UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI
INSTITUTE OF DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
(NATIONAL DEFENCE COLLEGE)
Master of Arts Degree in International Studies
Foreign Policy Analysis
Submitted by: EUNICE A.J.DOBBY 23/780
To: DR PAUL KAMAU
Winter (2004), applied the motivation from biological organisms to analyze how institutions can enhance the detection and sensing of weak signals. Likewise, failure of imagination expression is also applied to highlight surprises away as peculiar, deviating occurrences no one could have pictured.
Organizational behavior
In the Cuban case, the crisis organizational dimension is largely tackled by Allison (1971). The work of Allison is primarily focusing on facts while not entirely advancing strategic surprise theory. However, the work on Cuban missile challenge had a concrete effect on mentioning this subject. Organizational behavior is key since it accounts for the culture of an entity and examines how the culture influences intelligent assessment.
Instances of organizational challenges being involved in the pool of surprises are expressed in Zegart (2009) but the rationality behind such acts are rarely evaluated. Additionally, on a practical basis, bureaucratic politics design fail to efficiently describe strategic surprises since movements to reform intelligence frameworks have been continuously found to be wanting. For instance, after the war in Yom Kippur, Israel’s Argranat commission released recommendations to change what was deemed imitating the institutional networks of USA that failed in a similar manner.
Bounded rationality
This is a system of decision making that was created from dissatisfaction with the elaborately rational decision theory and economic choice models. These parameters (models) makes the assumption that preferences are factors of results, where these outcomes are fixed and known. As such, decision makers can maximize the net benefits by selecting the option generating the highest degree of benefits. In bounded rationality, decision maker maximizes the anticipated utility. Options within the competing objectives are tackled using indifference curves that pinpoints substitutability among the objectives.
The bounded rationality model was developed by Simon to challenge the comprehensive rationality that were applied within economics. It critiqued the public administration existing theories and suggested a new technique of institutional decision making.
Bounded rationality has been used in public-policy and public-administration studies. Recently, this approach is used to understand political reasoning in reaction to attitudinal model found in voting behavior. The greatest influence of the model is in analyzing governmental institutions. Various organizations behavior copies the bounded rationality of the players that occupy them. It states that organizations should be grounded within behavior observation and data analysis focusing on the organizational settings. Behavioral organization concept, unlike the strategic surprise (organizational behavior) -utility technique, considered uncertainty as infecting the very particular results not as possibilities attached to simple outcomes.
Another vital application of bounded rationality is in foreign financial markets. Stereotypes and risk misperceptions have been pinpointed within empirical study as one of the main factors causing global financial crisis, and correlated phenomena like stock market and ban run crashes (Aspasia, 2014). Thus, informed decisions are selected over best decisions when it comes to marketing. B.R. models also assist with reduction of supplier selection uncertainties in decision making. The models of B.R. have also been created in the foreign nations to examine the source and structure of optimism and loss aversion within market premises.
In the past years, economic organization has been advanced using the B.R. knowledge models Foss, 2001). Further, theorists in the institutional economics have applied bounded rationality in contract formation, and linking the contractual incompleteness to the exchange between investing less attention to manage the existing contracts and creating new ones.
Cognitive overload
This phenomenon relates to mental activities like information recall, memorization, observing distinct stimuli within a surrounding, analytic reasoning , problem presentation and pattern recognition. foreign policy scholars have connected various critical areas handling cognitive overload to inform their studies. One of the areas focuses on belief and systems, which create the building blocks for several judgments. A vital group of cognitive frameworks tested within the foreign policy analysis (FPA) is linked to arbitrations on policy costs and risks.
Areas of cognitive overload and their significance
Beliefs, images and identities
Beliefs form ideas that a person holds while explaining the way the world works as well as making up the legitimate or appropriate conduct as stated by Jervis (2006). Together with behavior and effect, beliefs are part of attitudes of an entity possessing some magnitude of favor or disfavor. They are not wider than values that operate as general instructions with less context-specify than attitudes or beliefs.
An area where FPA is applied is the study on leaders “belief in the operational codes. Emphasizing on the policymakers cognitive shortcomings, George (1969), made an hypothesis that leaders often draw from five philosophical and instrumental beliefs to decode the decision making process, create policy and select among the same. Philosophical beliefs generate a decision-makers perceptions on the “basic nature of politics” like whether the practice is a characteristic of cooperation or conflict. Alternatively, instrumental beliefs are regarded as causal mechanism or ends-means correlation, where a policy maker would link their actions , decisions and results. Both the beliefs are vital, even though they can alter as leadership authority gain more knowledge from experiences.
Another feature that is almost related to beliefs is the persons’ images of people outside one’s own political standing, and how these impact on individual’s observance of themselves and the social groups they hang around. Images are deemed as cognitive schemata, this is because like belief systems, they include a person’s “interrelated know-how concerning a theory or stimulus” and are hierarchically organized from a general conception to more particular (Larson, 1994).For instance, a person may have an image of “dictators” with related characteristics (aggressiveness , , bureaucratic etc.) that categorizes particular leaders like Adolf Hitler. Similar to beliefs, images are translated copies of their referents. According to Hemmer and Katzenstein, (2002), example of a prejudicial image is the racial stereotype, which also influences foreign policy decisions).
Ambiguous foreign policy
Ambiguity has been linked to many policy failures in terms of processes and goals. Goal ambiguity is regarded as the cause of uncertainty, misunderstanding, thus failure, whereas goal clarity is found as a vital variable that guarantees policy success (Ching and Neng, 2017).Simultaneously, in relation to processes, ambiguity is believed to be ineffective, both since it necessitates an effort to identify the outcome of the same procedures and the unrequited iteration procedures.
Nonetheless, there has been a developing feeling that ambiguity can at times be positive. Ambiguity helps in both decision making and execution, as stated by Matland (1995), ambiguity provides a positive role in “ambiguity of means”, where it minimizes conflicts, supports legislation and generates political compromises (which requires analysis and experimenting that opens doors for possible new objectives, influencing the goals clarity. The presence of ambiguity in process ambiguity, leads to experiment, contingent decision making, and alterations in the policy intents scope.
Example of ambiguity in foreign precarious beginning
There was a deep lying divide after a failure on the merger between Malaysia and Singapore. This was due to differences in beliefs – Malaysia demanded a nation where their people would have special rights, while Singapore resisted (Ching and Neng, 2017). The abolished merger caused inherent bilateral relations, particularly over the basic life necessity – water.
The politics on the confounding legal standoff of water conventions in 1961 and 1962, has been the focus of the political impasse – displaying Singapore vulnerability position as well as political stability that ensures water policies within the past years since their independence.
The narrative on water seems to be very complex than one can imagine. Water was limited even when Singapore was still component of Malaysia (Ching and Neng, 2017). The vulnerability sense was on the geographical fact. In this manner, the ambiguity between the two nations is far more extensive than often demonstrated within the political arena.
From 1927, Singapore had been importing water from Malaysia, these two countries had been ruled as one nation by the British. The city council had signed a water agreement with Malaysia (Johor) in 1961 (Ching and Neng, 2017).. This agreement stated that Singapore had the “full and exclusive right and liberty to take, confiscate and use the water in Scuadai and Tebrau rivers, and Pontian and Gunong Pulai catchments until 2011. Another agreement came in 1962 for the supply of abput 250million gallons of water each day from river Johor until 2061 (). Even during the time that Singapore was a region within Malaysia, there were still issues on water.
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