Johan P. Olsen
University of Oslo
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Primary Section: 53, Social and Political Sciences Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2011)
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Biosketch
Professor emeritus and founding director of Center for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway.
Research Interests
As a student of formal organizations and political institutions I have been interested in organizational decision-making and learning; the institutionalization and de-institutionalization, integration and disintegration of political orders; democracy, power and the changing political organization of Europe. I have worked within a research tradition where empirical observations of how decisions are made and formal organizations and political institutions work and change have problematized conventional assumptions about human agency, rational choice and problem solving, and formal organizations as tools of willful choice and progress. One result of a gradual relaxation of standard assumptions have been 'garbage can' models of organizational decision making, observing a temporal rather than a consequential order. That is, an order generated by temporal linkages, the arrival and departure times and independent exogenous streams of problems, solutions, participants and choice opportunities, rather than an order based on human intention and choice. Another result is the development of a 'new institutionalism', emphasizing rule-following and a logic of appropriateness rather than a logic of consequentiality. These developments are linked to old concerns in political theory of understanding the conditions under which there is (intentional) order and authority, and ongoing processes in Europe are providing an interesting 'laboratory' for exploring old ideas in a contemporary context.
