Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions Gary Klein MIT Press Cambridge, MA 1998 352 pp. ISBN 0-262-11227-2 $54.00

Keywords Decision making, Individual behaviour, Management

The "powers" referred to in the title is not an acknowledgement to the concepts of power-as-force in the organizational behavior and management literatures, but to power-as-analytical-abilities from artificial intelligence. Curiously, the subtitle of this book is a more apt descriptor, as this volume chronicles an inductively developed, descriptive model of naturalistic decision making; a stark contrast to more prescriptive artificial intelligence and rational choice models. The goals of this book are twofold; one to make a case for naturalistic study of decision making, and two, to describe Klein's recognition-primed decision model (RPD). Often these two goals appear mixed; from the third chapter onward, naturalistic decision making and RPD are often used interchangeably. To some extent this is to be expected, but in the later chapters this conflation sometimes becomes distracting and limiting. But, overall, Klein succeeds in both making a cogent case for further naturalistic study of decision making and in promoting his RPD model as a logical starting point. In the earlier chapters the array of evidence marshaled is plentiful enough to give even the most ardent rational choice theorist pause. The descriptive study of decision making has, in recent years, documented an increasing divergence between what people do and what the prescriptive models dictate they should do. The fact that people who do not obey the rational prescriptions seem to do well overall, especially the everyday experts as documented in this volume makes Klein's calls to redefine such icons as rationality and expertise appropriate extensions of the data.