Administrative behavior by Herbert Alexander Simon
Published 1947 · 259 pages · 141,158 words · about 10 hours at an average pace
How hard is Administrative behavior to read?
Administrative behavior scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Simon deploys a precise administrative and social science vocabulary: terms like 'bounded rationality,' 'zone of acceptance,' 'operative employees,' 'substantive coordination,' and 'inducement-contribution balance' appear throughout. The terminology is not obscure in the literary sense but is highly field-specific, requiring familiarity with public administration and organizational theory. Comparable in density to Orientalism, though narrower in disciplinary range.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Sentences are formal and periodic, with subordinate clauses and qualifications stacked carefully. Simon favors constructions like 'In so far as decisions lead toward the selection of final goals, they will be called value judgments; so far as they involve the implementation of such goals they will be called factual judgments.' The syntax never reaches Jamesian density, but the prose demands attention at each clause boundary. Comparable to 1984 in clarity of intent, but considerably more formal in execution.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- The entire book operates at the level of theoretical framework rather than narrative or case study. Simon analyzes decision-making hierarchies, value-fact distinctions, authority structures, and organizational equilibrium as abstract conceptual categories. Even concrete examples — the fireman, the assembly line worker, the street improvement project — serve only as illustrations of abstract principles. Closer to Kant's analytical style than to any grounded empirical account.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Each chapter introduces and develops multiple interlocking concepts — authority, loyalty, efficiency, communication, rationality — with extensive cross-referencing between chapters. The fourth-edition commentaries compound this density by adding fifty years of subsequent research, bounded rationality theory, and AI implications. Readers must track a scaffolded argument across eleven chapters plus appendices, making this significantly denser than The Second Sex but lighter than Critique of Pure Reason.
How Administrative behavior is regarded
Administrative behavior holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.