Decision Making: Foundations, Uncertainty, and Organizations - 4 ECTS

Course Coordinators: Associate Professor Morten Sørensen Thanning, Josefine Lykkegaard, PhD fellow & Paula Gehde, PhD fellow

STUDENT DRIVEN COURSE

Faculty

Morten Sørensen Thaning
Department of Business Humanities and Law

Short description

This course explores how decisions take shape across different contexts, from individual judgment to organizational strategy, AI-supported processes, and geopolitical uncertainty. The course brings together philosophical, behavioral, and organizational perspectives to examine how assumptions about rationality, responsibility, and power influence decision practices. Across four focused sessions, participants work with diverse cases and theoretical approaches to better understand how decisions are formed, justified, and contested. The course provides a shared space for examining how decision making unfolds in contemporary settings and for reflecting on the role of judgment and uncertainty in shaping organizational and societal problems.

Aim

The course focuses on developing students' understanding of how decision-making theory addresses fundamental challenges in organizations and society. Rather than treating decisions merely as instruments for performance or strategy, we explore how decision processes shape and are shaped by assumptions about rationality, responsibility, uncertainty, power, and legitimacy. In that process, the course considers decision-making contexts as diverse as individual choice, algorithmic and AI-driven decisions, team decisions, organizational strategy, public policy, and different levels and types of decision-making processes for analysis.

We invite PhD students with research projects that relate to decision making in business and organizational contexts, whether decision-making processes figure as an underlying dimension of the project design, are directly employed as a theoretical approach. Projects on organizational strategy, decision-making under uncertainty, AI and algorithmic decision-making, behavioral economics, judgment and choice, group decision processes, and strategic management often build, implicitly or explicitly, on  decision making theory. The course is designed to help students be more assertive about their treatment of decision-making perspectives and engage more critically with the literature as well as position their projects more deliberately within the wider scholarly conversations on decision-making.

Prerequisite

PhD students only.

Participants will submit a reflection paper relating their project to some of the themes of the course (2-3 pages) after the first four workshops. At the fifth workshop the participants will present their reflection paper and be responsible for providing feedback to others. Furthermore each student will be responsible for one “intervention” (critical reading and introduction of a text to the group). Assignment of texts to be determined on the first day.

For “intervention”, course participation and submission of reflective paper a total of 4 ECTS will be awarded.

Deadline for submission of the reflection paper idea is the 9th of April.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that students attend the whole course and submit the reflection papers by the respective deadlines.

Course content

Day 1  - Understanding Decision Making - Monday March 9th - 13:00-17:00

Faculty: Johan Gersel (BHL) and Thomas Poulsen (ACC)

This workshop introduces decision making as a practice shaped by rationality, judgement and human behaviour. In the first part we explore philosophical perspectives on how decisions are grounded in practical judgement and how agents come to justify and evaluate their decisions. In the second part we examine how behavioral economics challenges the mainstream model of rational choice. Drawing on Simon, Kahneman, and Sen, we explore how real decision-makers depart from idealized rationality and how these deviations reveal bounded, contextual, and value-driven forms of reasoning. The discussion links empirical insights to broader questions about agency and judgement in practice. The workshop brings these perspectives together to open a broader inquiry into how decision making is understood, how it can be studied, and which assumptions about human agency underlie different research approaches.

Day 2 - Decision making under uncertainty (AI and decisionmaking) - Thursday March 12nd - 13:00-17:00

Faculty: Kristian Bondo (MSC) and Helene Friis Ratner (DTU)

The second part examines how predictive algorithms interact with decision-making, using examples from child protection services and crime prediction. The session explores 1) how predictive algorithms render the future an object of decision-making 2) how professionals accept or resist algorithmic predictions. We discuss how predictive algorithms change the space of decision-making and the role of the human. We also discuss different analytical and methodological strategies to examine how predictive algorithms change decision-making.

Day 3 - Organisational Decision Making - Monday March 16th - 13:00-17:00

Faculty: Morten Sørensen Thaning (BHL) and Kirstine Zinck Pedersen (IOA)

This workshop focuses on how organisational decision making can balance formal rules with situated judgement. In the first part we will be drawing on empirical studies from the Danish health-care sector, to discuss how processes of standardization interact with professional discretion in practice. The second part introduces a philosophical perspective on the role of tacit knowledge in responsible decision-making in organisations. The workshop therefore combines philosophical perspectives on knowledge and authority with ethnographic insights into frontline practices to illuminate how organizations can cultivate responsible decision making. Through discussion, we reflect on how organizations navigate the tension between accountability and flexibility, and how professional practices can sustain responsible discretion under conditions of increasing standardization.

Day 4 - Decision Making Under Geopolitical Uncertainty - Thursday March 17th - 13:00-17:00

Faculty: Ingvild Bode (SDU) and Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen (BHL)

This workshop explores how geopolitical tensions and security dynamics shape decision-making processes at multiple levels. In the first part, we examine how states and international institutions make decisions about emerging technologies in security contexts, particularly artificial intelligence in military domains. The second part shifts focus to how businesses navigate geopolitical uncertainty, exploring how companies make strategic decisions about operations, and hybrid threats. It will look at how scenario planning and public-private collaboration can strengthen organizational resilience and adaptive capacity in volatile contexts.

Day 5 - Presentation and feedback - Monday April 13th - 13:00-17:00 

This last workshop provides a space for critically engaging course perspectives in relation to participants’ own research. Each participant presents how decision making theories or conceptual distinctions from the course can clarify, strengthen or problematize elements of their project. Through structured feedback and discussion, participants assess how decision making perspectives may contribute to stronger analytical grounding and more precise theoretical commitments. This part of the session encourages participants to articulate how decision-making functions within their research. In closing, we reflect collectively on how the course has equipped participants to work more deliberately with decision-making.

Teaching style

We start each day with a 10-minute ‘intervention’ by 1-2 students who:

●      Discuss one of the assigned theoretical texts critically

●      Connect it to some of the participants’ presentations from session 1 or other relevant themes form the course where possible

The course is taught in discussion-based lectures, small group work, plenary discussions, and exercises. Guests from the international academic community will join the course online.

Exam

The exam consists of two deliverables:

●      During the course

○      ‘Intervention', oral presentation in class. 

○      ‘Reflection Paper’ after session 4 (2-3 pages) and short presentation of the reflection from the paper.

■      Each participant must present (in a reflection paper and a short presentation) how one or more decision making perspectives from the course can illuminate, strengthen, or challenge an aspect of their PhD project, and engage in giving and receiving structured feedback to refine the project’s analytical and theoretical foundations.

■      Handin April 9th 2026

Course literature

Lecture 1:

Dancy, Jonathan. 2020. ‘Honing Practical Judgment’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(2): 410–424.

Korsgaard, Christine M. 2008. ‘Acting for a Reason’, i: The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology’. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 207–229.

Herbert A. Simon (1955). A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1): 99–118.

Daniel Kahneman (2003). Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics. American Economic Review, 93(5): 1449–1475.

Amartya Sen (1977). Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 6(4): 317–344.

Lecture 2:

Townsend, D. M., Hunt, R. A., Rady, J., Manocha, P., & Jin, J. H. (2024). Are the Futures Computable? Knightian Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence. Academy of Management Review. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2022.0237

Duan, Y., Edwards, J. S., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2019). Artificial intelligence for decision making in the era of Big Data – evolution, challenges and research agenda. International Journal of Information Management, 48, 63–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.01.021 

Brayne, Sarah, and Angèle Christin. 2020. “Technologies of Crime Prediction: The Reception of Algorithms in Policing and Criminal Courts.” Social Problems, ahead of print, March 5. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa004.

Ratner, Helene Friis, and Kasper Elmholdt. 2023. “Algorithmic Constructions of Risk: Anticipating Uncertain Futures in Child Protection Services.” Big Data & Society 10 (2): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231186120.

Lecture 3:

Pedersen, K. Z., & Pors, A. S. (2023). Discretionary Responses in Frontline Encounters: Balancing Standardization with the Ethics of Office. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 33(1), 80-93. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muac012

Du Gay, P., & Pedersen, K. Z. (2019). Discretion and bureaucracy. In Discretion and the quest for controlled freedom (pp. 221-236). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Gersel, J., Thaning, M. S. & Poulsen, T. (working paper). Codified, private, and parochial knowledge: how to identify and use tacit knowledge in organizations. Working paper.

Lecture 4:

Johnson, J. (2019). "Artificial intelligence & future warfare: implications for international security." Defense & Security Analysis, 35(2), 147-169. more tba

Workload

Reading of course literature (300 pages - 4x75): 67
Paper writing and preparation for presentation: 10 hours
Reading the others papers and preparing feedback: 10 hours
Preparing intervention: 5 hours
Course participation: 5 workshop days of 4 hours - 20 hours