Herbert Simon was an American Social Scientist and Economist who has contributed enormously to the growth of Public Administration as a discipline. He was born in 1916; he lived through a time when Management was getting structurally defined by Weber and Human Relationists respectively. Most of Herbert Simon's contribution to Public Administration was at a time when Scientific Management was fading away as a result of Bureaucratic Management antithesis and Human Relationists were campaigning for an employee friendly environment. It is no wonder that Herbert attempts to offer a modicum of all the three approaches while borrowing from his economics background and love for computer science. .
In this paper, we shall conduct an in-depth study of Herbert Simon's Contribution to the Public Organization Theory. We shall offer an in-depth look at his work on decision making, rationality in management and organizational behavior. Finally, we shall offer practical example of how Herbert's intellectual contribution to administration can be adopted in the Ministry of Education in Kenya. .
2.0 Herbert Simon Professional Contribution to Public Administration.
The main contribution of Herbert Simon to Public Administration was the process of decision making. His Psychology background as well as his reverence to Weber's Bureaucratic theory led him to investigate by experiments how administrators make decisions, what clouds their decision as well as the limitations of the human mind and cognitive process. For this reason, Simon writes a lot on rationality and the limitations of perfect rationality advanced by economic theories. Finally, he investigates how this rationality affects the decision making process of the administrators. In this chapter we discuss his contribution to decision making process as well as his advancement of the bounded rationality. .
2.1 Bounded Rationality.
Economic scholars before Simon and who Simon had studied a lot in economics had it that economic actors must at all times be rational agents.