern democracies. So
look out for more and more sophisticated uses of the GCM in years to come.
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Werner Jann
Werner Jann is Professor for Political Science, Administration, and Organization at
Potsdam University, Germany, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of
Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Norway. His main
areas of teaching and research are public sector modernization, organization
xvitheory, and public governance. He is Vice President of the International Institute
of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) in Brussels and past President of the European
Group of Public Administration (EGPA).
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