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Business Decision Making: A Phenomenological Approach
Norman, Richard Allan
10/2  (Winter 1967): 59-64

The article focuses on a phenomenological approach to business decision making. The phenomenological approach takes a different viewpoint as it is centered in the decision maker. It considers him to be an active element in the determination of business behavior and seeks to understand business decisions in terms of how he perceives and defines his situation? In this approach, a business situation is riot taken to be a single set of objectively determinable facts, it is a particular structure of selected data organized and evaluated by someone for some purpose. Thus, the decisions a particular situation will "cause" will depend not only on the facts, but also on the decision maker's selection and organization of those facts. The basic problem of the phenomenological approach is to understand how the decision maker "sees" the situation. While a decision maker's definition is not static and will change with new experience, the rate and extent of such change is limited, the decision maker's definition of his situation appeared to have stability and continuity both in content and in form.

 

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