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In 1970 Herbert Simon was invited by the Sociedad Argentina de Organización Industrial to deliver lectures on "Business Management in the Technological Era." He asked for an audience with Jorge Luis Borges, the director of the Argentine National Library. Simon had read Borges's stories and was particularly fascinated by "La Biblioteca de Babel" (The library of Babel), wherein he discovered that Borges, like him, conceived of life as a search through a labyrinth. The Spanish translation of the interview was published in Primera Plana, an Argentine journal. The brief interview sheds light on some of Simon's ideas about determinism and free will. His critique on maximizing rationality and his suggested approach to decision making have contributed to enlarge the concept of rationality as construed by standard economic theory. Consequently, it may be argued that Simon is incorporating free will in economics. However, though Simon's position implies an advancement for the role of free will, the whole context of his ideas conditioned it, thus resulting in a "weak" notion of it. During the course of his conversation with Borges, Simon clarified his personal stance, which is consistent with his ideas. The paper will reveal Borges´s and Simon's understanding of free will. This paper also contains part of the conversation between Simon and Borges that has not been published previously in English. Introducing it in its entirety is a contribution to the knowledge on Borges's and Simon's thought.

This is an attempt to sketch in very rough form what seem to me some of the central concepts and problems of organization theory. In the first section I have tried to define the field of organization theory and to indicate with some care what justification there is for regarding it as a distinct area of theory, related to, but by no means identical with, the theory of small groups and the theory of social institutions. The comments in the second section on subject-matter areas simply spell out the implications, many of them perhaps obvious, of the central argument of the first section.This paper is concerned with all kinds of organizations, and not simply with those that fall within the area of public administration. This definition of the scope of organization theory reflects my own conviction that there are a great many things that can be said about organizations in general, without specification of the particular kind of organization under consideration. Moreover, even if we were interested solely in governmental organizations, I believe that a great deal can be learned from the comparison of their characteristics with those of other kinds of organizations, and from attempts to explain the similarities and differences that are found. Neither of these statements denies the existence of numerous and important phenomena that are peculiar to governmental organizations or the need for theory in public administration to deal with these phenomena.