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This chapter gives an overview of approaches to the study of governments, building explicitly on the work of A. King (1975) and C. Campbell (1993), who, respectively, offered three research themes (composition, internal dynamics and external relations) and three theoretical perspectives (institutionalism, rational choice and political sociology/psychology). Each of the three research themes is discussed separately, using examples that illustrate the theoretical perspectives: under ‘composition’, the examples are coalition formation (rational choice) and recruitment/motivation (political sociology/psychology); under ‘internal dynamics’, the examples are prime–ministerial v. cabinet government (institutionalism) and political roles/groupthink (political sociology/psychology); and under ‘external relations’, the examples are executive–legislative relations (institutionalism) and control over bureaucracy (rational choice). The last section of the chapter compares the three theoretical approaches.

Depending on the degree of goal uncertainty and procedural uncertainty, organizational decision making may follow the bounded rationality model, process model, political model, or anarchic model. Individual decision making relies on heuristics that can lead to biases. Group decision making is vulnerable to the tendencies for groupthink, group polarization, and an escalation of commitment. In an attempt to reduce decision uncertainty and complexity, organizations control the creation and use of information by establishing decision premises, rules, and routines for different types of decision situations.

Emotions are contagious and under any conditions, human service delivery environments demand the highest levels of emotional labor from workers, who must contain the overwhelming and distressing emotions of their clients. Stress and trauma exacerbate staff demands for emotional labor. Atmospheres of recurrent or constant crisis severely constrain the ability of staff to manage their own emotions and this makes it difficult to provide healing environments for their clients. Atmospheres of chronic crisis and fear contribute negatively to poor services. Under these circumstances, conflict escalates and both relationships and problem-solving suffers.

This chapter explores the processes of social group behaviour, which are often analysed through a social psychological perspective that tends to see organizations as having shared purposes or as having ‘politics’ of a relatively minor kind. This perspective is then placed in a wider critical analysis of the politics of organizations. It is useful to take as examples cases where things go wrong. However, many of the same processes underlie ‘success’ as well as ‘failure’. There is a need to grasp how failure occurs but then aim to identify what is generic in the politics of organizations and what is particular to failure. With this approach in place, one can then ask how organizations might learn from experiences of success and failure and what organizational learning might mean. The concept of groupthink is also discussed, along with decision-making as a rational process, escalation as group psychology, escalation as a failure of rationality, and persistence.

This chapter presents the situational social influence explanation of organizational wrongdoing. This explanation is the second of five alternative accounts of wrongdoing considered in the book. It is rooted in a theoretical perspective that views organizations as systems of localized social interaction, and views organizational participants as by nature or necessity attentive to the attitudes and behaviors of those in their immediate environment. The chapter elaborates three forms of situational social influence that inform explanations of organizational wrongdoing considered in previous chapters: social information processing, groupthink, and definition of the situation. It also elaborates forms of situational influence that charter entirely new territory, including the norm of reciprocity, group dynamics, social comparison and liking-based compliance, and commitment to a failing course of action (which is considered in depth). The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of the situational social influence explanation.

Jeshua Enriquez, in “Crossing the Threshold of B-Mor: Instrumental Commodification and the Model Minority in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea,” examines how Lee’s 2014 novel presents an acutely globalized and market-driven dystopian vision. In the aftermath of a national collapse, American civilization rearranges itself into stratified sub-societies—Charters, Facilities, and Open Counties—with B-Mor (formerly Baltimore) the ultimate example. Consequently, Enriquez provides a nuanced reading of Asian American commodification as the model minority and the importance of communal story-telling in defeating an oppression generated by racial framing as social control through the novel’s key figure-Fan.

This chapter makes the case for theory-informed and critically-driven public policy and practice interventions to safeguard older people from abuse. The chapter’s first section sets out the case for ‘theory’, describing what this means and why it matters in social gerontology and adult protection. The second section calls for critical perspectives, critical thinking and critical practice in elder abuse, to create and sustain critically reflexive organisational cultures intolerant of ‘group think’, lazy reasoning, uncritical or poor practice. Overall the chapter argues that without critically informed and theory-driven policy and practice, adult safeguarding policy development and practice interventions run the risk of being ad hoc, at best without worth or at worst damaging to the older person.

Framed around debates concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis, this chapter investigates three contrasting approaches to the intersection of psychology with nuclear strategy. The first is Herman Kahn’s erasure of human psychology in his proposal of a flexible response as opposed to Bertrand Russell’s articulation of the nuclear standoff as analogous to a game of “Chicken.” The two others — Charles Osgood’s graduated disarmament strategy known as GRIT and Irving Janis’s critique of collective decision-making popularized as “groupthink” — attempted to reverse Kahn’s escalatory logic by incorporating aspects of psychological behavior into the rational framework dominant in the discipline at the time.

The social-scientific preoccupation with decision making is interpreted, in part, as reflecting an American cultural emphasis on instrumentalism. Its confusion of meanings as a distinct phenomenon is noted, and several different traditions of research are identified—rationality, the behavioral-descriptive approach, incrementalism, and “garbage can”—which have produced some disarray in the concept of decision making. The authors identify the “framing” of decisions as an especially usable concept. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to scholarly literatures on American presidential decision making; decision making in medical arenas; the process of decision making in “naturalistic settings,” usually dealing with crises and emergencies; and “groupthink,” a social-psychological process that frequently impairs objective, fact-based, contingent decisions.

This chapter examines how Ireland managed the 2008 financial crisis. It first provides an overview of Ireland's transition from colony to nation-state before discussing its institutions and legacies as well as the national question that it had to deal with. It then considers Ireland's political economy, focusing on the impact of the multinational corporations on the economy, along with the origins of the 2008 financial crisis and a number of issues faced by Ireland, such as the possibility of groupthink and the lack of expertise and regulation in the country. Finally, it analyzes Ireland's response to the crisis in the form of a package of state guarantees, capital injections, efforts to clean up the banks' loan books, and a bailout deal with the Troika of the European Union, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

Political leadership is often presented as a top-down and agency-driven process but as this chapter shows, leadership is a relational dynamic that has to include followers to be a viable enterprise. Leader–follower engagement is revealed as a complex and variable interdependency that raises significant methodological, conceptual, and theoretical issues. The chapter examines and appraises different types of ‘followership’ ranging from interpersonal forms of bargaining and negotiated compliance through to the more multilayered relationships involving the cultivation of cooperation via core values, emotional ties, and common identities. It also considers the influence of psychological conditioning (e.g. charisma) and the dynamics of social psychology (e.g. ‘groupthink’) before going on to consider the more extreme forms of internalized submissiveness associated with the ‘authoritarian character’.

This chapter reconsiders the persistent problems of discrimination and exclusion in light of psychology research on prejudice and bias. It focuses on three important topics in housing and land use law. First, it examines whether disparate impact claims (i.e., discrimination claims against facially neutral housing policies that have discriminatory effects but lack evidence of discriminatory intent) have the potential to redress implicit, largely unconscious bias. Second, it describes how psychology research on the effect of perceived social norms on prejudice lends support to a controversial provision of the US Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discriminatory housing advertisements and statements. Third, the chapter discusses how psychology research can inform, and ameliorate, exclusion and discrimination in neighborhood and block associations charged with budgeting, zoning, or spending powers.

This chapter describes the origins, operation, and characteristics of the Trumanite network that defines and manages U.S. security policy. The network emerged during the Truman administration, with the support of liberal democrats in Congress and over the opposition of conservative Republicans, who expressed concern about creating a “Gestapo” or “garrison state” run by “power-grabbing bureaucrats.” The tightly knit network consists today of the several hundred officials who run the nation’s vast military, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic apparatus, which is largely removed from public view. They are expert, efficient, hard-working, secretive, nonideological, and process-oriented, inclined to stick with existing policy, define security in military terms, exaggerate security threats, eschew dissent, and resist accountability. The gravitational pull leads to groupthink, excessive path dependence, and security programs that are “sticky down.”

Others’ public reactions to a mutually observed assertion are a significance source of evidence: the fact that our trusted fellows have accepted an assertion can provide us with additional (higher-order) evidence of the acceptability of the assertion. This chapter argues that this familiar phenomenon has implications that are much more far-reaching than has heretofore been recognized. Some of the news is good: the uptake of public uptake underwrites something in the vicinity of a kind of legitimate epistemic bootstrapping, in that there can be cases in which one’s own epistemic position with respect to a proposition improves on observing that others have accepted one’s assertion of that proposition. But other news is not good: some of the very same features that give rise to the possibility of legitimate epistemic bootstrapping also explain several unhappy aspects of our group life as epistemic subjects, such as groupthink and group polarization.

The universal dilemma of learning and its breakdown in organizations is revisited. Learning is an essential element of organizational functioning, but because of a variety of factors the breakdown of learning is inevitable. The chapter explores how organizations can address this universal dilemma of learning described by Wilensky in the 1960s. Politics, power, and deception contribute to the breakdown of learning. The failure to find an active WMD program in Iraq is put into the context of other breakdowns, including bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the space shuttle Challenger disaster. How experience can be miseducative is explored and the concept of miseducating experiences is expanded upon. Cultures that fail to support learning contribute to organizational breakdown. The chapter concludes by suggesting areas for future study of organizational breakdown based on the perspective of learning from experience in organizations.

This chapter speaks about Asch’s classic study about how individuals will conform to the group even in the face of unambiguously true information. Similar trends were witnessed in the real world during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where President Kennedy’s top advisors succumbed to groupthink and failed to recognize Cuba’s military strength and foresight in predicting the planned US invasion. Contrary to common sense, individuals tend to resolve the cognitive dissonance they experience when faced with group pressure by changing their deeply held (and objectively true) opinions. Conformity to work processes is necessary in any workplace environment, but when taken to the extreme, it can lead to false perceptions about agreement, a lack of speaking out, and ultimately poor decision-making.

Approaches to failure in organizations are reviewed. The organizational intelligence, culture, normal accident, high-reliability, human error, and expertise approaches are reviewed. The review reveals both the contributions and limitations to these approaches. This review is framed by considering the limitations and contribution of Irving Janis and his reference to groupthink. The influence and wide acceptance of the concept of groupthink to both the theory and the practice of organizational decision making provides an important benchmark for the possibilities of understanding organizational failure from a single perspective. The chapter concludes by suggesting a need to better understand the role of learning and learning from experience in organizational breakdown.

On the basis of a review of literature, the impact of groupthink and the importance of a democratic atmosphere in teams are discussed. An example of leadership in teams is provided by the interaction between a successful coach and his team during a soccer world championship. Leadership on the level of the organization is explored by giving the example of two merging organizations and their problematic cooperation. Leadership on the level of a world organization is exemplified by an analysis of the successes and failures of the United Nations. At the end of this chapter the concept of “flexible democracy” is presented. In this concept two lines of exploration come together, one referring to the movements on the dimensions of power distance and emotional distance and the other referring to the connection between self, team, and organization.

By deciding whom to execute and whom to spare, the fledgling Irish state was asserting its sovereignty and flagrantly displaying its power to deflect the law from the lethal outcome it was otherwise bound to reach. The unregulated nature of executive clemency stood out against a background of bureaucratic decision-making which strove to be open, consistent, and dispassionate. This chapter examines what can be learned about how executive clemency was debated around the cabinet table, to what extent it was vulnerable to public opinion and petitions for mercy, other factors which affected the exercise of discretion (including the role of Department of Justice officials), and the relevance of the make-up of the government, in particular, the character of the Minister for Justice. (e.g. P.J. Ruttledge versus his successor Gerald Boland). The concept of groupthink in relation to government decision-making is explored.