decision making in business
organizational cognition, change, and communication
concepts
The phrase garbage can is frequently used to characterize organizational decision processes, usually as an attribution of nonstandard, chaotic, surprising, or disrupted patterns of attention. The source of the phrase is the 1972 article in which Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen suggested that decisions to a large extent are produced by temporal linkages: the arrival and departure times of independent, exogenous streams of problems, solutions, decision makers, and choice opportunities. [Source: International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies; Garbage Can Model]
garbage can model