There can hardly be a story that does not involve choice. Two gripping ancient narratives, the story of paradise lost and the story of the Trojan War, start with fatal choices. In the first, Adam and Even choose to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. In the second, young prince Paris chooses to offer the golden apple to Aphrodite, setting up a sequence of events that will lead to the Trojan War and, maybe, the thousand year-old enmities that have divided people across the Aegean. In our times, choice has been elevated as the supreme value of our consumer culture and the guarantee of our freedom. So is all choice good? What makes it good?  

Choice is a ubiquitous feature of modern life. People make choices the whole time, about what jobs to apply for, about where to go on holidays, about who to side with in an argument, about whether to buy a new machine, about the price to charge for their goods and so on. Choice appears to be everywhere. Many life issues that, in earlier societies, were pre-determined by social factors, such as who to marry, what career to pursue, what sexual identity to adopt and so forth, have now come under the remit of free choice.

Choice is also deemed to be a good thing, it is a value. It is the foundation stone of contemporary freedom, summed up in the consumer’s freedom to choose what he/she buys without having to offer any explanations (Bauman, 1988). Choices, however, are not always open; nor does the appearance of choice always indicate the existence of serious alternatives. Some choices may look more open from the outside than the inside. Inside the hurly-burly of social and organizational life, many of our actions appear not to have the character of choice. An outsider may see choices (“You could leave your job” “You could retrain and start a new career” etc.) where an insider sees none. Alternatively, an outsider may see compulsion where an insider sees choice (“I choose to work 16 hours per day”). Choice is linked with agency. People who are in control of their own destiny are expected to make choices whereas those who have no choices are seen as failures, receiving charity and having others make choices on their behalf. This puts pressure on employees to see themselves as having choices; otherwise they are owning up to powerlessness.

It is well known that people cannot choose from an infinite variety of alternatives. Chinese restaurants realized that huge menus raise the anxiety levels of many of their customers and sensibly offered set menus as a way of short-circuiting some of this. The concept of bounded rationality has been used to explain how most choices are made. An individual narrows the range of alternatives by excluding various possibilities from the start and then chooses the first alternative that appears to be ‘good enough’, a process that Herbert Simon (1957) described as ‘satisficing’ rather than optimizing. While rationality plays an important part in some choices, others appear to be governed by emotional factors, by desire. Many people may acknowledge that a particular individual offers great prospects as a marriage partner (handsome, kind and rich) and yet follow the dictates of their heart and marry someone who appears to promise excitement, passion and risk.

A great deal of research has focused on consumer choice; how do people come to choose one product rather than another? This is clearly crucial for any competitive business and is particularly relevant for marketing and advertising. There is also much discussion of strategic choice, how, in other words the ruling blocks or coalitions in organization make choices about the direction in which they wish to steer it. How are alternatives formulated and how are they evaluated? There is also much interest in how group choices may differ from individual choices and the extent to which the perception of risk shapes group decision. A particularly intriguing account of how people in organizations make decisions is known as the ‘garbage can’ model of choice. According to this unexpectedly illuminating idea  “an organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision-makers looking for work.” (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972, p. 2, emphasis added). Choice, in this model, is not the careful and rational process of selection among alternatives but rather part of an anarchic and almost random process whereby ideas or measures assume the character of choices when they collide with socially constructed problems.

Choice was not always seen as an unqualified blessing. Existential theorists from Kierkegaard viewed choice as generating anxiety. Sartre’s concept of ‘mauvaise foi’ (bad faith) is not so much a state of inauthenticity as a deliberate denial of choices in order to avoid the anxiety that accompanies them (1956). Excessive freedom can be overwhelming. But sometimes, simple choices in conditions of unfreedom can be even more oppressive. In the film, Sophie’s Choice, a mother is sadistically forced by a Nazi officer to choose which of her two children will be murdered. The decision haunts the rest of her life. Likewise, in the novel Roots, the recaptured slave Kunta Kinte is allowed to choose what form of dreadful mutilation he will suffer. Such choices have more of the character of humiliation. But life is full of choices that call for painful and even tragic decisions. In organizations, managers and employees may be faced with two alternatives both of which are unpleasant, but are forced to choose between them. An employee of a pharmaceutical company might be faced with the choice as to whether to blow the whistle on false research results or collude with the wrongdoing. Far from being an unalloyed value, therefore, choice must be approached in a careful and critical manner to identify whether it is free or not, whether it is enjoyable or not, whether it is meaningful or not, and, above all, whether it is real or not.

Bauman, Z. 1988. Freedom. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. 1972. A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17: 1-25.

Sartre, J.-P. 1956. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. New York: Philosophical Library.

Simon, H. A. 1957. Administrative behavior. New York: Macmillan.