Images are defined to be information structures, with different kind of images representing different kind of information about what the actor is doi… - Lee Roy Beach

The Theory of Narrative Thought begins with the assumption that everyday thought is in the form of narratives, which are causally motivated, time-oriented chronicles, or stories, that connect the past and present with the future, thereby giving continuity and meaning to ongoing experience. Narratives are not simply the voice in your head, nor are they simply words, like a novel or a newspaper article. They are a rich mixture of memories and of current visual, auditory, and other aspects of awareness, all laced together by emotions to form a mixture that far surpasses mere words in their ability to capture context and meaning.

To begin, image theory assumes that decision makers use three different schematic knowledge structures to organize their thinking about decisions. These structures are called images, in deference to Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960), whose work inspired image theory. The first of the three is the value image, the constituents of which are the decision maker's principles. These are the imperatives for his or her behavior or the behavior of the organization of which he or she is a member and serve as rigid criteria for the rightness or wrongness of any particular decision about a goal or plan. Principles serve to internally generate candidate goals and plans for possible adoption, and they guide decisions about externally generated candidate goals and plans.

Decision making is essentially social behaviour, even when there is nobody else present, because one anticipates how others will react and factors this into the decision. [...] Organizations per se do not make decisions, but individuals in organizations do. And when they do, they must take others into account.