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Innovation and Administrative
Decision Making: The

Conservation of Land Resources

Problems of organizational innovation have been examined from the
perspectives of incentive management and limited cognition theory.
This study, however, points to the significance of certain fundamental
value orientations, often suprainstitutional, for an understanding of
decision making. It examines the impact of an orientation toward
change, shared by resource management agencies, upon biological
science, resource economics, and administrative practices. It compares
agency positions along a change spectrum to explain varying resistance
to innovation. Possibilities for further research into the role of this
variable in other substantive areas are advanced in a concluding evalua-
tion of its significance for the study of innovation.

Ashley L. Schiff is associate professor in the political science depart-
ment at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island.

IDEOLOGY AND INNOVATION1

STUDIES of organizational innovation have followed two main paths. Reflecting the influence of Barnard's inducements-contributions approach, some students have stressed the importance of

1 The author would especially like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Sanford Lakoff. He also wishes to express his appreciation to Arthur Maass, Albert Gorvine, Merton Reichler, Howard Scarrow, Herbert Kaufman, Dwight Waldo, and Aaron Wildavsky for their comments on a draft of this paper. He is particularly grateful to Arthur Maass for an opportunity to read his forthcoming article on the

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effective incentive management. Through the skilled use of explicit penalties and rewards, executives may enable organizations to maintain themselves in a hazardous environment. Other students, aware of the significance of limitations on knowledge for a theory of administrative choice and search, have focused on the phenomena of goal factoring, construction of means-ends chains, subunit identifications, attention focus, and suboptimization or "satisficing." Thus, administrators may simplify a complex world by attending to only part of it at a time and by fixing their attention on proximate objectives and operational criteria.

Common to both viewpoints is a belief in the efficacy of purposeful activity in organizational adaptation. Several students, however, have expressed reservations. One found that organizations that deliberately engineered changes failed to demonstrate marked superiority in adjustive power. Another proposed a theory of "natural selection" to reckon capacity for survival, relying on random variations in organizational forins and policy commitments. This skeptical view of the administrator's ability to effect a deliberate adjustment of the organization may well reflect a recognition of the many dimensions of organizational behavior that remain to be investigated. Pending isolation of these variables, reliance on chance to explain organizational fate is perhaps prudent even if it is not satisfying.

One variable that has not received sufficient attention in the literature is the role of fundamental administrative outlooks or professional ideologies. Unfortunately, the very pervasiveness of

"Conservation of Natural Resources: Social and Political Aspects" in the Interna-
tional Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. He also found most useful Hugh Raup's
Some Problems in Ecological Theory and Their Relation to Conservation, Journal
of Ecology, 52 (suppl.) (March, 1964), 19-24.

This work has been aided in part, by Resources for the Future, Inc.
* Peter Clark and James Q. Wilson, Incentive Systems: A Theory of Organizations,
Administrative Science Quarterly, 6 (1961), p. 129.

James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958);
Richard Cyert and James March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

*John McNulty, Organizational Change in Growing Enterprises, Admistrative Science Quarterly, 7 (1962), p. 1.

Herbert Kaufman, Organizational Theory and Political Theory, American Political Science Review, 58 (1964), p. 13.

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