Analysis of a Decision Making Investigation

Those management and social scientists dealing with organizational behavior are severely limited by the need for more operational theory and by the paucity of experimental data on important events and phenomena. The many practical and conceptual reasons why experiments in the classical sense cannot be conducted lead us to consider a less rigorous form of inquiry called an investigation. A possible heuristic procedure for analyzing data from investigations is proposed. The heuristic has the property that rather than selecting favorable events to support a theory, it codes and incorporates observed events systematically into a testing of theory. This procedure is applied to data from the Churchman-Ratoosh laboratory investigations of implementation processes. Our results are consistent with the assumption of a constant source diffusion of innovation process. Data for the diffusion process and attendant structural change are presented in terms of models. The application of the heuristic also suggests questions for further diffusion and implementation experiments.