Must institutional analyses be built on the methodological rules of “methodological individualism” or on those of “methodological holism”, in their several varieties? A middle way mode of explanation exists which Aggasi firstly named it as “institutional individualism” in 1960. The...

I discuss the rhetorical dimensions of bounded rationality in two different, yet related, contexts, namely in the practice of organizational economists and in Herbert Simon’s key attempts to persuade economists to take bounded rationality seriously, his Ely lecture and his Nobel Prize lecture....

The way in which bounded rationality enters contemporary organizational economics theorizing is examined. It is argued that, as it is being used, bounded rationality is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing the results of organizational economics. It is at best a rhetorical device, used...