A New Look into Garbage Cans - Petri Nets and Organisational
Choice
CPM Report No.: 00-63
By: Sven Heitsch, Daniela Hinck and Marcel Martens
Date: 2nd May 2000
A Paper at: The "Starting from
Society" symposium at ASIB'2000
convention, Birmingham University, 16th-19th April 2000.
Also published as: Sven Heitsch, Daniela Hinck and Marcel Martens (2000), "A
New Look into Garbage Cans - Petri Nets and Organisational Choice", in the
Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium on Starting from Society - the Application
of Social Analogies to Computational Systems, Birmingham, UK: AISB, 51-60. (ISBN
1 902956 13 8)
Abstract
Understanding how organisations make decisions is crucial step towards
understanding organisations. Seeing organisations as a place of structure
and rationality has not led to satisfying results. The "Garbage Can Model
of Organizational Choice" of Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972), fundamental
to behaviouristic organisational theory, looks at "organized anarchies"
and opens eyes for ambiguous and unpredictable decision situations. Reference
Nets, a high-level Petri net formalism, offer formal semantics, graphical
representation, means to model concurrency, and immediate executability,
and, thus, seem to meet basic requirements to model and present sociological
theories. In this paper Petri nets are used to formalise the Garbage Can
Model and expose its implicit assumptions. The resulting model serves as
a basis for interdisciplinary collaboration. Weaknesses of the original
theory are laid open leading to new sociological considerations.
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