The diversity of behaviors that human beings exhibit makes it challenging to know what behavioral assumptions to make when building theories about organizations. Fortunately for us, organizational contexts are, to varying degrees, designed. I argue that this introduces a powerful set of levers—sorting, framing and structuring—that can help reduce this diversity of behavioral possibilities to a tractable yet plausible few. In the resulting account of behavior, alternatives need not be given, their consequences need not be known, and the utilities attached to consequences need not be stable. This chapter offers a simplified framework to understand a variety of forms of rational and non-rational individual behavior as special cases.
Functional diversity of avian communities increases with canopy height: From individual behavior to continental‐scale patterns