The Study Of Business Decision-Making: Reflections On The Methodological Approach

The paper presents a reflection on the business decision-making and the methodologies used to study decision-making dynamics. It starts from an overview of the prevailing literature, which is essentially based on normative and predictive approaches, and then paves the way for a more realistic view of the decision-making, which belongs to descriptive approach and distances itself from substantial rationality in favor of the adoption of procedural rationality. Business decisions, in the reality of organisations, are the result of strategies, power games, constraints, rules and external influences and for this reason can only be understood ex post, in a descriptive logic.
Every decision appears to be linked to the specific historical and social context in which it is produced. This imposes a different study methodology, based on the exploration of decision-making contexts. The result of the study can only be local and non-generalisable knowledge.