Patrick Regnér

If behavioral strategy is set out to bring in “realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotions, and social behavior” (Powell et al., 2011: 1371), research in this emerging stream needs to go beyond conventional rational vs. bounded rational debate. It is not anymore novel to claim that managers are hardwired with cognitive biases. Nor do we see any added value in examining the battery of factors that can explain variance in a uniformly defined type of ‘rationality’. Instead, there is a need for an integrative perspective that can yield a more realistic picture of executive decision makers who interact in different social, political and historical contexts and, accordingly, develop their own heuristics and rules of thumb in order to arrive at their own ‘rational decisions’ attuned to their idiosyncratic ecologies. In this paper, we aim to fulfill this need.