(MIS)UNDERSTANDING COGNITION IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES

The article assesses the contribution made by cognitivist studies to the renewal of organizational theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s and highlights a number of ambivalences in the cognitivist approach. On the one hand, the innovations wrought by the works of Simon, Cyert and March, and Weick have focused organizational analysis on organizational thought, which became a mainstay in the paradigmatic polemic against positivism and structuralism in organizational analysis. On the other hand, the criterion of scientificity, the measurement of the thoughts of organizational actors, and the importance assigned to strategic decision makers in organizations, tie this approach to the rationalist, positivist and structuralist conception that was characteristic of the dominant paradigm in organizational studies and theories until the 1970s.