bounded rationality: an analysis of teaching manuals of management general theory

The objective of this article was to analyze how the concept of bounded rationality has been treated in the educational manuals of General Theory of Management, with the objective to analyze its quality, in terms of quality and complexity. Therefore, three educational manuals provided by the Central Library of the Alfa Federal University were used: “General Theory of Administration” authored by Motta and Vasconcelos (Manual A); “Introduction to Management” by Chiavenato (Manual B), and “Management: Theory and Processes” by Caravantes, Caravantes, and Kloeckener (Manual C). These were observed from the content analysis in four dimensions defined a priori: delimitation of the approach and quality of the references; historical-concrete dimension; relationship dimension; and theoretical dimension. The results showed that all manuals presented considerations about the bounded rationality assumption and made reference to Simon and Barnard, although they have not discussed their work and their contribution more widely. Manual A was the most complete in the axes analysis herein. Manual B turned to a summarized and synthetic theoretical discussion. Whereas C Manual defined and conceptualized bounded rationality and was the only one to describe the types of rationality presented by Simon.