James G. March Quotes (1928-2018)

“If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation.”

“Social, political and economic institutions have become larger, considerably more complex and resourceful, and prima facie more important to collective life. Many of the major actors in modern economic and political systems are formal organizations, and the institutions of law and bureaucracy occupy a dominant role in contemporary life.”

“Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ. Organization theories describe the delicate conversion of conflict into cooperation, the mobilization of resources, and the coordination of effort that facilitate the joint survival of an organization and its members.”

“One issue, which I used to talk about by looking at George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, is how madness, heresy, and genius are related. We often describe great leaders as having the drive, vision, imagination, and creativity to transform their organizations through daring new ideas. Retrospectively, of course, we sometimes find that such heresies have been the foundation for bold and necessary change, but heresy is usually just crazy. Most daring new ideas are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses. If we could identify which heretics would turn out to be geniuses, life would be easier than it is. There is plenty of evidence that we cannot.”

“Contemporary theories of politics tend to portray politics as a reflection of society, political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual behavior, action as the result of choices based on calculated self-interest, history as efficient in reaching unique and appropriate outcomes, and decision making and the allocation of resources as the central foci of political life. Some recent theoretical thought in political science, however, blends elements of these theoretical styles into an older concern with institutions. This new institutionalism emphasizes the relative autonomy of political institutions, possibilities for inefficiency in history, and the importance of symbolic action to an understanding of politics. Such ideas have a reasonable empirical basis, but they are not characterized by powerful theoretical forms. Some directions for theoretical research may, however, be identified in institutionalist conceptions of political order.”

“Social, political and economic institutions have become larger, considerably more complex and resourceful, and prima facie more important to collective life. Many of the major actors in modern economic and political systems are formal organizations, and the institutions of law and bureaucracy occupy a dominant role in contemporary life.”

“The Bureaucratic Phenomenon was the first of a series of books published over a 15-year period through which Michel stimulated attention to the organizations of contemporary society and their contributions to social and political problems. In La société bloquée (1970), L’acteur et le système (with co-author Erhard Freiberg; 1977), and On ne change pas la société par décret (1979), he explored modern, particularly French, society and its social, political, and economic structures. Better than most, he saw the difficulties of achieving democratic aspirations in a modern nation state. In particular, as his 1979 book trumpeted, he saw that modern societies did not change simply by giving them well-intentioned orders. Michel successfully avoided being encased in the bureaucratic coffin that frequently typifies universities, especially French universities. In the 1960s, he created the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO). The CSO developed a culture similar in spirit to other small groups that have made distinctive contributions to scholarship, for example, the group around Kurt Lewin at MIT in the 1940s. The CSO attracted a remarkable group of young scholars, including some from Quebec and China at a time when that was not common in French centers, who exhibited extraordinary loyalty and affection toward Michel while pursuing independent courses that only partly paralleled his. He was a teacher and a colleague who came to be respected and loved not only in France and America but also throughout the world”