Rationality

About: Rationality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 20459 publications have been published within this topic receiving 617787 citations.

Epistemic Cultures: Forms of Reason in Science

Abstract: Rationality is a conspicuous yet neglected phenomenon. It has received much attention from philosophers and some social scientists, who have treated rationality as the hallmark of science, of economic action, or of modernity in general. Yet with all this attention, rationality has been conspicuously taken for granted, and its taken-for-grantedness has licensed a neglect of the practical activity of rational action. In other words, rationality has been a resource rather than a topic of analysis. To be sure, some fields have long been preoccupied with specifying the rules of rationality which are capable of unifying-or reconstructinghuman endeavors within a domain of activity; but they have done so at the cost of neglecting to seek to understand the actual practice of these activities. For example, philosophers of science have relegated the vast territories of the "real" behavior of scientists to a marginal existence, in exchange for the doubtful benefits of the rational reconstruction of scientific theory choice. Economic theorists appear perennially involved in searching for "indisputable" definitions of rational choice which can serve as algorithmic devices in economic modeling, but they leave unexamined essential empirical aspects of real business-firm and market operations.! In a paraphrase of Hegel, Bruno Ingrao has recently described the content of economic theory as a "representation of rationality as it is in its eternal essence, before the creation of nature and of a finite mind" (1989, 120). As the many controversies over the content and definition of scientific and economic reason suggest, rationality is an interesting topic of investigation. But must this investigation be limited, as often in economic theory, to the mental and computational specification of rational calculation and constrained optimization as required by formal models to

The corporate management framework as administrative science: a critique

Abstract: A corporate management framework has been the basis for a transformation of Australian public administration in recent years. Program budgeting, corporate planning, performance contracts, program evaluation and new forms of efficiency scrutiny are among the techniques introduced. They stem from a dominant paradigm of technical and instrumental rationality, within which a framework of practical remedies and technologies of power carries the corporate management label. Four concepts underly this framework and its techniques: the product format, instrumentalism, integration and purposive action. The framework has fundamental problems. The product format is inappropriate for many public services and overvalues quantifiable, single-purpose outputs while denigrating claims of worth and effectiveness made on non-economic grounds; instrumentalism ignores the political dimensions of public organisations; integration denies the value of decentralised forms of service development and delivery and, paradoxically, contradicts current private management precepts; and purposive action displays an unwarranted optimism about the potency of technical rationality under central direction. The four principles must be reviewed as offering few prospects for genuine and lasting reform.

Joint Actions and Group Agents

Abstract: Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the usual constraints of consistency and rationality in adequate measure. The main discovery in the recent theory of group agency is that this result is not easily achieved; no regular voting procedure will ensure, for example, that a group of individually consistent agents will display consistency in group judgments.

Border Pedagogy in the Age of Postmodernism.

Abstract: Within the last two decades, the varied discourses known as postmodernism have exercised a strong influence on the nature of intellectual life both in and out of the university. As a form of cultural criticism, postmodernism has challenged a number of assumptions central to the discourse of modernism. These include modernism's reliance on metaphysical notions of the subject, its advocacy of science, technology, and rationality as the foundation for equating change with progress, its ethnocentric equation of history with the triumphs of European Civilization, and its globalizing view that the industrialized Western countries constitute "a legitimate center a unique and superior position from which to establish control and to determine hierarchies" (Richard, 1987/1988, p. 6). From the postmodernist perspective, modernism's claim to authority partly serves to privilege Western, patriarchal culture, on the one hand, while simultaneously repressing and marginalizing the voices of those who have been deemed subordinate and/or subjected to relations of oppression because of their color, class, ethnicity, race, or cultural and social capital. In postmodernist terms, the political map of modernism is one in which the voice of the other is consigned to the margins of existence, recognition, and possibility. At its best, a critical postmodernism wants to redraw the map of modernism so as to effect a shift in power from the privileged and the powerful to those groups struggling to gain a measure of control over their lives in what is increasingly becoming a world marked by a logic of disintegration (Dews, 1987). Postmodernism not only makes visible the ways in which domination is being prefigured and redrawn, it also points to the shifting configurations of power, knowledge, space, and time that characterize a world that is at once more global and more differentiated. One important aspect of postmodernism is its recognition that, as we move into the 21st century, we find ourselves no longer constrained by modern-