Where does attention-based view collide?

What a firm does depends on what its decision-makers attend to, and what they attend to is set less by their own minds than by the structures around them. Ocasio's 1997 Towards an attention-based view of the firm made attention a property of the organization rather than of any one manager: the firm's rules, resources, communications, and the concrete situations it puts people in channel where scarce attention goes, so the same executive attends to different issues in different roles. This is not a person concentrating harder; it is an organization structurally distributing and situating attention across its channels. Ocasio's 2011 Attention to attention later separated this organizational meaning from the many others the word carries. The referent here is a firm's agenda, produced by its architecture, not a spotlight inside a single head.[1][2]

Unit

A firm's allocation of decision-makers' attention across issues

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through the issues named in agendas, filings, and communications, and through the structural positions and procedures that channel them

The idea that attention is a scarce resource an organization allocates comes from the Carnegie tradition that the attention-based view grew out of. Because managers cannot attend to everything at once, March and Simon's 1958 Organizations and Cyert and March's 1963 A behavioral theory of the firm treated the firm's routines, goals, and search procedures as devices that decide which problems get looked at and in what order. Attention here is sequential and rationed: the firm attends to one goal, then another, and shifts focus when performance falls short. This is where organizational attention gets its meaning as something allocated by structure rather than chosen freely. Ocasio's view is a direct descendant, making the channelling of attention its central mechanism.[3][4]

Unit

The order and priority in which an organization attends to problems and goals

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred from decision routines, problem-driven search, and shifts of focus that follow shortfalls against goals