Decision Making for Business: A Reader (Published in association with The Open University)

Decision making is critical to organizational performance and central to any understanding of organizations. The decisions made by an organization to determine (or justify) actions taken, and reveal how organizations think. Students of business need to understand how decisions are made and what factors impinge on the processes and outputs of decision making.

Decision Making for Business gathers crucial contributions to our understanding of decision making and assembles them to form a coherent and sustained analysis of the key factors that influence the process. The selected articles are stimulating, provocative and analytical, resulting in a critical, comprehensive and innovative analysis of decision making.

The book includes theoretical insights into decision making. It provides empirical examples of decision making and explanations of decision making processes. The volume draws on classical contributions to decision making and more recent developments in the theory of organizational process and structure. Explanations are organized in four categories:

• The anatomy of decision making
• Understanding decision making
• Thinking in organizations
• Societal context of organizational decision making

Decision Making for Business is intended for students taking courses in strategy and decision making, organizational analysis, the sociology of work, at undergraduate and MBA levels, and will also be an excellent resource for masters and postgraduate students. The Reader is in a series of three (alongside Strategy for Business and Policy Issues for Business) which constitutes the main teaching texts of the Open University undergraduate course Business Behavior in a Changing World.

Graeme Salaman is Professor of Organization Studies at the Open University Business School